9 ms·

“Let's Run The Experiment”: about DAOs and the future of organizations online

66 points by abecedarius 5y ago

danschumann 5y ago
At some point, you need to do work to make money, especially when young. What if, however, your "job" was working for a blockchain instead of a company? Or a decentralized company? What if that blockchain turned evil? How could you stop it if no one had control? Everyone is just a cog.
- pavel_lishin 5y ago
  Sorry, how are your examples different for a blockchain vs. a company from the point of view of a young individual employee?
- casi18 5y ago
  Lots of daos have forums and token voting where you voice opinion, and also have 'rage quit' functions where you can exit and take your share of the dao bank balance with you. They're also often open source so can be forked in disagreements - even by anonymous others (see sushi forking uniswap and taking it in a different direction under new branding). my experience with daos i have worked with is they are often closely aligned with co-op style organisational structure. the difference is we dont all know each other and live all over the world, some people are anonymous dogs jpegs and thats all i'll ever know about them, some people are present in their irl persona. but its a group of people with some shared aim in collective ownership, this doesnt mean there arent directors and roles, but often you can just start talking and participating and be rewarded. e.g. anyone can write a strategy for yearn, pass it on to the team and be rewarded https://twitter.com/iearnfinance/status/1459658364837896192?s=20 https://twitter.com/iearnfinance/status/1459658364837896192?...
Animats 5y ago
It makes sense that you would cite Axie Infinity as a leading example of how the Web3 technologies are actually starting to work at scale. Huh? Axie Infinity is a Ponzi scheme. They're the people behind the Smooth Love Potion token. See chart for that.[1] They prey on poor people in the Philippines and Vietnam with a pay to play game that costs about US$1000 to enter. [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/
- saurik 5y ago
  Yeah: and the only reason it works at all is because it is actually a centralized game (which then indirectly but still centrally mints the SLP any time they want under any rule set... this is absolutely a "security") that can attempt to prevent people automating play by doing stuff like bot detection. I'm a believer in crypto, and even in crypto for games, but trotting out Axie as an example is painful.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    It’s not a surprise though as the interviewee works for a VC that invested in it.
    - superfad 5y ago
      The interviewee, Chris Dixon, never mentioned Axie though. It was the interviewer, Steven Johnson, that brought it up.
      - meheleventyone 5y ago
        As I read it the first block is Steven replying to Chris. Might be wrong though it’s not formatted very well.
        superfad 5y ago
        Ah yeak ok. I agree the formatting is a bit unusual. I guess the confusion is Chris did mention Axie but it was in the previous post which is paywalled.
- hackingforfun 5y ago
  Some people in the countries you mentioned are making more playing Axie than they could otherwise [1]. I'm not advocating for Axie Infinity, but I think there are multiple sides to this. [1] https://restofworld.org/2021/axie-infinity/ https://restofworld.org/2021/axie-infinity/
jimkleiber 5y ago
I really struggle to see how most DAOs and cryptocurrency efforts aren't mostly just ways to skirt around existing financial security laws. For example, could organizations give stocks/shares/tokens/choose-your-security-name to users of a platform in the current (US) legal environment? I don't have the legal background to know. Can they sell private securities to any user? I think no because it would go against accredited investor laws. Also, I think if they're selling to an open public, it might violate SEC laws by being a public security, not a private security, unless they also reported truthfully about risks, etc., to the SEC. So what if the law got rid of the accredited investor requirement? Or got rid of the reporting requirements for public vs private securities? So I think one part is that companies aren't legally allowed to sell private shares to just any individual and if they do sell to any individual, they aren't legally allowed to not report to the SEC. I think another part is that I wonder how many companies actually want more cooperative/democratic style ownership. Cooperatives (one member, one vote) have struggled to get investment because of that precise equality in decision making. [edit-added] And also, a more equal profit-sharing may not be in the interest of many people wanting to become the next unicorn billionaire. So it makes me wonder how many of the orgs using DAOs are doing so because they want to become more equal cooperative-like orgs, and how many are doing so to skirt securities laws.
- yawnxyz 5y ago
  I think academia is an interesting use case, e.g. VitaDAO.com and Molecule.to
  - jimkleiber 5y ago
    I wonder if even their methods are dancing around US securities laws, but I don't fully understand how cooperatives overlap with securities laws [0]. Despite that, I like what seems to be their intention around cooperatively-owned research, so I'll try to follow them to see what comes of it. Thank you. edit: Also, maybe one of the problems is that the internet is global and most regulation is at most national, so even if it were to break US laws, does it break other national, regional, or local laws? Do DAOs and crypto lead to some larger global form of governance? [0]: https://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/securities-regulation/securities-regulation-keyed-to-coffee/definitions-of-security-and-exempted-securities/reves-v-ernst-young-2/ https://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/securities-regulation/se...
gremlinsinc 5y ago
DAO's are a good concept but still have flaws. I just don't think blockchain is refined enough just yet... I'm personally working on just a basic ERP system to manage Cooperatives (Housing, Consumer, Worker), that would reward people for consuming, working, volunteering, etc with 'tokens' good towards rev shares, maybe health benefits, and ability to vote for company officers, etc... It'll have everything to manage ecommerce shops, restaurants, grocery stores, property management, etc.. as 'modules', kinda like ODOO, but for managing employees/users/consumers it needs to get the reward system right and make it modular enough so each co-op (SaaS/Multi-tenant) could have their own rules, etc.... It's for building a more democratic org, but still is centralized at least the DB parts, as it allows better control... I could see maybe rebuilding parts on the blockchain, and implementing some sort of crypto w/ UBI and a tax that really benefits those who spend more, and hold less of the crypto, but it'd need be sybil-proof, so would probably need some centralization for verification of identities. the app will also have tools for voting, w/ ranked choice and weighted votes (people w/ different roles can have heavier weights), and maybe even have settings like those 'weights' be voteable by the group, say the CEO is petitioning for 20:1 ratio for voting power, so maybe you setup the vote to allow just pick a numeric# from 5-20 (or some other min/max range) then the average is what gets picked, etc... even for voting for new company officers - maybe every two years a vote is triggered the winner has their roles and permissions automatically switched, and the loser has them revoked, etc... The ultimate idea is using it to create syndicated co-ops that maybe share some mutual aid benefits among users/consumers/workers of other co-ops... For e-commerce for example store owners could opt to include their stuff in a marketplace, so their products are distributed like Amazon's marketplace...
- pavel_lishin 5y ago
  This feels like buzzword soup.
- clippablematt 5y ago
  This sounds great, got a link? Or is it still in dev? We keep trying things with our coop, but we often just fall back on google sheets for everything - which everyone hates but it’s flexible enough to do what we need and we all know how to use it.
LiquidSky 5y ago
...we ran the experiment. It was an instantaneous, colossal failure that eternally discredited the concept in the most hilarious way possible.[1] That anyone thinks of a DAO as anything but a punchline is all the proof you need of the sheer delusion of the crypto space. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)
- smabie 5y ago
  Yup, Roman democracy also failed in the most hilarious way possible. That anyone thinks of Democracy as anything but a punchline is all the proof you need of the sheer delusion of the governance space.
casi18 5y ago
it'll be interesting to see if constitutiondao raise enough funds to buy the constitution this week (one of the eleven first editions). i think that is an interesting example of something going from private ownership to being owned by a large group (currently 12000 members in the discord) who will then vote on where it goes on display etc. They started as a group last friday, so far raised $5.7m, looking to get to $20m by thursdays auction. I don't think any other process could move so quickly in a few days, from a joke to being taken seriously so rapdily. its memes all the way down. https://www.constitutiondao.com/ https://www.constitutiondao.com/
- hemloc_io 5y ago
  I honestly doubt it, but I think the idea is very cool. Biggest issues faced with DAOs on ETH right now is the gas fees. Can't take small contributions with gas averaging around 100-200$
EGreg 5y ago
Hey everyone. Greg from Intercoin here. Forget DAOs for a second, how about just putting roles and permissions on the blockchain? Why do I have to trust some site won't have a guy gain access to the centralized database and change everyone's roles and permissions willy nilly? What if we had a trusted and audited codebase (like Uniswap factory) for creating smart contracts which any website on the Internet could query through Infura or GetBlock or another gateway to popular blockchains? And this codebase was about membership in communities, roles, tickets, etc. displayed as non-transferrable NFTs, and so forth. I see smart contracts as enabling stuff like that. Managing communities. Running elections for representatives, and making sure you know that someone "really was" elected or appointed to a position. Constitutions can be expressed in this way. Direct democracy and delegating your votes to actual scientists when it comes to certain issues etc. And that is only the "base functionality", if you will. Here is what you can build on top of it: https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications For instance, last year I wrote this for CoinDesk, and since then we have built it: https://coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-defense-of-blockchain-voting/ https://coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-defense-of-blockchai... PS: To me, one of the biggest problems in the crypto space is that each team roll their own smart contracts, and same goes for Web 2.0 startups and their app code. It's far better to have factories of heavily audited and battle-tested code on the blockchain, and produce instances from that. People would then make decisions about using the smart contracts based on standard init() parameters that can be easily documented around the web. The smart contracts wouldn't have an "owner", but would serve entire communities, with multiple businesses providing "utility" by accepting their "utility tokens", so the whole thing wouldn't be dependent on one single team or business. There is so much we can do, we've only scratched the surface. PPS: If you are a Solidity developer, contact me at the email greg at-sign intercoin.org, we are currently looking for partners to go and deploy all this to our millions of users worldwide by early 2022, here are the repos: https://github.com/Intercoin https://github.com/Intercoin
chipotle_coyote 5y ago
I suppose I'm asking for an "explain it to me like I'm five" response here, but when I read things like (from TFA): > When you have an internet service that serves hundreds of millions or billions of people, there is a huge asymmetry of power and knowledge between the service provider and individual users. To fix this, you’d want a system that provides a way for users to organize and act collectively. You’d want users to receive a straightforward digital representation of their economic and governance rights. You’d want a system that has unambiguous rules along with mechanisms to enforce those rules. And you’d want this all to be available globally and accessible to anyone. Sounds useful, right? Well, the system I’ve described is basically a blockchain. I think: a blockchain is an append-only distributed transaction ledger. But how is the system Dixon describes "basically a blockchain?" A blockchain has some of those properties, sure: it's available globally and accessible to anyone (with the technology to access it). It has mechanisms to enforce its rules, e.g., you only get to append transactions to the ledger and you can't modify past transactions without the tampering being obvious. But the "non-protocol" parts here -- providing a way for users to organize and act collectively, receiving a straightforward digital representation (?) of their economic and governance rights -- seem to me to be orthogonal to blockchains. What legally recognized rights you have in anything stems from, well, laws -- from legally binding contracts. Those don't need the blockchain. If you buy the "digital original" of your favorite meme for $3M, a transaction entry on a blockchain could be agreed to be the bill of sale -- but so could any number of things off the blockchain. What the blockchain brings to the party that's entirely new seems to be the ability to get ridiculous sales prices because there's currently a frenzy for anything NFT. And this is an issue I have with an awful lot of Let's Build It On The Blockchain! thinking right now: it's not that I can't see value in the concept of blockchains, it's that there seems to be a "it's good because it's on The Blockchain!" frenzy around a lot of things that are transparently dubious (see: millions of NFT scams, the insistence that digital in-game assets can be easily transferred between games built on entirely different back-end systems just because blockchain, etc.). And stepping back from that, the whole "Web3" pitch is "we can build an entirely decentralized Internet now because BLOCKCHAIN!" But, again: why are blockchains critical to this idea? We already built a decentralized Internet before blockchains; it was called (checks notes) "The Internet". I get that the idea is the new blockchain-based everything can't be centralized, but y'know, that's what we thought about the non-blockchain Internet a quarter-century ago. All the tools we had then to not be centralized still exist now. The issue with centralization now isn't a technological one -- which makes me pretty skeptical of purely technological solutions.
kisamoto 5y ago
I haven't found a good answer to this but I'd love to discuss a little here: 1. What value does a DAO actually have/bring? 2. Are there any examples of a successful, functioning DAO that adds additional value over a traditional organisation?

66 points by abecedarius 5y ago

At some point, you need to do work to make money, especially when young. What if, however, your "job" was working for a blockchain instead of a company? Or a decentralized company? What if that blockchain turned evil? How could you stop it if no one had control? Everyone is just a cog.

pavel_lishin 5y ago
Sorry, how are your examples different for a blockchain vs. a company from the point of view of a young individual employee?
casi18 5y ago
Lots of daos have forums and token voting where you voice opinion, and also have 'rage quit' functions where you can exit and take your share of the dao bank balance with you. They're also often open source so can be forked in disagreements - even by anonymous others (see sushi forking uniswap and taking it in a different direction under new branding). my experience with daos i have worked with is they are often closely aligned with co-op style organisational structure. the difference is we dont all know each other and live all over the world, some people are anonymous dogs jpegs and thats all i'll ever know about them, some people are present in their irl persona. but its a group of people with some shared aim in collective ownership, this doesnt mean there arent directors and roles, but often you can just start talking and participating and be rewarded. e.g. anyone can write a strategy for yearn, pass it on to the team and be rewarded https://twitter.com/iearnfinance/status/1459658364837896192?s=20 https://twitter.com/iearnfinance/status/1459658364837896192?...

Animats 5y ago

It makes sense that you would cite Axie Infinity as a leading example of how the Web3 technologies are actually starting to work at scale. Huh? Axie Infinity is a Ponzi scheme. They're the people behind the Smooth Love Potion token. See chart for that.[1] They prey on poor people in the Philippines and Vietnam with a pay to play game that costs about US$1000 to enter. [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/

saurik 5y ago
Yeah: and the only reason it works at all is because it is actually a centralized game (which then indirectly but still centrally mints the SLP any time they want under any rule set... this is absolutely a "security") that can attempt to prevent people automating play by doing stuff like bot detection. I'm a believer in crypto, and even in crypto for games, but trotting out Axie as an example is painful.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  It’s not a surprise though as the interviewee works for a VC that invested in it.
  - superfad 5y ago
    The interviewee, Chris Dixon, never mentioned Axie though. It was the interviewer, Steven Johnson, that brought it up.
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      As I read it the first block is Steven replying to Chris. Might be wrong though it’s not formatted very well.
      - superfad 5y ago
        Ah yeak ok. I agree the formatting is a bit unusual. I guess the confusion is Chris did mention Axie but it was in the previous post which is paywalled.
hackingforfun 5y ago
Some people in the countries you mentioned are making more playing Axie than they could otherwise [1]. I'm not advocating for Axie Infinity, but I think there are multiple sides to this. [1] https://restofworld.org/2021/axie-infinity/ https://restofworld.org/2021/axie-infinity/

jimkleiber 5y ago

I really struggle to see how most DAOs and cryptocurrency efforts aren't mostly just ways to skirt around existing financial security laws. For example, could organizations give stocks/shares/tokens/choose-your-security-name to users of a platform in the current (US) legal environment? I don't have the legal background to know. Can they sell private securities to any user? I think no because it would go against accredited investor laws. Also, I think if they're selling to an open public, it might violate SEC laws by being a public security, not a private security, unless they also reported truthfully about risks, etc., to the SEC. So what if the law got rid of the accredited investor requirement? Or got rid of the reporting requirements for public vs private securities? So I think one part is that companies aren't legally allowed to sell private shares to just any individual and if they do sell to any individual, they aren't legally allowed to not report to the SEC. I think another part is that I wonder how many companies actually want more cooperative/democratic style ownership. Cooperatives (one member, one vote) have struggled to get investment because of that precise equality in decision making. [edit-added] And also, a more equal profit-sharing may not be in the interest of many people wanting to become the next unicorn billionaire. So it makes me wonder how many of the orgs using DAOs are doing so because they want to become more equal cooperative-like orgs, and how many are doing so to skirt securities laws.

yawnxyz 5y ago
I think academia is an interesting use case, e.g. VitaDAO.com and Molecule.to
- jimkleiber 5y ago
  I wonder if even their methods are dancing around US securities laws, but I don't fully understand how cooperatives overlap with securities laws [0]. Despite that, I like what seems to be their intention around cooperatively-owned research, so I'll try to follow them to see what comes of it. Thank you. edit: Also, maybe one of the problems is that the internet is global and most regulation is at most national, so even if it were to break US laws, does it break other national, regional, or local laws? Do DAOs and crypto lead to some larger global form of governance? [0]: https://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/securities-regulation/securities-regulation-keyed-to-coffee/definitions-of-security-and-exempted-securities/reves-v-ernst-young-2/ https://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/securities-regulation/se...

gremlinsinc 5y ago

DAO's are a good concept but still have flaws. I just don't think blockchain is refined enough just yet... I'm personally working on just a basic ERP system to manage Cooperatives (Housing, Consumer, Worker), that would reward people for consuming, working, volunteering, etc with 'tokens' good towards rev shares, maybe health benefits, and ability to vote for company officers, etc... It'll have everything to manage ecommerce shops, restaurants, grocery stores, property management, etc.. as 'modules', kinda like ODOO, but for managing employees/users/consumers it needs to get the reward system right and make it modular enough so each co-op (SaaS/Multi-tenant) could have their own rules, etc.... It's for building a more democratic org, but still is centralized at least the DB parts, as it allows better control... I could see maybe rebuilding parts on the blockchain, and implementing some sort of crypto w/ UBI and a tax that really benefits those who spend more, and hold less of the crypto, but it'd need be sybil-proof, so would probably need some centralization for verification of identities. the app will also have tools for voting, w/ ranked choice and weighted votes (people w/ different roles can have heavier weights), and maybe even have settings like those 'weights' be voteable by the group, say the CEO is petitioning for 20:1 ratio for voting power, so maybe you setup the vote to allow just pick a numeric# from 5-20 (or some other min/max range) then the average is what gets picked, etc... even for voting for new company officers - maybe every two years a vote is triggered the winner has their roles and permissions automatically switched, and the loser has them revoked, etc... The ultimate idea is using it to create syndicated co-ops that maybe share some mutual aid benefits among users/consumers/workers of other co-ops... For e-commerce for example store owners could opt to include their stuff in a marketplace, so their products are distributed like Amazon's marketplace...

pavel_lishin 5y ago
This feels like buzzword soup.
clippablematt 5y ago
This sounds great, got a link? Or is it still in dev? We keep trying things with our coop, but we often just fall back on google sheets for everything - which everyone hates but it’s flexible enough to do what we need and we all know how to use it.

LiquidSky 5y ago

...we ran the experiment. It was an instantaneous, colossal failure that eternally discredited the concept in the most hilarious way possible.[1] That anyone thinks of a DAO as anything but a punchline is all the proof you need of the sheer delusion of the crypto space. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)

smabie 5y ago
Yup, Roman democracy also failed in the most hilarious way possible. That anyone thinks of Democracy as anything but a punchline is all the proof you need of the sheer delusion of the governance space.

casi18 5y ago

it'll be interesting to see if constitutiondao raise enough funds to buy the constitution this week (one of the eleven first editions). i think that is an interesting example of something going from private ownership to being owned by a large group (currently 12000 members in the discord) who will then vote on where it goes on display etc. They started as a group last friday, so far raised $5.7m, looking to get to $20m by thursdays auction. I don't think any other process could move so quickly in a few days, from a joke to being taken seriously so rapdily. its memes all the way down. https://www.constitutiondao.com/ https://www.constitutiondao.com/

hemloc_io 5y ago
I honestly doubt it, but I think the idea is very cool. Biggest issues faced with DAOs on ETH right now is the gas fees. Can't take small contributions with gas averaging around 100-200$

EGreg 5y ago

Hey everyone. Greg from Intercoin here. Forget DAOs for a second, how about just putting roles and permissions on the blockchain? Why do I have to trust some site won't have a guy gain access to the centralized database and change everyone's roles and permissions willy nilly? What if we had a trusted and audited codebase (like Uniswap factory) for creating smart contracts which any website on the Internet could query through Infura or GetBlock or another gateway to popular blockchains? And this codebase was about membership in communities, roles, tickets, etc. displayed as non-transferrable NFTs, and so forth. I see smart contracts as enabling stuff like that. Managing communities. Running elections for representatives, and making sure you know that someone "really was" elected or appointed to a position. Constitutions can be expressed in this way. Direct democracy and delegating your votes to actual scientists when it comes to certain issues etc. And that is only the "base functionality", if you will. Here is what you can build on top of it: https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications For instance, last year I wrote this for CoinDesk, and since then we have built it: https://coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-defense-of-blockchain-voting/ https://coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-defense-of-blockchai... PS: To me, one of the biggest problems in the crypto space is that each team roll their own smart contracts, and same goes for Web 2.0 startups and their app code. It's far better to have factories of heavily audited and battle-tested code on the blockchain, and produce instances from that. People would then make decisions about using the smart contracts based on standard init() parameters that can be easily documented around the web. The smart contracts wouldn't have an "owner", but would serve entire communities, with multiple businesses providing "utility" by accepting their "utility tokens", so the whole thing wouldn't be dependent on one single team or business. There is so much we can do, we've only scratched the surface. PPS: If you are a Solidity developer, contact me at the email greg at-sign intercoin.org, we are currently looking for partners to go and deploy all this to our millions of users worldwide by early 2022, here are the repos: https://github.com/Intercoin https://github.com/Intercoin

chipotle_coyote 5y ago

I suppose I'm asking for an "explain it to me like I'm five" response here, but when I read things like (from TFA): > When you have an internet service that serves hundreds of millions or billions of people, there is a huge asymmetry of power and knowledge between the service provider and individual users. To fix this, you’d want a system that provides a way for users to organize and act collectively. You’d want users to receive a straightforward digital representation of their economic and governance rights. You’d want a system that has unambiguous rules along with mechanisms to enforce those rules. And you’d want this all to be available globally and accessible to anyone. Sounds useful, right? Well, the system I’ve described is basically a blockchain. I think: a blockchain is an append-only distributed transaction ledger. But how is the system Dixon describes "basically a blockchain?" A blockchain has some of those properties, sure: it's available globally and accessible to anyone (with the technology to access it). It has mechanisms to enforce its rules, e.g., you only get to append transactions to the ledger and you can't modify past transactions without the tampering being obvious. But the "non-protocol" parts here -- providing a way for users to organize and act collectively, receiving a straightforward digital representation (?) of their economic and governance rights -- seem to me to be orthogonal to blockchains. What legally recognized rights you have in anything stems from, well, laws -- from legally binding contracts. Those don't need the blockchain. If you buy the "digital original" of your favorite meme for $3M, a transaction entry on a blockchain could be agreed to be the bill of sale -- but so could any number of things off the blockchain. What the blockchain brings to the party that's entirely new seems to be the ability to get ridiculous sales prices because there's currently a frenzy for anything NFT. And this is an issue I have with an awful lot of Let's Build It On The Blockchain! thinking right now: it's not that I can't see value in the concept of blockchains, it's that there seems to be a "it's good because it's on The Blockchain!" frenzy around a lot of things that are transparently dubious (see: millions of NFT scams, the insistence that digital in-game assets can be easily transferred between games built on entirely different back-end systems just because blockchain, etc.). And stepping back from that, the whole "Web3" pitch is "we can build an entirely decentralized Internet now because BLOCKCHAIN!" But, again: why are blockchains critical to this idea? We already built a decentralized Internet before blockchains; it was called (checks notes) "The Internet". I get that the idea is the new blockchain-based everything can't be centralized, but y'know, that's what we thought about the non-blockchain Internet a quarter-century ago. All the tools we had then to not be centralized still exist now. The issue with centralization now isn't a technological one -- which makes me pretty skeptical of purely technological solutions.

kisamoto 5y ago

I haven't found a good answer to this but I'd love to discuss a little here: 1. What value does a DAO actually have/bring? 2. Are there any examples of a successful, functioning DAO that adds additional value over a traditional organisation?