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Decentralised autonomous organization. Picture a corporation, but instead of a board and CEO the shareholders vote on what to do directly. I'm sure someone mor

Decentralised autonomous organization. Picture a corporation, but instead of a board and CEO the shareholders vote on what to do directly. I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than I could come up with a better analogy.

brighton36 5y ago
That's the brochure description. The evidence would suggest that this is a run of the mill cryto ponzi.
garrickvanburen 5y ago
That’s consistent with my understanding. They seem to be functionally identical to a Board of Directors or how a co-operative might run. Though as I understand, with potentially a very large number voters in ever-changing cloaked identities (as voting right tokens could be continuously bought & sold). Today, in the real world - DAO’s are an LLC coordinating on Discord, or Zoom, or other common communication tools. That DAO coordination happens fully in cyberspace is promoted as a unique differentiator to how businesses run today. In my experience, the key unique characteristic of DAOs are that you may not know who you’re doing business with.
ajross 5y ago
Also instead of a legal entity with the ability to petition the government for redress of grievances, it's just a bunch of data emitted by some smart contract code. This is going to turn out to be important the first time a DAO gets significantly scammed. Someone's going to take the money and run, or otherwise violate the "contract" that the DAO thought it was "enforcing", and... there won't be anything to do. There won't be any way to fix it. The smart contract doesn't handle the edge case of having to hire a lawyer on its own behalf. I mean, just to take this particular mostly-harmless situation as an example: that membership in the Blender Development Fund presumably includes some amount of official input into how the money gets spent. What if the DAO has specific desires or expectations, and Blender simply chooses to ignore them?
- riidom 5y ago
  What you can expect as a corporate (or any) sponsor, or corporate membership, as it's called, is defined here: https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/ https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/ The two (short) PDF's go a bit into detail, but in a nutshell they can fund core projects, access meetings, and "more closely monitor" progress they are interested in.
- dbt00 5y ago
  > This is going to turn out to be important the first time a DAO gets significantly scammed. Someone's going to take the money and run, or otherwise violate the "contract" that the DAO thought it was "enforcing", and... there won't be anything to do. There won't be any way to fix it. The smart contract doesn't handle the edge case of having to hire a lawyer on its own behalf. This already happened, and they hard forked the Ethereum blockchain to revert the hack. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2016/07/20/ethereum-executes-blockchain-hard-fork-to-return-dao-funds/ https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2016/07/20/ethereum-executes-b...
- tpxl 5y ago
  > This is going to turn out to be important the first time a DAO gets significantly scammed Badger DAO got scammed for 120 million USD last week and I doubt they were the first.
  - ajross 5y ago
    To be clear, that attack (also the The DAO event that caused the ethereum fork) was a hack. It was a bug in the contract that got exploited. And that's a risk too. But even if a DAO does everything right, technically, they're still subject to the problem of having to trust entities in the real world (e.g. "whoever on the Blender foundation gave them the address to pay") to behave the way they promise (e.g. "actually hand them an address under the control of the Blender Foundation"). It's trivially easy in this world to just cheat. And in the real world, with real people on both sides of the transaction, that's addressed in the courts. And it works, and fraud as a proportion of our economy is quite small. But that protection doesn't extend to anonymous smart contracts.
joshmarlow 5y ago
I think that's a pretty good analogy. I'll add a few other details to color the picture. DAOs can also be built to support fund disbursal through a m-of-n multisig - ie, a certain number of members have to vote on a transaction. It's also possible to do things like create NFTs and setup recurring revenue from them to go back to the DAO which distributes them to their members. Side note - in WY, DAOs have some degree of legal standing now (IANAL): https://www.wyoleg.gov/Legislation/2021/SF0038 https://www.wyoleg.gov/Legislation/2021/SF0038

brighton36 5y ago

That's the brochure description. The evidence would suggest that this is a run of the mill cryto ponzi.

garrickvanburen 5y ago

That’s consistent with my understanding. They seem to be functionally identical to a Board of Directors or how a co-operative might run. Though as I understand, with potentially a very large number voters in ever-changing cloaked identities (as voting right tokens could be continuously bought & sold). Today, in the real world - DAO’s are an LLC coordinating on Discord, or Zoom, or other common communication tools. That DAO coordination happens fully in cyberspace is promoted as a unique differentiator to how businesses run today. In my experience, the key unique characteristic of DAOs are that you may not know who you’re doing business with.

ajross 5y ago

Also instead of a legal entity with the ability to petition the government for redress of grievances, it's just a bunch of data emitted by some smart contract code. This is going to turn out to be important the first time a DAO gets significantly scammed. Someone's going to take the money and run, or otherwise violate the "contract" that the DAO thought it was "enforcing", and... there won't be anything to do. There won't be any way to fix it. The smart contract doesn't handle the edge case of having to hire a lawyer on its own behalf. I mean, just to take this particular mostly-harmless situation as an example: that membership in the Blender Development Fund presumably includes some amount of official input into how the money gets spent. What if the DAO has specific desires or expectations, and Blender simply chooses to ignore them?

riidom 5y ago
What you can expect as a corporate (or any) sponsor, or corporate membership, as it's called, is defined here: https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/ https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/ The two (short) PDF's go a bit into detail, but in a nutshell they can fund core projects, access meetings, and "more closely monitor" progress they are interested in.
dbt00 5y ago
> This is going to turn out to be important the first time a DAO gets significantly scammed. Someone's going to take the money and run, or otherwise violate the "contract" that the DAO thought it was "enforcing", and... there won't be anything to do. There won't be any way to fix it. The smart contract doesn't handle the edge case of having to hire a lawyer on its own behalf. This already happened, and they hard forked the Ethereum blockchain to revert the hack. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2016/07/20/ethereum-executes-blockchain-hard-fork-to-return-dao-funds/ https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2016/07/20/ethereum-executes-b...
tpxl 5y ago
> This is going to turn out to be important the first time a DAO gets significantly scammed Badger DAO got scammed for 120 million USD last week and I doubt they were the first.
- ajross 5y ago
  To be clear, that attack (also the The DAO event that caused the ethereum fork) was a hack. It was a bug in the contract that got exploited. And that's a risk too. But even if a DAO does everything right, technically, they're still subject to the problem of having to trust entities in the real world (e.g. "whoever on the Blender foundation gave them the address to pay") to behave the way they promise (e.g. "actually hand them an address under the control of the Blender Foundation"). It's trivially easy in this world to just cheat. And in the real world, with real people on both sides of the transaction, that's addressed in the courts. And it works, and fraud as a proportion of our economy is quite small. But that protection doesn't extend to anonymous smart contracts.

joshmarlow 5y ago

I think that's a pretty good analogy. I'll add a few other details to color the picture. DAOs can also be built to support fund disbursal through a m-of-n multisig - ie, a certain number of members have to vote on a transaction. It's also possible to do things like create NFTs and setup recurring revenue from them to go back to the DAO which distributes them to their members. Side note - in WY, DAOs have some degree of legal standing now (IANAL): https://www.wyoleg.gov/Legislation/2021/SF0038 https://www.wyoleg.gov/Legislation/2021/SF0038