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The Future of Work Is Not Corporate – It’s DAOs and Crypto Networks
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- boringg 5y agoA16 is quite deep in their crypto investments. They will have to keep the hype train going to get their returns.
- jiveturkey42 5y agoI've noticed that HN is typically hostile to crypto topics? Anyone care to explain why? I'm asking this question in genuine good-faith because I'm curious
- Freak_NL 5y agoOnly cryptocurrency and related items when these trigger people's bullshit detectors (which is most of the time and usually warranted). Cryptography related topics are generally well-received.
- exdsq 5y agoEven cool non-bs cryptocurrency topics just get derided by cRyPtO iS a ScAm comments sadly. It’s an easy way to get karma :)
- rchaud 5y agocare to provide an example? HN karma doesn't really matter, because this site is well-moderated and people aren't in the business of selling high-karma accounts to bots like on Reddit.
- qnsi 5y agoCryptocurrency has no real use case just massive wealth transfer from clueless people to crypto scammers promising new revolution in many areas and then escaping with the money
- bpiche 5y agoActual cryptography is interesting. Cypherpunk topics are interesting. Distributed networks like Tor are interesting. 'Crypto' in the modern parlance is not interesting. Compute-intensive blockchain technology is not necessary for any iteration of DeFi that I have personally ever encountered, and at the same time, everybody in the scene acts like it's the killer app. The whole scene is a confederacy of dunces who are all trying to fuck each other as much as possible. https://ambcrypto.com/7-7-billion-lost-to-crypto-scams-but-how-serious-have-rug-pulls-been https://ambcrypto.com/7-7-billion-lost-to-crypto-scams-but-h...
- idiotsecant 5y agoUnderneath the giant pile of scammers and spammers there is a small core of people quietly toiling away because they really believe that the technology can change the world. Those are the people and projects that make crypto interesting, I think.
- bpiche 5y agoI wonder what the hack-the-planet l0pht-era cypherpunks of the 90s would think of them, even the 'small core group of people quietly toiling away'. I bet they would think they were a bunch of moonboy sell-outs. Pardon the digression, but I just think it's such a shame that this hustle has co-oped a word that used to actually mean something to people. edit: Partially containing my bile
- medion 5y agoMostly SV bros still hell bent on VCs and that whole culture.
- kennu 5y agoI have four theories about it: 1. People are afraid of their current skills and knowledge becoming obsolete. This is similar to people being hostile to the cloud 10 years ago and serverless 5 years ago. 2. People are bitter because they see others profiting from the current crypto boom/bubble, and they didn't buy into it early enough or at all. 3. People are genuinely worried about the darker aspects (non-renewable energy usage, scams, illegal activities) and for some reason they blame the technology rather than the actors actually engaging in those activities. 4. People are problem/solution-oriented rather than vision-oriented. If they don't see an immedate relationship between an existing problem and a technical solution to it, they don't consider the new technology to have merit. These are just some theoretical reasons I think might explain people feeling so hostile.
- helen___keller 5y agoI identify strongly with 2,4 and weakly with 3. I actually don’t feel entirely hostile towards crypto (I dabble and keep up with the latest to see if/when things will get interesting) but I tend to write very negatively about current blockchain technologies and utopian vision about them Also, you’re missing another reason: we’re entering an age of techno-pessimism. After the techno optimism of the 90s and aughts, a lot of people were let down by the consequences that this technology had on society. Tracking across the internet, widespread misinformation and post-truth, total dominance by a handful of corporate behemoths, etc. some people are inspired by the anti-corporate message of this article, other people just feel burned from the optimism of the last few decades and what it became
- helen___keller 5y agoAnother one: the fact that every crypto evangelist by definition tends to have a strong financial motivation to pump their preferred coin means the entire ecosystem has a feeling of fakery around it: is X coin actually useful or just another pump n dump??
- jiveturkey42 5y agoThank you for an honest answer. I've also observed that cryptocurrency enthusiasts have a orientation towards high-risk, which is a different mindset than most engineers who prefer reliability and predicability
- lm28469 5y agoRemove the empty promises, wishful thinking and buzzwords from this article and tell me what's left ? Not much "Crypto" is a wantrepreneur magnet, most projects have no future (or present even). They sound like tobacco CEOs trying to convince you that smoking cigarettes actually is beneficial
- disambiguation 5y agoIt smells a lot like a ponzi scheme.
- rchaud 5y agoNot always a Ponzi, but there is certainly a "greater fool" theory at work in venture capital. The rush to take loss-making companies public makes that clear, as does the handwaving away of poor financial metrics with platitudes like "tech stocks are different". Now that SPACs have emerged, tech companies aren't even bothering to go through the regular route because SPACs let them do it with less financial disclosure.
- vanusa 5y agoAnyone care to explain why? Did you read the article? It's utterly nonsensical, from the very first sentence. It isn't "hostile" to point this out.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- thesuperbigfrog 5y ago"Traditional corporate employment is rapidly becoming outdated as a means for coordinating activity in the Information Age — we already see this in the emergence of alternative forms of earning such as influencers, contractors, creators, gig economy participants, and more." Aren't influencers, contractors, creators, and gig economy participants paid by large corporations? How many of these types of workers being paid by DAOs?
- exdsq 5y agoI’ve been paid by a DAO! Group of people proposed something, it was accepted by a governance council, people wrote some test cases, I submitted some code, people reviewed it, test cases passed, and I received some crypto
- idiotsecant 5y agoThat is pretty neat. In your opinion was this workflow significantly different / better because the people directing your work had a DAO in the middle?
- exdsq 5y agoIt was fun but not terribly efficient. I can see it growing with things like Gitcoin for open source projects with treasuries. Saying this I’ve found it far quicker to get freelance work with crypto than more corporate gigs. Last corporate job I had for a one-off task took weeks to figure out how best to pay from a US client to a UK account!
- ac29 5y agoDid you pay taxes on it (income, and potentially capital gains)?
- endisneigh 5y ago> accepted by a governance council Lol. Why even bother?
- twalla 5y agoI wish these kinds of people would just fuck off to their own planet and let the rest of us get back to doing actual useful work.
- gumby 5y agoYou don't have to read their rubbish. I didn't; I went straight to the comments, which is not my normal M.O.
- abakker 5y agoI wish they could cite some evidence that any number of people (who were not early crypto investors) even wanted this kind of thing to happen. Honestly, it is wankery.
- henning 5y ago> In the future, it’s likely that the average person will not work for a company. Instead, people will earn income in non-traditional ways by taking actions such as playing games, learning new skills, creating art, or curating content. Who's going to clean up shit off the sidewalk and who will they work for? The janitorial DAO? Vacuous bullshit that shows zero regard for how crypto in its current manifestation is an ecologically disastrous scam.
- NeutralForest 5y agoCouldn't agree more, disappointing to see this kind of crap here
- mwattsun 5y agoI only posted it because it's from Andreessen Horowitz
- nopenopenopeno 5y agoY Combinator spams Hacker News enough as it is. P.S. - I know Y Combinator created and maintains Hacker News, but I am confident that in a post-capitalist world an even better version of Hacker News would blossom in the hands and interests of the public at large, much in the same way that open source would.
- rchaud 5y agoIt's basically sponsored content. They've sunk a lot of money into crypto projects so its general partners will write gushing articles about how DAOs, NFTs, "Web3" are all the future. Did the same with Substack last year. Post after post about the power of newsletters. If they were so powerful, why does Substack have to offer exclusive publishing deals to well-known reporters and writers?
- dporter 5y ago> Who's going to clean up shit off the sidewalk and who will they work for? The janitorial DAO? Simple! The janitor will be a willing market participant who wears a visible QR code with their wallet address, and passers by can voluntarily tip them if they do a good job. 90% of the tip goes to network processing fees, but that's actually a feature! \s
- echelon 5y ago> people will earn income in non-traditional ways by taking actions such as playing games, What? Fewer than 1% will ever earn money this way. Look at the long tail of Twitch, with all the streamers who make nothing at all.
- datavirtue 5y agoI think they mean workers playing games that implicitly solve problems or accomplish something real. I could be wrong though, this blathering post of nonsense did little to connect with me.
- shrimpx 5y agoDoesn't look good for a16z.com to be hosting trash like this.
- vanusa 5y agoAt least they're showing their true colors.
- bpiche 5y agoIs this a joke? First WSJ and now a16z. I figured due diligence was one of their core competencies. Now, I'm not so sure.
- gumby 5y agowsj is pretty shallow on topics like these. As for a16z: their job is not to do great diligence; it's to take their LP's money and do a spray and pray (this is the case for pretty much any mega VC fund; DD is too hard). Instead they do sector diligence; when they find one they like they pump it up to attract deal flow. Hence Levine's semi-jocular suggestion that a16z be considered a media company with an investment arm. They have $2B allocated to crypto deals. They like to take both coins and equity.
- bpiche 5y agoWow, that's an interesting analysis. Do you maybe mean that they have so much influence that they can attract other firms to an entire sector just by being a prime mover in that 'media' space? Even if it's all crap. I wonder how long this house of cards can stand.
- endisneigh 5y agoI’ll believe it when they dissolve themselves and start a DAO in its place.
- BrianOnHN 5y agoHas any DAO actually achieved anything notable?
- idiotsecant 5y agoMakerDAO achieved a (mostly) autonomous peg of a crypto asset with the US dollar. I think that's pretty notable.
- disambiguation 5y agoReading about this now.. trying to understand how this is different from tether?
- idiotsecant 5y agoIt would be a very long post to go through it all, but suffice it to say it incentivizes other people to maintain the peg through bribing them with potential rewards. There is no person at MakerDAO printing new DAI like would occur with tether. The system prints and destroys DAI based on individual users acting selfishly seeking profit. The people using the system keep the peg non-altruistically. It's really quite a clever idea.
- iskander 5y agoI have a hard time reconciling the utopian revolutionary vision of DAOs with the reality of the ones that actually exist. Even in the best case, DAOs are essentially a Discord and treasury (hopefully a multi-signature wallet). Where is the actual social infrastructure through which people are organized into collective effort? It seems missing from the DAO story. It's like saying a public corporation is its shareholders and hoping some of the step up to actually somehow do some work.
- brightstep 5y agoIt's purposely missing. Crypto proponents believe they can use the technology to change the world without any coordinated human interaction. It is a political movement with no politics.
- iskander 5y agoI can see that for e.g. DeFi but DAOs are essentially social. People are starting tons of these things for all sorts of purposes, from serious to mostly silly. Some kind of social infrastructure will inevitably emerge but given that it's being treated as an afterthought, it will probably be pretty dysfunctional and/or recapitulate lots of known lessons from other social/political realms.
- dporter 5y agoThe three classes described in the article, core contributors, bounty hunters, and network participants are just employees, contractors, and share holders with new branding. The most meaningful difference is a lack of labor protections.
- disambiguation 5y ago> The most meaningful difference is a lack of labor protections. It's 100% about this, and more generally evading regulation. My casual observation of recent economic history is that there's an undying libertarian fervor to pursue things that escape government control. All the major "growth" lately has been in web, crypto, and space. Things that are largely unregulated.
- ahartmetz 5y agoA16z going off the rails a little lately? It's not the first crypto-related shitpost from them.
- qnsi 5y agothey have a big crypto fund, ran (if I am not mistaken) by Chris Dixon. I admire him, and he made me think deeply and research crypto, but I came to conclusion its a castle made out of sand.
- idiotsecant 5y agoLike everything else in crypto DAOs probably have a small niche where they will one day be wildly successful to the point that they are the standard way to do a thing. But that doesn't mean they will be or should be universally applied. Decentralized anything is by definition more expensive and less efficient than the centralized version of that thing, particularly when those decentralized systems have to interact with squishy human elements. In some cases that tradeoff is OK, but in some cases it isn't and it's silly to pretend otherwise.
- huitzitziltzin 5y agoHilarious, ludicrously implausible. I get that Andreesen-Horowitz has a lot of money at stake in this area and would love to make some of it back, but it's been more than 10 years since bitcoin emerged with the promise that the blockchain would have world-changing repercussions and _I still don't see even one meaningful application of the technology_ ? Please go ahead and tell me how important NFTs are again. Or how Venezuelans are supposed to use bitcoin as an inflation hedge. Or how smart contracts are going to revolutionize... the exchange of goods (?), as soon as developers can figure out how to program them entirely without bugs. On the basis of all of the applications of blockchains I've seen over the past decade (which I can count on one hand), why should I expect that ANY of the predictions in this piece will come to pass? Let alone something as world-changing as displacing the corporation as the leading organizational form for economic activity.
- iskander 5y ago>but it's been more than 10 years since bitcoin emerged with the promise that the blockchain would have world-changing repercussions and _I still don't see even one meaningful application of the technology_ ? I see this critique often but I don't get it: bitcoin was essentially an early prototype, the story of crypto since gone through lots of twists and turns. Make it programmable (ETH), try to make it scalable in one chain (lots of failures, now things like Solana), figure out how to split consensus/data/computation (current ETH L2 road map). The technology is still young and evolving. There are a lot of other things worth critiquing (PoW is wasteful, permission-less systems are socially bad, &c) but saying "this technology has been here for 10 years" misses that it's a big complex roadmap, a lot of which (like zero knowledge rollup L2s) just showed up this year.
- jimkleiber 5y agoThe more I look into DAOs, the more they look like companies that are: 1) registered on a global level instead of a local or national level 2) skirt US securities laws by allowing anyone to buy and sell ownership, whereas companies normally restrict that to accredited investors, unless they register with the SEC 3) often have a more democratic ethos of governance, although many seem to be based on one token = one vote, which sounds almost identical to how companies operate with one stock = one vote. So, the main thing that I think they do that is quite different is giving people the ability to register a company on a global level, as there isn't a governmental way to do that right now. Other than that, what they seem to offer is a way to organize and collect money that goes around financial and securities laws.
- Sparkyte 5y agoAnswer will and always be no.
- Zababa 5y agoIf you're baffled by the idea that most people can live their life by not working, I would suggest skipping directly to the "Network participants: participate-to-earn" for a quick explanation. The idea is basically just a proper redistribution of benefits. That's a bit weird to me since most people in networks are consumers, not creators, and consumers don't really create value, so we show them ads to create value. Maybe the future is about giving to people a bit of the money they generate while watching ads? But aren't those people already getting something by participating in this network for free? For example, if you watch a youtube video with sponsored content, the value you get from watching the sponsorship is the youtube video itself. Maybe it's about distributing the surplus? Anyways, this confirms again that the crypto/web3/DAO space is not for me. All of that stuff moves way too fast. Donald Knuth said about email: "Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.". Crypto is making me realise that my role in life may be to be on the bottom of things.
- jimjimjim 5y agothey want to mechanical-turk the whole world. bitnikel-and-dimed.
- helen___keller 5y agoIf you start from the goal of buying in early to a foundational, trillion+ dollar investment, it can be easy to work backwards to convincing yourself that web2 is doomed and web3 is the way to go. After all, tech giants dominate web2 already which makes it hard to see a trillion dollar investment happening there. But web3 promises us that the tech giants’ days of influence are numbered, and when everyone goes for decentralization that’s a lot of value to capture. That doesn’t make the hypothesis any more true, of course
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- streamofdigits 5y agoThe Future of Investment is Not Rational - It's DAOs and Crypto Networks
- yob28 5y ago
- Grismar 5y agoFlat Earth or creationism for people who who are more responsive to a strong dose of techspeak.
- TYPE_FASTER 5y agoWhile there are some really interesting possibilities when you start thinking about PoW being basically anything, and yeah I think it could be used to disrupt previous disrupters, like any other hype cycle the vast majority of the new companies are NGMI. Anybody else remember Web 1? https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/11/biztech/articles/18ktel.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/...
- JohnFen 5y agoThis article completely reads like it's trying to sell a scam.