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Comment by jimkleiber | Hacker News Reader

Exactly, a public company that skirts KYC/AML laws and securities laws.

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with those laws, I just see much of the "DAO revolution" as designed to "free the people" into investing anonymously and without accredited investor requirements, without directly trying to change the laws.

One thing I think it does that most don't talk about: allows people to register a global company/org. Right now, I think the highest level to register an org is the nation-state level, not much, if anything, exists at a global level.

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those bits on the net will sure come in handy when it goes to trial in "global court".

A fair point—there also isn't much of a global judicial system to regulate property ownership. WIPO perhaps but doesn't seem too relevant/powerful to most and probably doesn't cover most things.

So then we have global things often being regulated by national laws, which, seems to be a conundrum I see happening more and more.

That’s actually the point. You theoretically shouldn’t need a court. Everything is regulated by code, and if something goes wrong you have to own it. The code is public. You can vet it as much as you want. Proposals are voted proportional to code ownership. It looks controversial but not utterly nonsense to me.

For on chain stuff, sure. Where it interfaces with the real world, how do you make the agents carry out the decisions of the code without using the courts?

I'm by no means an expert, but my intuition is that the relationship between on chain and real world should be regulated by real world courts. So, for instance, an on chain DAO hires a contractor, that then does insider trading on behalf of the DAO in the US: both the contractor and any real world activity in the US get targeted by US courts. It's like fining Google in the EU: you can't touch it in the US (it's as if it's on chain), but you can prevent it from doing business on EU soil. Or what happened with Facebook in the UK: the parliament summoned Zuck, and he just didn't show up. It's convoluted, but not far fetched imho.

You can’t say that it’ll rely on real word courts and then two minutes later say that the benefit is that you don’t need to hire lawyers.

You don't need to hire lawyers to create the entity and coordinate internally. I've managed a multinational company: it's absolutely crazy the amount of complexity needed to coordinate between legislations, just because states can't efficiently talk with each other. It doesn't make any sense. It's a broken protocol. It's a fine line: within the org, on chain and no lawyers, only code and everyone must take care of code due diligence. Outside the org (ie. real world), you deal with lawyers as much as needed.

I've thought that many crypto solutions are just workarounds for not having global standardization around laws. Do you think a global governance level (with more buy-in than the UN) would help mitigate some of the challenges that a global company encounters?

In other words, do you think there would be as much of a need for DAOs if a company could register with a global authority, had globally aligned taxes, etc?

It's literally an implementation of a Kafkaesque judge that can never be reasoned with, will never explain itself beyond pointing to the rules and can never be overruled.

Why this is supposed to be a good thing is never explained.

Because it's global. I don't need to reason with anyone anywhere, I don't need to hire lawyers, I don't need to make a global enterprise fit local regulations that are often conflicting. I'm not saying it's recommended, or even reasonable. I'm arguing that is not utter nonsense in some peculiar cases IMHO

I don't find any of these points to be convincing.

Storing data in a blockchain doesn't mean that local laws don't still apply. Even if the FBI can't prevent you sending money to a terror organisation with a smart contract, they will still arrest you for it.

Being able to reason with someone can be an advantage. With imperfect rules, having authorities involved that are allowed to have some discretion can be a huge boon.

And not having to hire lawyers? Well, you still have to hire someone who understands smart contracts, someone who writes them, and someone to negotiate them with whoever you want to close your contract with.

I believe we're not saying opposing points of view. What I'm arguing for is moving corporate law on chain, mostly regulating relationships between shareholders, and keep everything else real world. In Europe for instance it's quite absurd how much bureaucracy you have the cope with to create operating entities in different countries within the same economic space. Everything else can stay the same - penal law in particular. It's a very fine line but I believe it can make sense in some instances

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