In quieter corners DAOs are forging a new ecosystem for digital startups
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Curiosity withers under repetition: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Diffs are what's interesting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I need to say that there is some solid tech in that space but there are still some fundamental problems to be solved, structural problems, and I'm not seeing a solution. But we are not here to talk about it...
Reading about DAOs is funny because I really understand them now, after talking with those friends of mine who know nothing about tech and should have handled other parts of the project. I understand their meaning: 99% of the time they are a clever way of fooling people.
There is a lot of enthusiasm around crypto lately and some smart people, overhearing a lot of stuff (and fluff) they don't understand simply try to jump into the bandwagon. They are smart people in their lives but without tech knowledge they become the bigger fools when entering the crypto sphere.
But when you fool a smart person he will try to fall on his feet, he will never admit he got fooled so now he needs to fool someone else so to exit the game with lesser losses, or even gains if he's really smart... it's a weird variant of a Ponzi scheme and also an incredible social experiment.
My two cents.
edit: some language errors
and "crypto" with "startups".
Financial regulations prevent the average nonexpert from making those kinds of risky investments in relatively unregulated companies - you have to qualify as an "accredited investor" (i.e. either someone with deep pockets or expertise in financial markets). Publicly traded companies and investment funds are open to anyone, but in exchange they're subject to all sorts of regulations about transparency and accounting rules to make it "safer" for the average Joe to invest in.
DAOs feel like they are really hoping to create an end run around all those financial protection laws.
The SEC agrees with you!
Not sure what your threshold is for "interesting calculations" but running an entire tech business for years on end with no central governance or traditional corporate structure seems incredible to me. You can participate too if you wish, maybe try drive it into the ground for fun? Or maybe run a seed server with decent uptime and get paid for it instead?
Rather than theoretical putdowns based on some strange misconceptions of how this stuff works under the hood, that's a real life counter example.
Really anything can be applied for as a contribution, you can rock up right now and say you'll translate the docs into Esperanto for X amount and the community decides if that's worth paying out of the pool for this round, if rejected you can apply again next round, no hard feelings.
No one is in control, it's all decided communally with votes recorded onchain for each proposal and paid out automatically if they pass, they have coloured coins as the proxy for the votes (sort of like stock voting but digitally and with cryptographic signatures), those same coins are also what people pay for trading fees, making a closed loop between funding and advancing the DAO. If people trade less, there's less money for dev work, creating incentives for a range of stakeholders to collectively make proper choices and produce good results.
Never once have they raised money from speculators, no ico or anything. All funding has come from people using the product itself.
Let's say the community decides it's worth paying for that. Does payment happen up front, or only upon completion of work? If the latter, who decides if the work meets the standard that was expected and thus is worth paying out for?
> In an email, Bisq told Decrypt the platform doesn't use smart contracts "at least not in a commonly understood sense of Ethereum smart contracts."
The mechanism seems to be let's do all computation of the chains.
However the DAO can the notary's job more transparently and without corruption (real oversight of their activities is cheaper... heck, it's possible)
Aside, notaries where I come from are extremely expensive and inefficient. I'd choose a blockchain in a split second if I could, for anything requiring human notaries now.
This is one of the fundamental problems with blockchains: Local problems often lead to global consequences, requiring forks of the blockchain and/or high level intervention to maintain consistency or to roll back exploits. Here's the classic example:
https://www.coindesk.com/learn/2016/06/25/understanding-the-...
'Don't write bugs' is not a viable strategy for software development.
We’ve been hearing this for basically as long as cryptocurrencies have been around.
I suspect we will see a currency that can do decent throughput, but I think it will require advances in the underlying theory for that to happen and that’s a few years away.
The only reason people think it's a problem is because bitcoin and ethereum have limited themselves so much.
https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
Surely the people who design the protocols aren't intentionally sabotaging the usefulness of the blockchain with these limits? If the limits are raised, what problems are introduced, and what advances are needed to avoid them?
It already works to have large blocks, it always has. Why don't you tell me specifically and technically where you think the bottleneck is?
The CPU is a fraction of one core, bitcoin's transaction fees have been at times more than the cost of hard drive space to store the entire chain, and only servers even need to sync chains in the first place.
Bitcoin is crippled to sell a second layer. If you look at its throughput, it is literally less than a dial up modem. The average block size is 700KB every 10 minutes. You can print base64 characters on a laser printer and get more data throughput on paper.
No one has ever been able to give me a credible answer here because it doesn't exist. The best anyone can do is gish gallop with unrelated nonsense hoping that other people who read their reply can't make sense of it.
I am very interested in alternative coordination mechanisms, so I was really looking forward to the practical applications of the DAO mechanism outside of crypto-for-crypto, but still am not really seeing it. What am I missing?
I too am interested in alternative coordination mechanisms. I recommend hopping on the discord channels for these different projects and seeing what you can find. I've personally looked at Constitution, SPICE, and ENS. I would recommend diving into ENS, it's credible and they're working to manage development and budget. Journalists simply don't have the tools or support to dig into the level of detail that you probably want.
There's also some group in Colorado I forget the name of, they weren't in the article though. They bought up an acre of land and are trying to manage it as a group?
Let me know what you find!
Yup. "Just do your reasearch". "Just hop onto the literally thousands of Discord channels inundated by random talk and you will definitely see the light!"
You'd think that by this time there would be something coherent coming out of these Discords, but no.
> Let me know what you find!
You're the one suggesting to dive in and finding something. You've also said you've already dived in. Apparently, you've found nothing.
The parent said they were interested in alternative coordination mechanisms. I pointed them to where to find more and how to approach it. This is how curiosity works. I'm not selling any "light". There's little glimmers spread across lots of projects, even the ones that completely fail or grapple with seemingly small issues.
ENS just turned the management of 300,000+ name service records over to a DAO. Now they are grappling with how to update registration prices when domains expire. They have a delegate and voting system for decision making. Registration on expiry prices for ENS itself is pretty boring so reading more about this is likely only interesting to someone curious about alternative coordination mechanisms.
You pointed nowhere. You literally said, and I quote: "I recommend hopping on the discord channels for these different projects and seeing what you can find."
That is literally "hop onto the literally thousands of Discord channels inundated by random talk".
> This is how curiosity works.
Curiosity !== "you need to sift through mounds of shit in the hopes to find 'little glimmers spread across lots of projects'"
Had there been anything interesting or valuable in these "lots of projects", we'd have seen something coherent describing it.
> ENS just
> grappling with how to update registration prices
> have a delegate and voting system for decision making
And That is surely described in their docs in a coherent manner, or you have to join their Discord?
So I went ahead and did that.
#ens-faqs does not contain FAQs. It has a link to #server-faqs and "please don't fall for scams" pleas
#server-faqs has nothing on that. There are question about airdrops though, whatever that is
Maybe #dao-info contains that info? No
At this point I quit their Discord. Life is finite. Bullshit is infinite
> Registration on expiry prices for ENS itself is pretty boring so reading more about this is likely only interesting to someone curious about alternative coordination mechanisms.
It might be interesting to many people, if, you know, there was actual info on any of this.
> Curiosity !== "you need to sift through mounds of shit in the hopes to find 'little glimmers spread across lots of projects'"
To me this sounds like a fair description of curiosity! Reminds me of hacking with Arduino or something too. I have fun with it, anyway.
So which is it? Join Discords? Or forums? Or?...
> To me this sounds like a fair description of curiosity!
It isn't. Bullshit is finite. Life is finite. There are so many things to satisfy one's curiosity that don't involve digging through bullshit.
The main reason you have to "just google it" to find any coherent info on crypto projects is that when you boil everything down to a single-page coherent description of what it is they are trying to do, it turns out it's just bullshit. That's why all these projects, consciously or not, never produce anything that someone can point to and say: go, read this. Almost invariably it's "just find it on Discord".
A great example is in a sibling discussion mentioning Orange DAO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30133241
Even your example literally has nothing of value in that discussion. Original problem statement: "Now they are grappling with how to update registration prices when domains expire". There's literally no grappling in there. A regular community discussion with a voting mechanism that is happening hundreds of thousands of times a day all around the world. This is interesting? How?!
Different stakeholders want the expiration auctions to work differently. For starters, there are the Devs, ENS owners, ENS users, domain speculators, token speculators, ENS newbies, and more.
Normally this would just be "devs and community", i.e. "we listened to the community and took suggestions". But with ENS anyone can own tokens and vote on what actually happens to the protocol.
There's discussions happening on Discord, in the forum, and twitter to figure out what to do. Then there's another layer where token owners choose delegates and those delegates vote.
It's exciting to see this kind of structure come together, where the friction is, and what ultimately gets built. It's unlikely this specific DAO will succeed, but part of it will work and the model will improve. Imagine a world where this works and all stakeholders play a role in how Twitter, Spotify, or even HackerNews change. Super interesting to me. Understand that the docs and UI for all of this needs a lot of work so that others can join in.
I've seen a bunch of DAO concepts that are fundamentally "hey let's make currencies and securities". It's like "uh, remember all the ICO stuff? that didn't work".
Excited to see examples of DAOs that do connect to augment traditional governance structures.
But, as soon as money flows into the real world, they will need to figure out how to create and interface with traditional entities, or...like you said, it's very ICO-like.
Entertainment
Community
And a fungible bearer asset that neither company shares or a PostGresQL spreadsheet could accomplish
Many of these DAOs have components to them that people now understand werent good to participate in, and people are more discerning towards certain behaviors and features. For example, rebasing with high APYs should be for entertainment purposes only. But DAOs dont need that, and many just advertising liquidity bootstrapping events, without the rebasing component now.
While the protocol-owned-liquidity desire and implementation stays. People find it much better to trade liquidity for discounted tokens, than to risk having an illiquid asset, or find it better than renting liquidity with farming.
These evolutions occur in weeks and are immediately applicable each time.
Now, I’m not sure if it makes sense to try to bridge the physical world happening to a digital heavy concept of DAO.
We just wanted to plant trees, lots of trees (not guns) - https://treeslotsoftrees.org
I read all your site twice and I cannot find anything that make it necessary for your org to be a DAO. What technical aspects of a DAO are necessary and why couldn't it simply be a non profit with a "donate here" and a "subscribe for a fee" and whatever else?
Are you running all your logic on chain o it is mostly off chain?
Thanks :)
Here is the list of reasons we are doing a DAO as opposed to a traditional donation model:
- Easier data sharing among organizations.
- Secure and auditable transactions enabling verifiable and trusted logs of transaction (monetary, carbon credits, monitoring events, donations).
- Decreased inefficiency for currency exchange rate and cross border transaction costs.
- Support for NFT and automatic calculation of carbon dividend.
- Easier reporting and analysis.
- Transparency in operations (which portion is going to what organization and for what reason).
- Platform of choice for next generation of climate change advocates and supporters.
- Smart contracts enabling decentralized calculation of carbon offset for many daily activities (offset your emissions by planting and monitoring trees.
- Crypto mining is a great source of emissions, its way easier to plug our DAO into the existing networks to calculate and offset transaction emissions in a user friendly way.
- Blockchain allows for more secure anonymous donations which can be essential for some contributors.
> Easier data sharing among organizations
It is more complex than pulling that data from a random DB or API.
> Decreased inefficiency for currency exchange rate and cross border transaction costs
Since most people need to buy crypto currencies with fiat they need to pay for that conversion, then they need to pay for the transaction, then you need to pay again to send that crypto to the tree planting folks and then again they need to turn in into fiat.
It would be far easier and less expensive for you to handle everything in USD or EUR.
> Easier reporting and analysis
Same as the other point, you can do everything pretty simply with any DB and some lines of code.
> Platform of choice for next generation of climate change advocates and supporters
This is hardly a point
> Smart contracts enabling decentralized calculation of carbon offset for many daily activities
Computational power of smart contracts is incredibly limited and HIGHLY energy intensive. There is actually no good reason to perform those computations on a decentralized network. It would also be very expensive, much more than any other alternative.
> Crypto mining is a great source of emissions, its way easier to plug our DAO into the existing networks to calculate and offset transaction emissions in a user friendly way
That actually sounds as a counter point.
So... man, it is really less impactful on the environment and also less expensive and less complex to open a non profit in a country with a stable fiat, open source your model and make all data public (except donors personal data, just give them a UUID).
Plus, charity is usually tax deductible almost anywhere, why would anyone want to donate anonymously? You can also accept cryptos as donations, that's not a problem, but you are more likely to lose contributions by not accepting fiat than the other way around.
That's why I said I can hardly see the point of being a DAO in your case.
That way I, or others interested in DAOs, can find our what aspects are especially promising to a project like this.
It's also incredibly funny how you pretend to care about trees and ecology ... and using the single most ecology unfriendly tech on earth.
For anyone who gets interested in one of these concepts, I recommend finding the group's Discord and popping in to ask a few questions yourself.
However the depth of the article wasn't satisfying. Regarding SPICE DAO: > "The group’s plan was to produce its own version of the film, with creative decisions voted on by the token’s holders."
From having dug into the SPICE DAO's Discord, I'm surprised this is what the journalist led with. It's an intellectually dishonest take on what the group was trying to do. Having poked around a bit, the people leading the DAO clearly understand intellectual property and were buying the book as something of a parallel project to getting licenses. But there seems to be a big push to paint them as complete idiots. Not sure why though. Maybe they are complete idiots, but not from what I've seen.
From my limited experiences with DAOs, they're not a magical solution to anything, and it will take time to figure out exactly what they're useful for. Nonprofits, hackerspaces, and corporations are all entities that work on mass coordination of incentives, resources, and labor. It's all hard work. DAOs may offer a new toolkit for this type of coordination, but they're unlikely to be a panacea. I am deeply curious to learn which problems this toolkit turns out to solve.
Edit: oh check out Orange DAO, mentioned elsewhere in this thread
Yup. "Just join the thousands of Discord channels".
How about: these scams and borderline scams actually produce some coherent information and put it up on their sites, and not expect every person to seek out their Discord channels and ask them questions?
> But there seems to be a big push to paint them as complete idiots. Not sure why though.
Because of what they actually do and say outside the Discords. If they weren't idiots, they would actually have a proper explanation of what it is they are trying to do, and actual roadmap on how to get there, and why they needed to blow 3 million dollars on a book if they want to "produce an original series".
> oh check out Orange DAO, mentioned elsewhere in this thread
And how exactly do you propose we check it out? You mean "Orange Protocol" which is a centralised aggregation service that pinky swears it will run a DAO at some unspecified point in the future?
Just google it or something, the concept sounds neat. Sounds like you know more about it already. Not a DAO yet? Oh well.
"Just google it"
Do you realise how you sound?
Those efforts were largely focused on antitrust regulation, which is a different problem than the sorts of blue-sky securities problems that are more common in today's crypto space. But the reason I'm recommending reading about the earlier antitrust stuff, as opposed to the securities regulations that began to emerge a few decades later (which is more superficially topical), is that it marked the beginning of a phase transition in how the American public viewed the relationship between government and business. I think we're in the early part of another such phase transition today. Without the antitrust regulations that preceded them, subsequent securities regulations would likely have had a much steeper hill to climb in the court of public opinion.
Obviously we aren't going to be able to just copy+paste yesterday's regulations onto every newly emerging trend. But I think we can definitely draw lessons from how earlier types of regulations emerged and the ways that the government's relationship with capital interests was adjusted over time.
There were also downsides to the new regulations (like the coopting of the definition of "trust" to include unions as a means of curtailing the power of labor). Those are valuable lessons, too.
I say this as someone who is relatively pessimistic about the value that these new crypto constructs are going to be able to provide over the long term, but I'd make the same argument to crypto optimists, as well.
Apologies to the non-US folks; other countries have their own regulatory histories, some of which were well ahead of the times compared to America. But I'm less familiar with those.
Food for thought.
No dark pools, no naked shorts, public ledgers are commonplace, no brokerage license required to participate directly, the list goes on and on.
Equality is not equity, in case there was any confusion (maybe there wasn't) but crypto has incredibly strong claims to equality in money.
These folks are being smashed by inflation. They're getting poorer everyday. We have to figure out how to allow them to quickly escape this rat race through a non-inflationary currency.
Fiat currencies are a scam as well. Crypto isn't a scam inherently, scams exist because there's too many gullible and greedy people.
But Fiat is designed to be a scam. A few folks control the supply and effectively steal from everyone when they increase it.
You cannot arruficially increase supply of most crypto.
We need to stop thinking about "how much is crypto X is worth in dollars" and actually cut the dollar out, let people buy everyday needs directly with crypto.
And so you will have the ultra-rich who've hoarded the coins at the very beginning, and the rest, who will be getting smaller and smaller scraps.
Whoever actually serves society and earns coins for their service will keep their value in the long run. In one generation, or less, it will be possible to ascend from a poor level.
Just like it was possibke and happened all the time earlier, when currencies were pegged to non-inflationary assets, like the gold.
You're literally describing cryptocurrencies
> They cab increase their gains by 10%, but it will be taken out from them with little effort.
Gas fees
> Whoever actually serves society and earns coins for their service will keep their value in the long run.
Ahahahha, no.
> Just like it was possibke and happened all the time earlier, when currencies were pegged to non-inflationary assets, like the gold.
Yeah, we all know about the incredible rags-to-riches stories en masse in the "before time". Which are those, exactly?
Seems to me the issue isn’t inflation it’s lack of wage growth, and with proper wage growth, far more people would have been able to benefit from the market growth we’ve had.
And into a rat race of "how much can you HODL and get rich quick through scams and/or currency trading"
There is no other source. If there was, crypto proponents would actually provide one.
As it stands, though, there are exactly three types of crypto projects:
- scams (the absolute vast majority)
- can be and have been implemented in a better, more efficient, and more scalable way without blockchain. And as such, are borderline scams
- circular. The vast majority of "DeFi" which mostly exists to rotate and speculate on cryptocurrencies
And there are exactly two types of people in the crypto space:
- people who know exactly what's up
- gullible fools
- Ones who look at them as tools that can be used for good or evil, just like anything else
- The cynical ones
As such, I wouldn't be so sure that cryptocurrencies will only exacerbate inequality. "Free markets" often required a central entity to draft and enforce laws, giving this central entity power and incentives to favor certain market participants, by selectively applying or changing the rules. Cryptocurrencies could bring about actual free markets in places where there weren't before, by autonomously codifying and enforcing laws.
[1]: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/weal...
> Despite the fall in equity markets that drove a sharp decline in wealth in 2020q1, equity prices rebounded quickly after the Federal Reserve, U.S. Treasury, and Congress took steps to stabilize financial markets and the economy, and households gained over $18 trillion in wealth since the beginning of 2020. This 17% increase over 2019q4 was driven by asset accumulation much more than by debt paydown. Further, asset-price increases were the dominant source of wealth accumulation, accounting for nearly 80%.
[2]: https://theconversation.com/global-inequality-may-be-falling..., https://www.un.org/en/un75/inequality-bridging-divide
This is no failure. It's designed for that.
friesdao team make up: a coinbase employee, fast food franchise operators, registering in wyoming and reviewed by the dev of vfattools
Any DAO that wants to do anything of any meaningful complexity ends up registering as a Wyoming entity which isn't really any different than an LLC.
DAOs are an attempt to separate the crypto nouveau riche from their tokens.
You can achieve anything you want to from a DAO with a corporation plus a twitter poll or SurveyMonkey thing - except the issuance of unregistered blue-sky securities.
Anyways, what's going to get really interesting is when we inevitably have see some legal challenges around this. I strongly suspect we'll see some personal liability materialize and this is going to take a lot of the fun out of this new grift.
To this day, it still trades for ~10X its initial value on Uniswap: https://info.uniswap.org/#/tokens/0x7a58c0be72be218b41c608b7...
Anyone who bought more than ~$50 of DAO tokens before the auction could stand to make a profit on the aftermarket even accounting for gas fees.
In case it needs to be said: this all seems crazy to me, but it is what it is.
this isnt like a ticketmaster convenience fee, everything on that network costs that much
Anyone using ETH would presumably have been aware about the enormous fees involved.
How would accept money from thousands of people without being public? How would those ownership stakes be easily transferred?
If DAO tokens do convey some ownership interest, then they'd have to be registered as securities - which is why DAOs are very clear that you get nothing but their appreciation in exchange for the tokens. In which case you'd sell them the same way you sell any other securities.
Reg A+ and Reg CF allow the sale of equity for crowdfunding contributions, btw. There are even some marketplaces that sprung up around them.
If a DAO token is a security, it does need to be registered: it either needs to be registered or have available an exemption from registration.
There are DAOs that try to fit within an exemption from registration. See the LAO, and it's offshoots, like Red DAO, Flamingo DAO, etc., which sell LLC interests to a limited number of accredited investors.
[0] https://medium.com/openlawofficial/the-lao-a-for-profit-limi... [1] https://www.flamingodao.xyz/
Ok, but that's just an LLC with extra steps no? If you're only accepting accredited investors then you're required to validate that they are accredited meaning that you have to pierce the veil of anonymity. It imposes legal control over the transfer of these tokens which means there's no reason whatsoever for them to be decentralized, permissionless and on the blockchain?
Accredited investors were always welcome to buy whatever toxic garbage they wanted.
I would say the core idea of a DAO is this: how can we organize a disparate group of people around a common goal, more easily than in the past?
Whether you think they are a joke or not, ConstitutionDAO, SpiceDAO (which I think is the worst example in this space given their lack of diligence or thought on IP issues), OrangeDAO, FlamingoDAO, etc., are all unique in that they have organized a disparate group of people more quickly than in the past, and enabled them to more efficiently work together towards a shared goal.
There are many ideas being explored:
1. Can we have better laws (like Wyoming is exploring) or regulations? 2. If the DAO is decentralized enough, are the tokens still (or should they be) a security? Are there better ways to regulate something like this globally? 3. How do you coordinate a disparate group of people? How should you let in new entrants, or weight votes? How should a DAO manage its treasury? 4. What happens if all voting proposals are public and verifiable on the blockchain? Is that good or bad?
At it's core, yes, I think you can say that a DAO is basically the idea of a corporation, except with most of the discussion on Discord and with on-chain voting, and plus some securities laws issues that are at best gray areas and at worst, in some cases, clear violations. But I think that is ignoring that something worthwhile might come out of that design space.
I disagree, because, the Great Depression.
They're not setting out to solve a limitation around business organization. You can do basically anything you want out of a Delaware LLC or C-corp except sell the shares to an un-accredited investor without registering them. There's even a light-weight way to do that with Reg CF and Reg A+.
You want public voting? Ok, that doesn't require a blockchain and it certainly doesn't require a whole new legal framework for organizing a business. Twitter has managed to have polls for years.
Most people actually trying to build a business of value aren't trying to reimagine the concept of a business.
By all means, go with God, find a better way to organize companies. If they land one one, I'll happily use it. But so far all I see is grift, crime and frankly, little else.
Also, it's possible to sell these investments to non US-persons under regulation S without bothering with the accredited investors.
>Most people actually trying to build a business of value aren't trying to reimagine the concept of a business.
Most people actually trying to build a business fail. It would be fallacious for me to imply that means not reimagining concept of business means likely failure, even though it is technically true.
Really curious - is it enough for another party to attest that they are accredited? Ie- could I set up a company selling verification services, saying “the person with this key is accredited, send the feds our way if they ask”? (Pure mental exercise, just honestly curious)
Not just that, what about transferring shares of a business requires the business to have tokens issued on a blockchain?
And how would you write an option on your ownership stake using conventional technology? That seems like it would be prohibitively hard.
How would you use your ownership as collateral in a loan? The illiquid nature of private stock may turn some lenders off. On a blockchain, the collateral can be part of the smart contract.
Many technological advances simply make already possible things easier. For instance, checks were around since the time of the Crusades. Functionally, checks transfer money from one account to another. We also have a postal service we can use to send checks almost anywhere in the world. So why do we have digital banking infrastructure and wire transfers?
The issues you describe are intentional encumbrances on the part of the company and corporate attorneys which they could stop at any time. You haven’t described how this model would change their minds. Changing their minds is the thing holding back what you desire not the technical limitations.
Even if Carta and Pulley didn't exist, this is still not a technical limitation of non-Blockchain systems, at all.
To date: few DAOs are actually selling equity…more of a donation with a fancy membership / receipt.
As equity requires a poking the veil of the DAO and setting up an LLC.
1. “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame”; from Slashdot, dismissing the new Apple iPod.
2. "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software"; from HN, on the launch of Dropbox.
Yes, DAOs may be similar to corporations mixed with a SuveyMoney, and the above comments also have some truth to them. But all three entirely miss the forest for the trees, and miss that there are qualitative changes that make the impact of the new version much greater.
DAOs allow a disparate group of people to raise capital and execute towards a shared idea far faster and greater than was previously possible. That is a qualitative difference worth paying attention to.
And while you are correct that the legal frameworks backing DAOs currently have many problems, that is something that will change.
And for the HN skeptics, over 1,000 YC founders disagree with you: https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/24/hundreds-of-y-combinator-a...
It was a major contributor to the Great Depression.
So my question to you is: what has changed since last time we tried this? Why am I to believe that "this time is different."
[edit] Your suggestion that an idea cannot possibly be bad because 1000 startups are chasing it holds no water, it's an appeal to authority. Worse than appeal to authority: it's an appeal to the wisdom of crowds. Crowds of course are notorious for making great decisions. Hundreds of thousands of individual investors thought that sub-prime mortgage backed securities were a brilliant plan.
Your arguments can (and have been) those that applied to Uber or AirBnB; namely, that the only value they had was in skirting regulations, and that eventually the regulations catch up such that Uber or AirBnB is no better than the predecessor taxi and hotel industries. And I think there is certainly a lot of truth to that, but I also think this is normal human progress. As times change, we try something slightly different, and where old pain points arise again, we re-regulate accordingly. You are left with something that is indeed quite similar to the older industry, but with a fresh coat of pain and some improvements. You can dismiss that as entirely worthless, but I see it as normal and part of progress: two steps forward, one step back.
Similarly, I think having financial regulations that were created in 1933 be static forever is a mistake. As technology progresses, there can be room for changes. So I see DAOs and crypto in a similar light: yes, certain actors violate existing laws, but there is a freedom to explore a new design space, and then the regulators will catch up and reign it back to something more reasonable.
As for my link to OrangeDAO, it is not about 1,000 YC founders with Web3 startups, but 1,000 YC founders that are members of a DAO that seeks to invest and help other Web3 startups.
As for what's different, my answer would be scale. DAOs make it easier to coordinate large groups of people. Take a look at what OrangeDAO seeks to fund:
https://orangedao.notion.site/0516999b88534575bf759323f5e9fe...
Many of them are targeted towards corporate infrastructure; replacing traditional processes with software-first functions, which allow a lot of disparate people to function together more easily, and reduces the friction of "a group of people working together towards a common goal" from that of an existing corporation.
In the sale of blue-sky securities? Not a darn thing.
> As for what's different, my answer would be scale. DAOs make it easier to coordinate large groups of people. Take a look at what OrangeDAO seeks to fund.
Sounds like a VC fund. Just wait until you see the list of those projects!
> Many of them are targeted towards corporate infrastructure; replacing traditional processes with software-first functions, which allow a lot of disparate people to function together more easily, and reduces the friction of "a group of people working together towards a common goal" from that of an existing corporation.
So like, Zoom and GSuite? I'm not sure how "Waze for moving crypto assets" fulfills that goal.
On the other hand, ConstitutionDAO - the most noteworthy example to date, was a complete failure and hasn't even been able to handle refunds.
> that is something that will change.
"Talk is cheap. Show me the code."
The sheer incompetence/negligence/malice would be funny if it weren't so sad.
I'm familiar with this DAO, they have been advised by a competent IP lawyer before even bidding on the book. There is a crucial legal difference between derivative work, and work "inspired by" another.
[1]: https://twitter.com/TheSpiceDAO/status/1482404318347153413
Not by a screenshot of the tweet, but by the tweet itself. And it was rightfully ridiculed for it.
And now they are "producing an original series" and don't have the money for a writer's room? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30046358
For three million dollars they could've created not just "a package with a powerpoint", but half of an animated series, probably.
Or how (the heck) did offers raise to almost three million dollars?
edit: Thanks - that tweet doesn't inspire confidence. Why would you need to overbid on a sketchbook in order to make a show which is inspired by it? Why not just, you know, make the show...
Orange DAO being completely separate from YC suggests this is a possibility. Imagine the year is 2030: Orange DAO has more assets under management than YC itself, and has proven greater returns for investors in both percentages and absolute dollar value.
And I am elected God Emperor of the Known Universe.
Here's an alternative: The year is 2030. Orange DAO is a distant memory, and cryptocurrencies have all gone to zero. YC continues to grow.
Transparency is the next fight for the workers and ideas like this could prove very valuable