Hacker News Reader

Comment by obeattie | Hacker News Reader

As someone coming to the topic of "replacing the Bitcoin Foundation" cold, this would really benefit from a short, Plain English description. This tells me next to nothing:

> an adaptable software package which is designed to be modular, easily copied, and easily modified - and therefore used in many different applications. We intend to use Eris as the relevant platform when we incorporate the Association at a later date, but we will not be limiting future development of the platform to that single application.

View on HN

"Governance in a Box" would be a better description. Imagine anything that needs to be governed by consensus, including corporation bylaws, town ordinances, 'foundation' advertising spends, Internet group meeting agendas, etc. Eris appears to be a basic framework for instantiating any of these in a way that brings trust and high transparency to a group of individuals with common goals and interests. It's one of the more powerful things the blockchain brings us!

That's actually very much what we are going for. I have spent much of my career at the intersection of international development and legal reform and the idea of having a governance framework which can be used for making collective decisions in a way which will not rely on central nodes of corruption or failure.

And then we'll find out we are just trading central modes of failure for failure which can occur across networks due to specific channel attacks

Perhaps. But we'll never know until we try.

Thanks for the comment. We have updated that paragraph and hopefully it will be a bit more straightforward.

I found this (a page or so in) to be a good summary of "why should I care":

the proliferation of ÐAOs in user-friendly applications has the potential to allow the public to claim back control over their data and over their privacy on the internet.

> As someone coming to the topic of "replacing the Bitcoin Foundation" cold

I'm not sure it's entirely designed for that purpose, though that does seem both an obvious and relatively easy application of this concept. Instead, I think they purposefully made it a little more generalized so it could be applied to a lot of different spaces. For example, I can see how this framework, or at least the concepts that it implements, could be used in a decentralized social networking application...as some of these same concepts we implemented a long time ago in DIASPORA* and Tent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com