4 ms·

What is the argument? Why would we expect a version of Apple with decentralized governance to outperform the current Apple?

21eleven 5y ago
Because the governance structures of DAOs will be open source smart contracts they will be, in theory, easier to iterate upon and improve.
tedunangst 5y ago
The DAO Apple would vote to make iPhones with replaceable batteries, which as we all know, is what the market actually wants.
casi18 5y ago
It is an interesting question, but what would outperforming Apple look like? and on what timescale? Is it being more profitable? Having happier workers? Making the sleekest shiny things? And are we thinking for the next year or the next hundred years? Decentralized organisations seem (to me) to be prioritising resilience over efficiency. This seems like a long game. But perhaps shared ownership and pseudonymous employment will appeal to people. And perhaps sourcing workers anywhere in the world will lead to quick contacts building and fast deployment too. Or it could get caught up in bureaucracy, but then we can just fork the daos and vampire attack them! There is a lot a vague murkyness in national law as to who is responsible/where is tax payed/what is it, but the idea of being able to click a button and i have a borderless organisation with voting systems and memberships all ready to go to anyone who wants to join in is pretty exciting. Think of the crazy possibilities of collisions happening, people to meet, ideas to be generated. If we increase the speed at which people, ideas, and capital can come together that can be explosive (and that could be good or bad). We can have groups of strangers round the world seeding startups of anonymous teenagers writing code after school, before the university lecturers and vcs ever get to them. Thats radical and revolutionary. DAOs are the most exciting thing going in crypto imo.
miketery 5y ago
I'd say you could gain some efficiencies. I think the same governance structure that Apple has can be implemented for the most part in a DOA (e.g. shareholder voting, board assignments, CEO hiring, dividend distributions). The hard part is interfacing with physical world legal system. But even then the DAO can agree to accept jurisdiction X. Then we can do taxation and accounting in the clear. Obviously far out. But not impossible.
- lottin 5y ago
  So, the company would have the same governance structure, only more efficient? How exactly it would be more efficient, you don't say.
  - miketery 5y ago
    Voting, and dividend distribution today requires intermediaries (e.g. broker). Those can be direct.
    - atweiden 5y ago
      > Voting, and dividend distribution today requires intermediaries (e.g. broker). Those can be direct. Issuing dividends in a cryptocurrency would disintermediate brokers and doesn’t require a DAO. Nor does “let’s upgrade our voting systems” require a DAO.
      - chrisco255 5y ago
        It does require a DAO. You need to know that no one party has control over the funds. Or they can screw the community. If the community is distributed the token in a fair way (and they'll know, since this is all blockchain and it's all visible), they can also inspect the code that protects the funds from being spent. So you can encode the mechanisms that protect the disbursements, and you can do this in a provable way. It's not some SQL database that's controlled by an admin key. It's not a bank account that the CEO has control over. All the funds are on-chain, in a smart contract, protected by code and cryptography. That aligns incentives in a powerful way that you can't replicate with stock ownership. You can't replicate it with a voting button on the Robinhood app. It is a fundamental shift in capital management and human coordination.
chrisco255 5y ago
I don't know why you would pick Apple. They are a hardware company. I'm not saying that the introduction of DAOs will be the death of all corporations. I could make a much stronger argument for a decentralized social network coordinated by a DAO, so I would make the case for a DAO-controlled Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook (which are software businesses). That's not to say that DAOs couldn't be used for a more physical business but software is certainly a more natural fit. Uniswap, for example, which is a decentralized version of Coinbase or NYSE, has something like 7 or 8 employees, is trading $2B a day in value, and has $8.5B in liquidity available for exchange. This is for a young startup less than 2 years old run entirely on smart contracts. Not bad. https://info.uniswap.org/home https://info.uniswap.org/home https://cryptofees.info/ https://cryptofees.info/
- herval 5y ago
  Is there anything provided by DAO that makes Uniswap runnable by fewer people? How many people would they need if they didn’t run like you say?
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    Yes, the DAO has aligned the community around Uniswap. By distributing governance over the protocol to their early users and community, they've grown to the size that they have. The liquidity providers and the traders have ownership of Uniswap. They now have a $7.5 billion treasury at their disposal, that they get to vote on how to spend based on their percentage of UNI token holdings.
    - herval 5y ago
      So.. they capitalized on the hype around the technology and crowdfunded? From the past comment, I was hoping there’s any benefit to DAO itself that’d make an enterprise this size easier to run - you could technically achieve the same with a kickstarter campaign or a gofundme? Of course, the obvious orders-of-magnitude in value would be different, but that’s inherent to crypto’s inflation, not really due to any virtue of DAO?

21eleven 5y ago

Because the governance structures of DAOs will be open source smart contracts they will be, in theory, easier to iterate upon and improve.

tedunangst 5y ago

The DAO Apple would vote to make iPhones with replaceable batteries, which as we all know, is what the market actually wants.

casi18 5y ago

It is an interesting question, but what would outperforming Apple look like? and on what timescale? Is it being more profitable? Having happier workers? Making the sleekest shiny things? And are we thinking for the next year or the next hundred years? Decentralized organisations seem (to me) to be prioritising resilience over efficiency. This seems like a long game. But perhaps shared ownership and pseudonymous employment will appeal to people. And perhaps sourcing workers anywhere in the world will lead to quick contacts building and fast deployment too. Or it could get caught up in bureaucracy, but then we can just fork the daos and vampire attack them! There is a lot a vague murkyness in national law as to who is responsible/where is tax payed/what is it, but the idea of being able to click a button and i have a borderless organisation with voting systems and memberships all ready to go to anyone who wants to join in is pretty exciting. Think of the crazy possibilities of collisions happening, people to meet, ideas to be generated. If we increase the speed at which people, ideas, and capital can come together that can be explosive (and that could be good or bad). We can have groups of strangers round the world seeding startups of anonymous teenagers writing code after school, before the university lecturers and vcs ever get to them. Thats radical and revolutionary. DAOs are the most exciting thing going in crypto imo.

miketery 5y ago

I'd say you could gain some efficiencies. I think the same governance structure that Apple has can be implemented for the most part in a DOA (e.g. shareholder voting, board assignments, CEO hiring, dividend distributions). The hard part is interfacing with physical world legal system. But even then the DAO can agree to accept jurisdiction X. Then we can do taxation and accounting in the clear. Obviously far out. But not impossible.

lottin 5y ago
So, the company would have the same governance structure, only more efficient? How exactly it would be more efficient, you don't say.
- miketery 5y ago
  Voting, and dividend distribution today requires intermediaries (e.g. broker). Those can be direct.
  - atweiden 5y ago
    > Voting, and dividend distribution today requires intermediaries (e.g. broker). Those can be direct. Issuing dividends in a cryptocurrency would disintermediate brokers and doesn’t require a DAO. Nor does “let’s upgrade our voting systems” require a DAO.
    - chrisco255 5y ago
      It does require a DAO. You need to know that no one party has control over the funds. Or they can screw the community. If the community is distributed the token in a fair way (and they'll know, since this is all blockchain and it's all visible), they can also inspect the code that protects the funds from being spent. So you can encode the mechanisms that protect the disbursements, and you can do this in a provable way. It's not some SQL database that's controlled by an admin key. It's not a bank account that the CEO has control over. All the funds are on-chain, in a smart contract, protected by code and cryptography. That aligns incentives in a powerful way that you can't replicate with stock ownership. You can't replicate it with a voting button on the Robinhood app. It is a fundamental shift in capital management and human coordination.

chrisco255 5y ago

I don't know why you would pick Apple. They are a hardware company. I'm not saying that the introduction of DAOs will be the death of all corporations. I could make a much stronger argument for a decentralized social network coordinated by a DAO, so I would make the case for a DAO-controlled Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook (which are software businesses). That's not to say that DAOs couldn't be used for a more physical business but software is certainly a more natural fit. Uniswap, for example, which is a decentralized version of Coinbase or NYSE, has something like 7 or 8 employees, is trading $2B a day in value, and has $8.5B in liquidity available for exchange. This is for a young startup less than 2 years old run entirely on smart contracts. Not bad. https://info.uniswap.org/home https://info.uniswap.org/home https://cryptofees.info/ https://cryptofees.info/

herval 5y ago
Is there anything provided by DAO that makes Uniswap runnable by fewer people? How many people would they need if they didn’t run like you say?
- chrisco255 5y ago
  Yes, the DAO has aligned the community around Uniswap. By distributing governance over the protocol to their early users and community, they've grown to the size that they have. The liquidity providers and the traders have ownership of Uniswap. They now have a $7.5 billion treasury at their disposal, that they get to vote on how to spend based on their percentage of UNI token holdings.
  - herval 5y ago
    So.. they capitalized on the hype around the technology and crowdfunded? From the past comment, I was hoping there’s any benefit to DAO itself that’d make an enterprise this size easier to run - you could technically achieve the same with a kickstarter campaign or a gofundme? Of course, the obvious orders-of-magnitude in value would be different, but that’s inherent to crypto’s inflation, not really due to any virtue of DAO?