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Comment by camjw | Hacker News Reader

My favorite part of this story is that they DAO has actually raised ~$8m, spent $3m on the book (10x the expected auction price), then the "core team" has started paying themselves ~$30k a month[0]. Also, how is this "decentralised" when one person owns over 50% of the voting token?

[0] https://snapshot.org/#/dunedao.eth/proposal/0x2038fc240d0e85...

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It's unbelievably funny and scary at the same time. This is the profile of their "Marketing Lead":

https://twitter.com/YOJIMBO_KING/media

Qualifications listed for their team include "Bitcoin Class of 2013", not sure if a joke or not? The impression is that this is a bunch of 13 year olds who suddenly got a windfall...

"They worked as Product Manager on StarChant and Project Manager of PegzDAO; consulted with POAP on their communications strategy and Raid Guild DAO on business development. DeFi trader, yield farmer and liquidity provider on DEXs. Bitcoin Class of 2013."

You weren't kidding, this sounds like an application for a World of Warcraft Guild I applied to in 2008 or something. I have no idea what any of this means

It means “I’m in on the con job so let’s play ball”

The language and behaviour is consistent with the cant generally spoken by the crypto community. It's a similar idea to /r/wsb/ and does the job of identifying insiders while keeping outsiders out.

Not supporting crypto one way or another. But EVERY technical industry is full of jargon.

"Did you verify that the RVSM system was talking to the FMS after completing the JIC during the RON?" - Aviation "Are you sure the packets are flowing on UDP? Can someone check the CAT6?" - Simple networking

Etc. So I wouldn't say the jargon is constructed solely to keep outsiders out.

It's not only jargon, because a lot of it is used as watchwords or shiboleths.

I was referring specifically to the example above, or at least the jargon I've seen used. And EVERY community is going to have specific language or "Slang".

I mean, even the specific resume example above simply translates to "Worked as a Product Manager on moderately successful project, worked as a Project Manager on random project, consulted with highly successful marketing firm and extremely successfully and profitable co-operative consulting firm on business development. Likes to trade high-risk stocks, puts money into high-risk interest bearing accounts and likes to give random unsecured loans to strangers"

I understand there's a ton of bashing of crypto, but I think that looking at a unknown sub-cultures language and assuming that they are purposely using jargon antagonistic to outsiders is rather closed minded. As someone who dipped their toe in, but still doesn't understand, they have been extremely helpful in explaining the concepts even when I argue against them.

Slang:= (in tech) shortcuts for meaningful technical information

Watchwords:= seemingly slang, but conveys only group membership

Crypto Watchwords:= seemingly slang, but conveys only group membership. Group membership revoked if you try to define any of those watchwords at a first principles level (which is precisely why a group of young people raised on NFT's doesn't understand the possession/copyright ownership split)

It’s entirely possible that that’s exactly what happened. The space is awash with people that got lucky in the initial boom and have convinced themselves (and a few others) that they’re investing geniuses and not just lucky fools. Come to think of it, this phenomenon isn’t limited to bitcoin, although the signaling behavior is quite different than a VC that’s gotten lucky once.

How can they take themselves seriously?

No idea why the other comment is dead. It's obvious the entire thing is a way for them to con some suckers into giving them what is basically a golden ticket to a life without any worries. They don't take themselves seriously. They're laughing all the way to the bank.

For the sake of accuracy, it appears to me that it is $30k per month total for the core team not each. There is a total maximum operating budget of $50k per month including a maximum of $30k for the core team. When the core team has 4. That is about $8k per month each.

8K seems plenty when you can do your "work" from anywhere in the world (and probably have a good reason to not be too easy to find by your scam victims)

... and possibly if the "work" is not like 40-50 hours/week, but more like a couple hours per month ...

Sounds like a board seat.

All the GAFAM engineers sweating heavily right now.

*MAAAM

Will be interesting to see how this, as in the whole DAO space, works out. Part of the problem with the ICO craze in 2017* is that the founders got all the money up front without having any obligation to do anything, so the tiny minority of well intentioned ones ended up simply enjoying the money rather than doing something hard like actual work. Seems like this is still a risk here - the founder can string people along for a few months or years until they lose interest, all the while drawing down the money and living rather comfortably.

* The other problem with the ICO craze is of course that the combination of money up-front and no obligations and anonymity meant almost all were simply out-and-out scams.

Which is why there are rules and layers of checks to actually IPO - another term misappropriated to ICO like currency was misappropriated for cryptocurrency to mislead; stock markets would lose all trust and credibility if they didn't curate and require due diligence.

Perhaps we should look forward to innovations like “Special Purpose Acquisition Coins” then?

SPACs have gotten rid of much of the diligence traditionally part of the IPO process.

From my understanding may also be taking advantage of the money the government's currently printing - at the externalized cost of general society, an additional wealth transfer? I haven't looked read too much into SPACs yet, though they certainly did start to pop out of nowhere and in huge sums as "special purpose vehicles;" I'd sure love to raise a quick $1 billion SPAC though to fund my endless projects.

That's not how SPACs work. You can only use the funding raised as basically a dowry for a merger with a private company. It's low risk to investors because they simply get their money back if 2 years pass without a merger, and the people who run the SPAC lose everything they spent on getting their SPAC to the stock market. Right now, the market is saturated with SPACs, but there are only so many private companies looking to go public.

The filings are pretty much the same. The biggest difference, as far as I know, is there's no roadshow to get institutional investors onboard. But this isn't technically a requirement of an IPO. And a direct listing also skips that.

I think what the previous poster was referring to is that the filings for the SPAC (acquisition company) are the same as any other IPO, but there's nothing in the SPAC (just money and a management team). For the company that gets acquired by the SPAC, however, it's a different story. That company does not have to go through the IPO process itself, so it goes public with a lot less regulatory scrutiny than it would have had had it pursued an IPO itself.

That's not really true though. The SPAC needs to file an S-4 before the deSPAC (the merger), which informs investors in minute detail about the target company and the merger deal. I don't know exactly how it compares to an S-1, but it's extremely comprehensive.

The biggest difference I can see is that a traditional IPO can't succeed without getting institutional investors onboard, and there are strict guidelines about what can be pitched to them. The negotiations between a SPAC and its target company are much less constrained.

I'm not an expert in this, so I'm probably wrong on some of the details, but my company is undergoing a SPAC merger, so I've tried to inform myself on how it works.

There are laws for ICOs as well when they are marketed in US: they are securities. The SEC knows this perfectly, they just don't do anything for some reason.

"Decentralized" means "out of the reach of law enforcement". Or at least that's what these people treat it as.

Hey that's pretty unfair, I was just chastised a couple days ago for implying the killer use case for the blockchain was criminality!

"Criminal" is such a strong word. We prefer "less normatively constrained".

I'm moralatypical myself.

It's not criminality, it's _regulatory arbitrage_.

Hey now, its not criminality, its jurisdictional arbitrage

> the "core team" has started paying themselves ~$30k a month each

But don't forget this team has the Q1 deliverable of presenting "a film treatment and budget by Roble Ridge Productions for the original animated limited series inspired by the book for a community vote on Snapshot" - which one can only assume will be a lot of work... :)

And also will be unauthorized since they own no rights to derivative work (or even the original work)

Perhaps it will be a series inspired by the book (the physical object) not the contents/story

They could release a series about overpaying for a copy of dune at auction and technically fulfill their mission

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s_Dune

> Salvador Dalí was set to play the Emperor and claimed he wanted to be the highest-paid actor in Hollywood history. He asked for $100,000 per hour to act in the movie. Jodorowsky accepted, but then reduced the Emperor’s scenes so that Dalí would be needed for no more than one hour with the rest of his lines spoken by a robotic lookalike. Dalí accepted on condition that the plastic lookalike was donated to his museum, and that his throne was to be a toilet made up of two intersected dolphins.

Absolutely incredible.

> And also will be unauthorized since they own no rights to derivative work (or even the original work)

I'm sorry for the confusion, but my post was supposed to be humorous.

On reflection I think there's nothing that can actually be said about this auction that can possibly be as funny/sad as the original situation.

> Also, how is this "decentralised" when one person owns over 50% of the voting token?

A professional definitive edition exit scam, waiting to happen. It is ConstitutionDAO all over again, but this time without the refunds.

I’m reminded somewhat of cases where VCs like A16Z push DAOs as the future, and we’re supposed to just pretend that they’re not going to buy up as many tokens as possible so that they can extract maximal profits like usual. It seems like exactly the same scam as ICOs with another level of indirection.

(not 10x, it’s 100x)

why did they spend so much for it, I cant seem to find that out. Was that their opening bid?

This is my question. If so, then not only do they suck at Intellectual property, but they suck at getting a good deal at an auction. Hopefully their screen writing skills are better?

Technically, 30k/team, not 30k/person... But there's 4 members.

Almost all positions are "not to exceed X/month" for X~=7000 USD. So, not too shabby!

The word you're looking for is Scam.

It's either teenagers or money laundering.

Funny how it could be either.

Has anyone checked if the seller is legit?

Maybe the profit was meant to be split once the item "sold".

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