DAOs, a Canon
future.a16z.com
future.a16z.com
But, curious to see if I'd missed anything, I went down to the "Applications of DAOs" section, and clicked a post at random. This one.[1]
> But what if underrepresented communities and their allies could more easily organize human and financial capital to invest in projects and people that mattered to them and the diverse world we live in? What if by investing more capital into underrepresented communities, we could dramatically accelerate progress in diversity, inclusion, and equity globally?
> We believe that this is the future: underrepresented communities and their allies will be able to more easily coordinate human and financial capital to invest in building the world we all live in—and in the process, economically empower their communities in ways that today’s societal systems are failing to do at scale.
> And all of this will be enabled at scale across the internet by DAOs.
So, I'm guessing the _proposed_ application is "easier access to pools of investment money for minorities", and the proposed solution is _DAOs_.
But what it doesn't explain is why DAOs are a better solution than all the other existing solutions for creating investment syndicates.
[1]: https://syndicate.mirror.xyz/xeRR8PJUnGr-mUlwLJppFHe65WPpyyU...
In fact, there's even been organisations codify sociocracy (holocracy's older sibling with longer hair and more wild stories) into their constitutions. Constitutions for companies / charities / incorporated societies etc. work well.
Admittedly, I can see an advantage that if it's all in code, there's not really any room for debate - the quorum was met, so the smart contract initiated an extraodinary vote, and here's an immutable record of how quorum was met.
I can see it not being so helpful in situations where interpretation is required - e.g., your organisation wants to help minorities, that's awesome. What constitutes a minority? If you're looking for global reach, that will really differ from country to country, and how do you build that fuzzier logic into code? Rohingya are an oppressed minority in Myanmar, in Bangladesh, they're kinda part of the majority if you squint, but the forcibly displaced are still treated as an "other" by the Bangladeshi government. Likewise, Cambodians of Vietnamese descent can often be discriminated against, but then also often do well for themselves.
But I also suspect that if DAOs / smart contracts etc. go mainstream, it won't be long until the first court cases over their implementation/intepretation of the constitutions follow.
Everyone seems to indicate that DAOs will enable large groups of individuals who are not accredited investors to invest in some arbitrary organization, turn a profit on their investment and take it out later. That's a blanket security according to the Howey test.
I also wonder how the regulators will stop this? They can only enforce this at the place of exchange for crypto<->US dollars, I believe, so I imagine a "exchanging crypto for dollars is illegal if it was derived from an unregistered security"
I don't know. I just don't see how these do not end up placing people under serious legal risks.
Looks like venture capital is betting that the governments (or just the US government) will stop regulating and/or enforcing anything. That's a non-zero probability unfortunately, at least in short/medium term.