is DAO an acronym? "Does Anyone Object" ? "Diabolical Ant Organization"? "Donuts And Onions" ?
This web site reads like some of the really bad TEDx talks "its going to revolutionize the world" but what it is, well that is a mystery.
The DAO close to $100m in funding. Soon to be the largest crowdfunding ever
21–30 of 84 posts
Re: The DAO close to $100m in funding. Soon to be the largest crowdfunding ever
#22Anyone who can explain what this is, much appreciated. Judging from comments here I'm far from the only one without a clue despite reading the page.
I think DAO is a complicated abstraction layer over blockchain protocol, meaning that when you get hacked you don't know how much money you actually lost.
That sounds about right to me. Any insight on how it/they managed to get 100 million in funding? What do all the people sending money think "DAO" is or does?
Re: The DAO close to $100m in funding. Soon to be the largest crowdfunding ever
#23[deleted]
Thanks for the explanation. Sounds like a Ponzi scheme to me. Is there any independent site that verifies how much funding they've already got?
Re: The DAO close to $100m in funding. Soon to be the largest crowdfunding ever
#24[deleted]
Sounds like a pyramid scheme.
Edit: For the interested, the distinction between a pyramid scheme and a Ponzi scheme is that a pyramid scheme is relatively more upfront about how it generates returns, and relies on the investors themselves to recruit new investors, not the fund manager.
Re: The DAO close to $100m in funding. Soon to be the largest crowdfunding ever
#25Re: The DAO close to $100m in funding. Soon to be the largest crowdfunding ever
#26> Each DAO Token Holder is granted voting rights and complete control over The DAO's digtal assets (ETH to begin with) proportional to the amount of DAO tokens they hold.
It seems like they're going to raise a bunch of money, and then vote on what to do with it. The premise I guess is that it's a "distributed autonomous organization" but I imagine the initial investors have a large stake in the amount funded so far, and their politics will decide what happens to the majority of investors who hold virtually no votes in comparison. This seems like a certain type of investment scheme...
Re: The DAO close to $100m in funding. Soon to be the largest crowdfunding ever
#27[deleted]
The "panel" of curators is far more limited than that. Taking from the page:
A Curator is a failsafe mechanism that indirectly prevents malicous actors from executing 51% attack. Curators do not add centralization to the DAO: they are nominated by the DAO Token Holders themselves, and can be fired at any time, for any reason. Curators curate the whitelist, the list of Contractors authorized to receive ether from the DAO. A Curator therefore holds two primary functions:
First, when a DAO Token Holder submits a Proposal in the form of a smart contract, the Curator checks that the published Contract on the Ethereum blockchain matches the source code the Contractor claims to have deployed (this is done by comparing bytecode).
Second, a Curator confirms that a Proposal comes from an identified person or organization. This is done by asking the entity submitting the Proposal to send a signed transaction with a certain set of data only known to the Curator and the author of the Proposal, thereby confirming the author of the Proposal.
The above are the only two functions of a Curator. For clarity, the following tasks are therefore not the role of a Curator, but instead the role of the DAO as a whole:
Evaluate whether a Proposal is ‘good’ or not. Audit the Proposal’s smart contract code. Provide legal advice regarding the Proposal (if any). Take responsibility for the Proposal.
Re: The DAO close to $100m in funding. Soon to be the largest crowdfunding ever
#28> Each DAO Token Holder is granted voting rights and complete control over The DAO's digtal assets (ETH to begin with) proportional to the amount of DAO tokens they hold. It seems like they're going to raise a bunch of money, and then vote on what to do with it. The premise I guess is that it's a "distributed autonomous organization" but I imagine the initial investors have a large stake in the amount funded so far,…
Who are the initial investors? There's no privileged position.
Re: The DAO close to $100m in funding. Soon to be the largest crowdfunding ever
#29[deleted]
Sounds like a pyramid scheme. Edit: For the interested, the distinction between a pyramid scheme and a Ponzi scheme is that a pyramid scheme is relatively more upfront about how it generates returns, and relies on the investors themselves to recruit new investors, not the fund manager.
How is it a pyramid scheme? Investors pool funds and proportionally vote on what to invest in. There's no requirement to recruit new investors.
Re: The DAO close to $100m in funding. Soon to be the largest crowdfunding ever
#30DAO stands for 'decentralized autonomous organization'. 'TheDAO' is an instance of a DAO, in this case their stated mission is to fund various projects related to IoT and the sharing economy that its members vote for. Apparently this is for-profit and proposals are expected to provide some kind of ROI, perhaps financial returns or physical delivered product.
Ethereum provides the decentralized infrastructure to support the voting and disbursement of funds from 'TheDAO' to the winning proposals. I don't know enough about ETH to understand the high level view of how it really works. It seems like all the websites devoted to Ethereum/DAO write in this entirely-devoid-of-substance style which is so breathless about how much it will change the world, it can't seem to actually tell you what's really going on.
Crucially, I'm not sure it's quite fair to describe this as $100m in funding. You can get your share of ETH back at any time, minus amounts that have been committed to approved projects. Ethereum must somehow guarantee this property.... It is amazing what a large percentage of all ETH (currently stands at 13%) has been committed, but I assume the refundable nature of it all is what's driving such large involvement.
One thing I found interesting is that the first 'Proposal' on TheDAO is for Slock.it, which itself is run by a team which was highly involved in starting Ethereum. If you read Slock.it and try to understand what they are doing, you will find it's exactly like trying to read and understand TheDAO -- so many words which just totally fail to make any kind of discernible point.