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Autonomous corporation “The DAO” has become the biggest crowdfunded project

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Re: Autonomous corporation “The DAO” has become the biggest crowdfunded project

#131

Post by binaryanomaly »

drcode wrote: post #7

TLDR; A computer program living on the ethereum blockchain is currently in control of 107+ million dollars, making it the second largest crowdfunded project in history. Shareholders vote on proposals to give money to other entities (probably also programs on the ethereum blockchain) that they hope will make money and send it to the parent contract. All votes are managed by a program written in EVM code, which runs on…

Your summary somehow reminds me of TRON... ;)

I guess it comes down to the question whether one beliefs that mankind is naturally good or bad. As I still believe in the first one I may give this idea a chance. I still have a dream...

Re: Autonomous corporation “The DAO” has become the biggest crowdfunded project

#132

Post by Moshe_Silnorin »

pre wrote: post #126

So, a sort of Distributed Digital Democratic Dragon's Den then. I suspect the contestants will make more money than the Distibuted-Dragons.

It's a shockingly bad idea. I support the right of people to invest in whatever they like, but VC has notoriously poor returns, decentralized VC run by a committee that can only invest in other decentralized technologies seems like a really, really bad idea. DAOs like Augur are actually interesting, even if you think they'll never work. This just seems crazy.

Re: Autonomous corporation “The DAO” has become the biggest crowdfunded project

#133

Post by Bjorkbat »

steego wrote: post #74
Bjorkbat wrote: post #44

An interesting concept, but I'm not buying the hype. At the end of the day a bunch of people bought shares in a company (or did they? Legality is weird) with the special condition that in addition to owning a share of said company they also get to vote on what the company actually does, and even submit proposals for what it should do. Oh, and they also bought said shares with cryptocurrency. Magic internet money guys…

You shouldn't buy into the hype, especially from that hyperbolic story with silly blurbs like "The DAO is a paradigm shift in the very idea of economic organization." However, I don't think we should be flippantly dismissing the idea with phrases like "magic internet money", because if it proves itself to be minimally viable, it would really speak to a young demographic of investors who don't trust financial institut…

Yeah, maybe I was too harsh with the magic internet money thing. I still have fresh memories of when Bitcoin went past the $1000 mark before cooling down again. Just strikes me that the people genuinely wanting to use Bitcoin as an actual form of value exchange are overshadowed by people treating it as "the new gold"

The notion of having a very democratically run autonomous corporation seems a bit too far, but I'd be pretty excited to see someone using cryptocurrency to invest and buy shares in a company in a more accessible fashion than what we have now.

In other words, I think cryptocurrency could potentially provide a better alternative than the way the current stock market works, but I don't know if this is necessarily a better alternative.

I'm still not sure if even polling shareholders for product ideas works, unless product proposals are done effectively enough to where shareholders have a very clear vision on what the company is going to do, versus someone saying "So, we have this idea for an IoT product. There's no physical prototype you can hold yet, but here's how we think it'll work".

Re: Autonomous corporation “The DAO” has become the biggest crowdfunded project

#134

Post by Riseed »

street wrote: post #71
drcode wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The DAO isn't actually worth 120 million. I you tried to sell all Apple stock in a single day it would also sell at well below market rate- Does that mean Apple is worth less than its market cap? That said, I personally have not invested/speculated in the DAO because I just don't see it as a good opportunity.

I just sold one of my hairs to myself for $10. Is my head now worth a million? With Apple, there's intrinsic value to consider. And frankly, if you sold enough Apple stock for it to go down 50%, I'd personally start buying. I doubt that's the case for ETH, where there's only early adopters buying it hoping to strike it rich.

Looks like the #HairTokens announcement will be made soon.

https://twitter.com/TheDAONews/status/732303373093900288

Re: Autonomous corporation “The DAO” has become the biggest crowdfunded project

#136

Post by c3534l »

natosaichek wrote: post #107
c3534l wrote: post #78

There's a reason corporations developed as they did. With a large number of owners, it becomes very difficult to tell what is actually going on in a company and making consistent, sensical decisions is difficult. The result is that we developed a board of directors who are elected by the owners to oversee the performance of the top employees at that company, and a complex of system of accounting to communicate the fi…

So I might be reading into it too much, but it seems to me that part 1 (a lack of complete information about a company of reasonable size) Is basically totally solved by this system. The assets are completely documented on a massive publicly distributed system. The procedures for making decisions are similarly well documented. Basically everything you'd want to know about the [entity] is totally freely available. It'…

It's not just that the visibility of the assets, it's not knowing that your employees are tired or angry or thinking about leaving; it's not knowing what tone of voice your customers have when they return a product; it's basically everything unpredictable without someone being there to individually assess an unpredictable situation and make a decision. There are already some domains which are highly automated - finance comes to mind. But you still have someone ultimately in charge to oversee it. If the sales pitch is that this is some kind of open-source trading algorithm where investors get to vote on code, that's neat, but I don't see what's so special about calling them tokens instead of stock or how this will lead to automated corporations (or how this is not a corporation for that matter). Actually, now that I think about it, if this thing isn't going to be registered as a corporation, who will be held responsible for it's finances?

Re: Autonomous corporation “The DAO” has become the biggest crowdfunded project

#137

Post by pre »

Moshe_Silnorin wrote: post #132
pre wrote: post #126

So, a sort of Distributed Digital Democratic Dragon's Den then. I suspect the contestants will make more money than the Distibuted-Dragons.

It's a shockingly bad idea. I support the right of people to invest in whatever they like, but VC has notoriously poor returns, decentralized VC run by a committee that can only invest in other decentralized technologies seems like a really, really bad idea. DAOs like Augur are actually interesting, even if you think they'll never work. This just seems crazy.

As long as nobody's putting in more than they intend to lose, it's at least a very pretty way to fund a bunch of distributed app code being written I guess.

And if they all take what's left of their money out again, the code will still exist. Presumably has to be mostly free-software if it's gonna run distributed anyway.

Re: Autonomous corporation “The DAO” has become the biggest crowdfunded project

#138

Post by jrochkind1 »

cloudjacker wrote: post #95
jrochkind1 wrote: post #94

> While The DAO is a group of people authorized to act as a single economic entity, no governmental body recognizes it as such. They're really not legally incorporated anywhere? Foregoing the limitation of liability that goes along with a corporation seems awfully legally risky -- any of the individual members can be sued, likely succesfully, for something done by the aggregate, with possible damages exceeding their…

Right, and there are people that do want to be involved. They want to be part of the case law incongruences that will arise to solve disputes. They want to bring this to light so that the legacy system is presented with a better or more efficient way. Anyway, Slock.it a germany company is managing this asset, their liability is limited.

If they think they can somehow get limited liability protections in the U.S. without a legal incorporation, I think nearly any lawyer will tell them they won't have much of a case. No judge is going to decide that. You don't get limited liability protections just by acting like a corporation, you need to actually incorporate. It's pretty straightforward law with regard to that much. (I am not a lawyer).

Re: Autonomous corporation “The DAO” has become the biggest crowdfunded project

#139

Post by baddox »

drcode wrote: post #46
street wrote: post #36

The DAO isn't actually worth 120 million. For one, it's based on the price of ETH, which would completely crash if you attempted to sell even a few million worth. Secondly, everyone can withdraw their funds from the DAO before any funds are sent to projects. Many have invested because those who invested early make money from those investing later, since the number of "DAO tokens" you get per "ETH" has gone down over…

> The DAO isn't actually worth 120 million. I you tried to sell all Apple stock in a single day it would also sell at well below market rate- Does that mean Apple is worth less than its market cap? That said, I personally have not invested/speculated in the DAO because I just don't see it as a good opportunity.

> Does that mean Apple is worth less than its market cap?

Well, it means you need to specify what you're talking about when you're talking about a company's "worth." Any time I read something like "public company X is worth Y dollars," I do look closely to see if they're talking about market cap.

Re: Autonomous corporation “The DAO” has become the biggest crowdfunded project

#140

Post by numlocked »

a3camero wrote: post #105
drcode wrote: post #7

TLDR; A computer program living on the ethereum blockchain is currently in control of 107+ million dollars, making it the second largest crowdfunded project in history. Shareholders vote on proposals to give money to other entities (probably also programs on the ethereum blockchain) that they hope will make money and send it to the parent contract. All votes are managed by a program written in EVM code, which runs on…

Although the "proposals" themselves are Ethereum "contracts" (programs), the thing that the money goes towards doesn't have to be a program. The most popular proposal for The DAO to invest in is actually a German corporation called Slock.it UG: https://www.online-handelsregister.de/handelsregisterauszug/... .

And Slock.it is the creator of The DAO...
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