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Are DAOs Dead?!🌐🪦Crypto Quorum Ep. 13
Recorded: July 3, 2025 Duration: 3:26:15Space Recording
Short Summary
The conversation delved into the evolving landscape of DAOs, highlighting their role in fundraising, governance, and community engagement. Participants discussed the importance of partnerships, the emotional stakes of crypto investments, and the potential for tokenization to reshape financial models in the crypto space.
Full Transcription
Thank you. I've seen the charts from the malls at my level of dreams
Bitcoin castles, now a shadow
We've got a solid night, the fight craze
When you and I chase those golden days.
I chase those golden days. I chase those golden days.
I chase those golden days.
I chase those golden days.
I chase those golden days.
I chase those golden days.
I chase those golden days.
I chase those golden days.
I chase those golden days.
I chase those golden days. I chase those golden days. When my bags are dust and I'm broke beyond compare
I know you won't, I know you won't, my dear
When the mark is red, you'll disappear
I've shilled the coins, built them up with my tweets now chasing moonshot ignoring all the doubt now
hearts taking days blockchain dreams the way you'd hold with me it seems
and all the gains we got to know your diamond hands and crypto glow.
Will you still love me when I'm no longer a crypto millionaire?
When my bags are dust and I'm broke beyond compare.
I know you won't. I know you won't, my dear, when the market's red, you'll disappear.
Dear Satoshi, when I lose it all, please let me keep my dash.
When the bear comes, tell me it won't crash.
Vitalik, tell me if you can.
All that code, all that chain, all that speed makes me feel no pain.
It's my edge, it makes me feel like diamonds.
Will you still love me when I'm no longer a crypto millionaire?
When my bags are dust and I'm broke beyond compare, I know you won't.
I know you won't, my dear.
When the market's red, you'll disappear.
Will you still love me when I'm no longer a crypto millionaire? Yeah Yeah Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah Yeah just let that one sink in a little bit
hey how's it going everyone uh welcome to the space hopefully you enjoyed that song
we're just gonna get some other people up here. And yeah, just X is being annoying as usual.
But I would love for the Xano folks to come up to co-host.
I think I sent an invite like eight times, but you know how this is.
So if not, I can always just have a speaker or something and we'll figure out the rest.
have as a speaker or something and we'll figure out the rest but in the meantime share out the
space and invite anyone who you know was coming to go speak go get them on board and then we'll
be good to go in just a second but in the meantime how's everyone doing anyone want to say something
i'm doing pretty good how about you How's everyone doing? Anyone want to say something?
I'm doing pretty good. How about you?
Yeah, doing pretty good. It's one of those days where like, kind of super busy, but kind of super quiet at the same time.
I'm not quite sure what to make of that. But you know, this has been, you know, it's been a lot of stuff going on this week. I kind of feel like the holiday in the U.S. at least has definitely affected the vibe for this week, even though there's so many people from all over the world, including in this very thing here.
in this very thing here.
I kind of feel like that the holiday week for the US,
which has a lot of to do with companies and such
in the crypto space,
does seem to kind of make everyone else quiet a little bit.
I don't know.
Have you noticed the same thing?
Yeah, it's been a little bit of a it's been a strange week it's uh
yeah i think everyone's just kind of zoned out or checked out waiting for the barbecue on friday
yeah for sure and it's funny because i still have to do my podcast tomorrow at like three
in the afternoon my personal one this is joelle by the way speaking down there so um i might have to
to be dodging barbecues or coming back and forth etc but uh you didn't cancel that
for the holiday well here's the thing it's no i didn't yet there's always a chance it does
get canceled because spoiler alert the guest is the one and only Kenneth Bozak. And who knows if he's going to show up or not.
So if he doesn't, I might accidentally cancel.
So there you go.
Anyway.
Hey, guys, can you hear me now?
Yep, I can hear you now.
All right, I was fighting with Twitter for a sec.
Listen, the struggle never ever ends it's just when you think that space is starting to get nice and smooth
and yeah then it just doesn't so it's a constant struggle it will never stop
um yeah nice to see you hpain as well um i see uh shapeshift in the audience too if you want to
bring them up as a speaker more than happy to add them to the the whole thing here um oh hell yeah
i'll tell them to move the account over thanks Yeah, absolutely. Even if they don't talk, even if you're the mouthy one here,
we can just add them.
It makes everyone look like, oh my gosh,
shape shifts become this big DAO space.
This is great.
And then people join the space.
Should we play the other song since we're still waiting or no?
Yeah, probably.
You've been kind of just chomping at the bit waiting for that to happen huh
yeah well you know you know i i do love to hear it yes uh i have to say same here i i definitely
enjoy the humorous shitposty songs at the beginning as well but uh this what really gets me in the
mood is the the real song and so why don't you let her ripple or let everyone else know that this is happening
and getting everyone else up here.
Go for it.
All right.
All right. like corn lead joe lights away from the chains we forge to the dreams we chase
in open space Hey, did you fight and she shifted it higher?
Crypto Choral, hear the sound.
Voices rising from the crowd.
Talk it out, break it down.
In this space, we're unbound.
On the floor, till the stars we fly.
Crypto Choral, you and I. um oh oh
claim Let's talk it out, break it down. Let's talk it out, break it down. Let's talk it out, break it down. Let's talk it out, break it down. Let's talk it out, break it down. Let's talk it out, break it down. Let's talk it out, break it down. Let's talk it out, break it down. Let's talk it out, break it down.
Let's talk it out, break it down.
Let's talk it out, break it down.
Let's talk it out, break it down.
Let's talk it out, break it down.
Let's talk it out, break it down.
Let's talk it out, break it down.
Let's talk it out, break it down.
Let's talk it out, break it down.
Let's talk it out, break it down.
Let's talk it out, break it down.
Let's talk it out, break it down.
Let's talk it out, let's talk it out. Let's talk it out, let's talk it out.
Let's talk it out, let's talk it out.
Let's talk it out, let's talk it out.
Let's talk it out, let's talk it out.
Let's talk it out, let's talk it out. Let's talk it out, let's talk it out.
Let's talk it out, let's talk it out.
Let's talk it out, let's talk it out.
Let's talk it out, let's talk it out.
Let's talk it out, let's talk it out. Let's talk it out, let's talk it out. Let's talk it out, let's talk it out. Let's talk it out, let's talk it out. Let's talk it out, let's Maxi or Maltzai, wherever you stand, Crypto Quorum's the pulse of the land.
Thank you. Tune in, join your crew, stay just like you are you, and see you on the one side, wherever
you stand, crypto clorings, the cause of the land. and there we have it and i have to say we started this theme song on day one and that was back when
light coin wanted to coast with us before they got too busy traveling around the country in an
rv or something like that and uh obviously we immortalized everyone who was on that
thing, two of whom are here
today. It seems like Rock and Shapeshift
were mentioned in the song and are there.
And we've been wanting to
do an update, but
the song is kind of
good. And I just don't
want to do a different song
just to have... We haven't been able to get
it just right. I think I figured out
like I've perfected
the lyrics, but I
can't get, like I'm just
trying to figure out how to make the AI
fix the song. So
hopefully next week, but we'll
see. Yes, if we don't get it perfect
then I'm just, and we do
have to change this, then I'm
just going to have to officially
make it the circle of exit liquidity instead yeah yeah very nice all right so uh welcome everyone
uh first I should say that one co-host who is you know not always gonna be here but hopefully a lot
of times just not today is uh Edgewallet who are kind enough to offer to sponsor this space as a sponsored co-host, because we definitely,
you know, they're one thing that not a lot of people know about. Edge was, of course, a long
time supporter of Dash and one of the multi-coin wallets that's given the best support. But the
Dash DAO actually owns some equity in edge through a
little function called the dash investment foundation so edge is sort of like a dash
company in an interesting kind of way and so um definitely uh i dropped the link for there they
actually gave me about 10 minutes ago like i don't know if it's gonna make it by the space but they're
like oh wait here it is they dropped a special um download link for for, I don't know if it's going to make it by the space, but they're like, oh, wait, here it is. They dropped a special download link for Edge.
I can't remember if they said it was going to be preloaded with a little bit of Dash
if you add it, if you download from that link, but there's only one way to find out, I guess.
So definitely, you know, personally, what I definitely like about Edge is other than
Paul and the rest of the team are just good people
that I've known for a very long time is true self-custody with you know you always own your
keys at all times which you'd be surprised to know just how rare that is in the crypto space
where it's there's so much um so many caveats to that I should say and no KYc not ever and plenty of you know services that don't require it necessarily you
might have some little kyc traps in there somewhere where you might have to sign up for a service or
something then it's like whoops enter your id and fully encrypted private by design strong security
multi-chain in all one simple app built in exchange with no centralized exchange required, real support, etc.
And the one last thing I wanted to point out here, other than it's open source, etc.
is the duress mode, which I personally have not yet had the chance to dig into, unfortunately.
But I do want to in the near future.
But basically, in case you're under duress and someone's trying to literally take your money
with a $5 wrench attack,
something there to let you kind of help protect against that.
So that's the quick shill for Edge.
And now the non-sponsored co-host,
but still a co-host nonetheless
because they show up every single time
and bring it is Zano.
How's it going?
Hey guys, how's it going hey guys it's going doing good so it's winter now in argentina
so it's stronger than a bit but it's cool yeah literally understandable um and obviously one
thing to note about xano other than it is supported in the edge wallet
as well which is great um i did write on my personal thing a personal opinion thing about
working with crypto projects and companies and things like that and about how you you could tell
a lot by who shows up and works hard and hustles and zano's definitely been one of those that
you know i kind of heard about when i had a roger here on my own podcast a year or so ago and since
then i've seen the work being put in it's not just oh my gosh a few key celebrities like this coin
and they're gonna pump it i've seen a lot of work from the team, a lot of like growth mindset. And that's something we respect.
So that's why they're up here gathering, you know, free attention, free followers, etc.
Every single week, not because it's not free, because they show up and work and participate.
So thank you very much for that and definitely respect that.
It's great to be here.
And there are so many great minds here.
And I really enjoyed the conversations that happened. Yeah, it's great to be here. And there's so many great minds here and I really enjoyed the conversations that happen.
Yeah, absolutely. It's definitely one of the highlights of my week too. So before we go introducing everyone, the subject of this space is, are DAOs dead? And I can't remember exactly. Someone might have said something to that effect on last week's thing.
Because I remember it was halfway through the actual space that I kind of thought, hey, we should do that.
And then I chatted with Mark, who was going to introduce himself a little bit here, about, you know, what do you think of this thing?
And he was like, yeah, there's an interesting amount of discussion around this in some of, the ethereum space so i was like why don't you come on and talk and so then there we go and i
hit up everyone who i knew who is involved in some manner shape or form of dao and you know
they're here and there's going to be interesting discussion because um i have been so dash has been in the dow game since like 2015 or something
probably still stands as like the oldest dow in existence there's always some like kind of like
when you say like where did the bitcoin atm get invented and it's like well new hampshire but then
the first publicly deployed one was in vancouver there's always some little like you know but
actually there.
But, and then me personally, I've been in some way, shape or form involved in a DAO or something like that since late, mid to late 2016. So seen a lot. And obviously, because I'm working for a
DAO now, I have, you know, positive views on
DAOs, right? But also I've seen some ugly sides to it or some,
some down some maybe, I guess loops that need to be closed.
So that's kind of the subject of this. So there are maybe some
DAO bulls or some DAO bears in here. So we hopefully we'll get
a good discussion out. So really quick, everyone will go down
and introduce yourself.
Who are you?
What do you do?
And just keep the arguments for later.
Really quick, are DAOs dead or are they just getting started?
Binary, as usual.
We love the binaries around here.
QuickSwap, why don't you start?
Hey, I'm Nicole. I'm speaking
for QuickSwap today. Of course, I
don't speak on behalf of QuickSwap.
I'm just here
on the QuickSwap account.
Are DAOs dead? No.
DAOs aren't dead.
Interesting. That's my binary
answer. Yes. I mean, I can't say daos are dead because i'm quick because
we're dao so yeah wow what if you what if you guys are dead just kidding that would be very
funny um yeah so xana do you want to give a quick i know we kind of give you a shout out already but
quick intro and then the binary answer are daos dead or are they just getting started
hey guys so i'm gonzalo to community manager for santa and as well my opinions don't reflect once in the center project uh and in my opinion dows i'm bearish on those i like them there we go
this should be good for some good conversation. Shapeshift, your turn.
I'll be speaking on behalf of Shapeshift today.
GM, my name's H. Payne or Houston.
I'm the head of marketing at Shapeshift.
And Shapeshift DAO is a DAO.
And of course, similar to QuickSwap,
I'm super bullish on DAOs.
I think we're not quite there yet,
but we're moving in the right direction.
So I'm excited to talk more on that later.
Nice, perfect. And now Decred, how's it going? I think we're not quite there yet, but we're moving in the right direction. So I'm excited to talk more on that later. Nice.
Perfect.
And now Decred, how's it going?
Give yourself a quick intro, who you are, what you do, and then the binary on DAOs,
which I have a feeling if I can predict, I think I'll know what it'll be.
But go ahead.
Hey, guys.
Exodus here from Decred.
Decred is a layer one DAO with a self-funding treasury,
on-chain voting, and a proposal platform to facilitate our DAO. Basically, we are bullish
on DAOs. The DAO is an integral part of development coordination, funding, and just getting consensus
from stakeholders all over the world. There are some issues that we can maybe get into later but uh yes we are bullish
on doubts nice cool so let's go to rock i have no idea who you are so you might as well introduce
yourself hello guys rock zacharias uh ceo of lunar digital assets and um serve on the polygon grants
board and mentor for tim draper, Bitcoin Fly Accelerator,
co-founder of QuickSwap and some other fun stuff.
But yeah, I'm a huge proponent of DAOs.
I think they're alive.
I think there's still a lot of work to be done.
Just was actually discussing,
because we use Aragon for a lot of Polygon grant stuff.
And we want to continue doing that, even maybe doubling down on it.
And so I'm super bullish on DAOs in the future.
I think they're still rough around the edges, but I think they'll be a part of global governance over time.
Interesting.
Yeah, I mean, that seems like a pretty reasonable take.
Oh, we'll dive into it a little bit more in a second. And now we get go to Vinny. How's it going, Vinny?
mostly content editor, writer, everything related to content in the blockchain industry.
I really like to discuss with Joel a lot of stuff because he inspired me to live 100% in crypto.
I'm almost there.
So I take my payments 100% in crypto, trying to spend them that way.
And no, I don't think DAOs are dead, but they surely need to improve.
And that's it.
Nice.
Yes, sometimes I on purpose wait a little bit awkwardly long
before responding just to see what people say to fill the silence.
But nothing personal.
So Mark, last but definitely not least, in fact, last but most probably here, introduce
yourself, who you are, what you do, and are DAO's dead, yes or no?
Yeah, my name is Mark Hopkins.
Like I said, I am a crypto guy is the best way to put who I am. am i i do my professionally i i work with free ops dao um and i also do a ton of work with ai
stealth ai startup right now are dao's dead gee i hope not um because i really like them
um but i do think uh there's a lot to to discuss about whether or not they're achieving the dream. And I'm sure we're going to do a lot of that today.
Yeah, absolutely.
Again, a lot of us here, it's like DAOs are dead.
It's like this whole panel is just wiped out.
We're going to be really, really bored if we're dead, man.
I don't know what to do.
All of us are just going to be gone kind of, but, or at least pivot.
All of us are just going to be gone, kind of, or at least pivot.
So the basic, you know, the show format isn't really too much of a format.
I will just keep asking everyone one by one a question until people start talking too much.
And they'll just let it float.
And if people get really unruly, maybe I'll step in.
But for the most part, just, you know, question by question until things flow freely, feel free to jump in or raise your hand if you want to jump in.
And I'll try to sort of cram you in there.
And, yeah, we'll go with that.
So starting with on, you know, we already get the binary thing.
And while I have a lot of opinions on DAOs because of this general makeup of this conversation, I'll probably start taking a little bit more of a bearish angle on this or critical to make sure we have everything. And sincerely
though, because there are some things that are maybe holes that I'd like to sort of fill there.
So to begin with, let's just think about crypto projects like an L1 blockchain of some kind,
crypto projects like an L1 blockchain of some kind, right?
Or just like what used to be everything in crypto,
but now is not everything.
Like, should everyone be a DAO?
Like, let's just take your Litecoins and your Ethereum's
and just go down the list.
Should every one of them have a DAO kind of governing the system?
So, Ray, who wants to go first?
Say why you think so as well, and then we'll jump into it from there.
Who wants to go first?
I mean, I'll jump in.
Okay.
I already saw a quick thumbs down, and so I'm going to take the opposite side of that real quick.
Because I think, yes, everything ought to be a DAO for very broad definitions of DAO.
I think there is a conflation in a lot of people's minds that DAO automatically means
some kind of democratized, decentralized kind of entity.
And that doesn't necessarily, like the,
I don't think that's necessarily the case, right?
It's like saying, you know,
all organizations in, you know,
TradFi and the old system are LLCs, right?
That's one type of an organization.
That's one type of a for profit organization. Right.
So there's there's a million. Not really a million. There's, you know, in the American system, there's probably like at least two dozen distinct varieties of organization from profit to nonprofit.
And the theme that I feel like I'm going to hit on a lot today in this discussion is that, yes, everything ought to be a DAO, but we ought to have a lot more, not just bespoke, but a lot more no-code variety in the type of DAO modalities that we can access.
Right now, we're very limited in what we can kind of pull off a shelf and click into and create when it comes to DAOs into a few different things that Vitalik, who kind of is the one that popularized this recent wave of discussion in the Ethereum ecosystem anyway, said that we're really kind of stuck with DAOs that are focused around moving money from point A to point B.
And even in the wave of DAOs that I was highly involved in, the Free Ross DAO, Ukraine DAO, Constitution DAO, Assange DAO wave,
that's largely what they were.
They were vehicles for, in a decentralized way and using decentralized rails moving money from point a to
point b or many points to a singular point to many other points in our in most of our cases
and so for but for you know a singular cause so to say that um it's hard to disagree with
vitalica saying but if we had the variety of formation instruments that you can obviously pull from an ink file or some sort of self-corporate filing service in the DAO space, I think that it would be much easier to say, yes, everything ought to be a DAO.
Literally everything ought to be a DAO everything ought to be a dow why wouldn't it be interesting anyone want to counter that say man maybe not
if no one immediately then let me just let calisty introduce himself real quick and just
say and then he started to talk i guess so let's let's have you do that as soon as calicity's done clisty say who you are uh what you do and binary should you know are dow's dead or not
uh hi i'm calicity i'm the lead developer for saline wallet for bitcoin cash and are dow's dead
um no and i kind of think with uh mark I agree with him in a lot of ways.
So binary, no.
Taos are not dead.
Cool.
Great to have you here.
Xano, do you want to kind of counter what Mark said or kind of add extra context or whatever?
Okay, I didn't think I would be the only one against Naos.
I should become more prepared.
But I think it will be good to first decide on what a DAO is,
or at least what's the scope,
because I have a very basic understanding of it.
But if a DAO is, which Mark just explained, it's not, but most of the time when I see DAOs,
I see them as, well, doing the admin money from point A to point B via a voting system.
And I don't think that's the right fit for all projects. I think, you know, whenever users choose a project, they are in a way also choosing the team behind them and the decisions they make.
And those decisions might not be, you know, popular ones.
And I think that's fine because given that there is, it's a multi, you know, there is a lot of layer ones to choose from so i think it's okay to
uh have variety and have people make unpopular decisions and if you disagree with them then you
can just go to another project i think that's a powerful way to vote and i'd say it's even
more decentralized than having smart contract with it.
I mean, I kind of think L1s in themselves, you can kind of think of, it doesn't have a centralized vault or any kind of centralized governance. And even in our
case on BCH, it's like, there's no like central founder or anything. I mean, unless you count
Satoshi, that's, I think, a different argument. There's a book called Swarmwise by Rick Falkfinch
that I think touches on this very well. And so I think this model of the swarm mentality,
that I think touches on this very well.
And so I think this model of the swarm mentality,
I think really is a good mental model
for thinking about DAOs in the abstract.
And it kind of goes into the whole Bitcoin metagame theory
that I always talk about where it's like
in open source governance in general,
it's just you run the software, you fork the software.
Like that's it.
So, you know, it doesn't matter if I'm running open BSD
or free BSD or whatever,
I could fork the Linux kernel and run my own homebrew variant if I want, etc.
You know, we can fork Bitcoin and make Bitcoin cash or Bitcoin nots.
So, you know, ETH and ETH classic, you know, it's just what rule set do you want to work under?
What network effect do you have?
And it's a more abstract way of, I guess, thinking about governance.
But it's, I think, lends well to anarchy.
I guess classical DAOs, though, I think there's another argument to be made there where I still don't think that they're dead, but I won't soapbox for too long.
I would say if you want to be a DAO, you have to have some form of voting, some form of transparent, verifiable voting.
So I don't think Litecoin could be a DAO unless it somehow implemented that. But even if it did, the vast
majority of users see it just as money for peer-to-peer payments. So you might have a hard
time educating people on, hey, this is now a DAO and you're going to vote on things and do things.
So you might have problems with participation. I'd also make the argument on some hey, this is now a DAO and you're going to vote on things and do things. So you might have problems with participation.
I'd also make the argument on some level you need some form of treasury or some form of doing donations to help facilitate the DAO and paying people to do things.
the O comes into DAOs versus L2 governance or L1 governance, which is to say that there is a
way to incentivize activity that's not strictly part of like the security model,
which is how most chains are organized, right? So the other thing that I think is interesting,
just to, yes, Anne, what you're saying,
or to like a caveat on kind of what you're saying
is transparent voting is considered to be
kind of a hallmark of what Dow is,
but Vitalik was recently saying that for it to evolve, we need to start considering
considering Dow's that have privacy baked into voting mechanisms or at least optionally baked in,
because in many cases, what ends up happening is virtue signaling via governance votes.
These are Vitalik's criticisms of current DAOs, not necessarily mine.
Although I don't necessarily disagree with them.
I just don't think it's necessarily the biggest issue with DAOs. I do recall the very early days of Ethereum and one of the, you know, because it was the, everybodypto governance experts or advocates or talking heads were,
you know, kind of, you know, actually rightfully concerned with the idea that all voting would be
transparent because it does fundamentally break some things that we consider to be
central to how democracy is supposed to work. Being able to not have to disclose your vote can prevent political violence in extreme cases.
So there is a lot of use cases for, I think, privacy and governance that we simply do not have the baked in tooling for in most doubts.
simply do not have the baked in tooling for remote in most doubts.
And, you know, I think that's, I think it's a major way that I agree with Vitalik things
could evolve and maybe even revitalize excitement in the space.
privacy does yeah that is kind of interesting because um it it depends on like exactly what
Privacy doubts.
Yeah.
like i have to say so let me i in all experience i invited hive to participate to this space but
they were around to do so unfortunately but you But Hive being the surviving steam fork has a DAO that dispenses
everything. And the way Hive works with usernames, a username is an address, like a human readable
username. And it's a social platform. So everyone who posts, everyone who uses the network, their
primary thing they do with it is blog, leave comments, upload images,
things like that. So it is one of the most doxed DAOs in existence, I would say. And so when you
see people not just commenting on governance proposals, but you can literally see which
person voted for which proposal and that in a very clear way. And that does get kind of a little
in a very clear way.
And that does get kind of a little, little sketchy.
The dashed out does is fully pseudonymous at the moment.
Like every single vote,
you could tell which master node voted for what,
but who runs which individual master node is not necessarily,
it's not public.
And some people have, or entities have multiple ones, et cetera.
So for all practical purposes, it tended to be very anonymous for many years.
However, there are some, if you, you know, maybe I'll actually post this right here,
but there's a, a, a site, which is probably one of the biggest eyesore sites.
Like if you want to violently throw up from looking at a website in 2025, this is the
website aesthetically to go to.
But it's called MNOWatch.org where a Dash community member came and started sort of observing cluster voting patterns for proposals and things like that.
And kind of used it to sort of identify voting blocks of like, this is probably an individual, this is probably
another individual, et cetera. And then sort of analyze who voted for what. It's not nearly to
the same event, the same level where you can just tell everyone who voted for everything,
but there's a little bit of like an idea out there, I guess. And I guess that kind of thing can over time end up being something that
can maybe cause some issues like detract from the anonymity of voting, which can give you,
I guess, safety in your own votes and decisions and cause like a real risk on that. Although we
are hopefully working to fix that in the future to where even that is not really a thing.
I see Vinny has his hand up.
Go ahead, Vinny.
Yeah, I want to comment specifically on this privacy thing on DAOZ and present a counterpoint because I see that you agree with the previous argument.
I would say that it depends.
In the case, for example,
it depends on how the voting works, right?
So in the case of a representative voting,
let's say for an L1 where people,
the users, the holders can't vote directly.
They delegate to a validator
and the validator do all the voting on their behalf.
In this case, I think that having privacy is negative
because these validators are not accountable
for their vote and delegators can't know if they need
or if they should re-delegate their votes
to another validator that aligns better
to what they think should be happening. So this will be the counterpoint. I agree, I think.
Yes, for the most cases, having private votes will probably be better than having transparent
votes, but it depends. It's not in all cases this is true.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Now,
as usual, whenever we get
into a topic like this that has
some binary type
answers of like, yes, this good, this bad kind of thing.
A lot of times you have, you just start realizing how much more nuance or levels to, well, well, in this case, yes.
Or in that case, no.
Definitely as far as like, I'm a big, obviously privacy advocate.
I think privacy is fantastic.
And every project worth its salt needs to have something of the kind.
I also believe in the privacy is freedom.
Therefore, it's optionality of you should be able to do what you want with the thing.
You should be able to share what you want, with whom you want, under which conditions
you want.
And when you do have something where you have like a representative type voting thing,
where people are
pledging their support behind representatives who then vote.
In that case, I believe that the,
I personally believe that transparency is very important in that case where
it's kind of interesting for a, an analog example of that.
The New Hampshire house of representatives is 400 people And it's a lot of people and a lot
of, for sake of brevity, a lot of votes go by in a voice vote, where just eyes have it, nays have it,
whatever. And a friend of mine who's in the legislature is kind of famous for requesting
roll calls, which is where you have to say, this person, how did you vote? This person, how did you
vote? Because a lot of people are sort of avoiding accountability
by just going with a herd of other people
and voting for something bad.
And so, yeah, just kind of the roll call on the blockchain
for a representative kind of thing kind of makes sense.
I mean, it's horses for courses, right?
I think transparency to me makes sense, more sense than privacy in the majority of cases.
I think the dividing line, I mean, this is obviously not a rule or a law or, you know, like, it's just kind of a guideline to me.
guideline to me, but like governance is not,
governance can be either a privilege or a right,
depending upon the degree to which you have optionality to,
you know, to, to leave the system. Right.
So if you're talking about state governance, right.
Like country or a state or a city or whatever it's,
it has to be considered like probably you want to err on the side of privacy because the decisions you make and the voice that you have as a citizen
subject to rule um you're you could be voicing opposition to you know an entity that has
voicing opposition to an entity that has the ability and the mandate to enact violence upon
you in whatever form that means, taxes or actual violence or whatever. An L1 governance situation,
significantly less threat of violence, right? Transparency feels safer there because you want people to be accountable
for their actions. And you want to be there. They're like, it's more like a representative
democracy in many cases, or some type of like a futarchy where they've bought their way into,
you know, having a governance stake or something like that. So in those, in those, I think where
the, like the rule of thumb
when you're designing that type of governance,
whether or not you want to have the option
for privacy or not,
it's kind of how the people
that are subject to this system
and participating in the governance of this system,
how much right to vacate the system do they have?
And that's kind of like the spectrum by which you can start to apply privacy features, I think, to it.
You obviously can have a totally private DAO.
Another example of something that kind of defies that rule of thumb, just to counterpoint myself,
is MakerDAO, the guys that I guess they've rebranded to something else recently
but they're the ones that have the die token the the cdp staple coin and uh the they've explored
over the years situations where uh they they would have uh slashing that would happen on certain types of governance participants that dox themselves, like enforced by penalty privacy measures.
I think probably largely due to the regulatory risk they face is kind of the motivation behind that.
that but there's probably other reasons as well um you know if you're if you're running tornado
But there's probably other reasons as well.
cache 2.0 maybe you want to really consider privacy by default in your governance and you
want to enforce you don't want one guy to be doxed and like the rest of the team not to be because
that's the guy the feds are going to go after to break the rest of your team you know so like
there's there's a lot of situations where you want to have privacy and you currently can't, or it's difficult.
There's a lot more cases, I think, where transparency by default is probably the better option.
Yeah, I guess that makes sense.
anyone else have something to add to that?
Anyone else have something to add to that?
I was just going to quickly say in Decrit's case,
all the stakeholder voting is anonymous because when you go to purchase tickets
to participate in our system, they pass through a mix net.
So there's nothing linking you to your voting,
and you can even submit proposals completely privately
under a pseudonym or something.
So our system is kind of geared towards almost like cypherpunks.
So we have transparent voting, but it's private.
Yeah, very nice.
That's a great feature to have, of course.
Now, one thing for, let me just add in a context to, you know, maybe get things up,
about where I got into, I guess, the DAO space more specifically, is just like a lot of people
in countries with hyperinflating currencies tend to be the ones to get into cryptocurrencies,
kind of at a greater scale because they see
firsthand how things don't work. So back in 2015, I stopped being paid in fiat currency and was only
paid in Bitcoin. And then the next year I closed my bank account. The box size war thing happened.
No need to rehash exactly like the who's right or who's wrong kind of thing of that. But the result was the way I was using
Bitcoin to live off of was no longer possible when the network became congested. And that was because
of some explicit decisions by people who were involved with it. And at the time, it became
pretty obvious. I was watching the block size were unfold and it became for me obvious,
but maybe for others at best debatable where the majority of Bitcoin's holders and users,
et cetera, if they wanted on-chain scaling or not. My opinion, it seemed to point towards
on-chain scaling, but I guess the real answer is we don't 100% know. And in my view, I literally staked a
big part of my life on Bitcoin working, and it did not work the way it was supposed to work.
And today, it still does not work in that way. And of course, you can argue that Bitcoin works
fine in other ways, and that's a completely different discussion. But from my perspective,
at that point, I wouldn't, I'll use anything, right? Anything that works, especially anything
that's decentralized that works, it's great. But as far as things that I will, I will trust
significant investment of time and capital in for my personal decision, I, after that, well,
it needs to have a governance mechanism that's explicit in some way, like a DAO type thing.
Because otherwise, in 2016, when the block size were started to heat up, this is before I got involved, the Dash DAO voted on on-chain scaling or off-chain scaling.
And the on-chain scaling vote won, and then there you go.
That's just decided.
You don't have to worry about that anymore.
And there's been quite a few...
Sorry, what happened there?
Could you expand on that?
Yes, there was a proposal where basically Dash's founder, who was still around at the time, observed all this talk and discussion in the Bitcoin community. And there was like a war, like a block-sized war, as it were, brewing.
as war as it were brewing and he just said you know what let's solve this issue for us because
the rest of the the community really the rest of the crypto world is watching and so he just asked
should we scale dash on chain or do pursue an l2 scaling roadmap and he just posed that binary
question and the network voted actually pretty overwhelmingly in the on-chain scaling way and then that was decided
and then it there you go it just continued on after that and that's kind of been the way it's
been ever since and there's been other votes such as block reward allocation and certain things on
like privacy for example we just implemented a advanced privacy roadmap, and that went down to a DAO
vote, which was not overwhelming or unanimous, but is pretty strong in favor, I would say,
of overhauling Dash's privacy and lots of concerns on both sides.
So basically, these big decisions that could...
Like I basically would, my personal perspective is that I would only trust a system where I have commensurate control over it personally or the people in the system, whether whoever is determined to be the stakeholders of the system can actually have a direct voice and say, this is the way it is this is the way we're going so there isn't some area where you have a small
group maybe or an outside group that comes in and influences uh developers you know pays developer
salaries to astroturfs a few forums things like that and just can bend things away from the will
of the people now the dao votes in the wrong way according to me that's a different story but
it's still there's a certain safety in just knowing that everything will have to go kind of
through a process that will sort of prove the will of the stakeholders so um anyone else want
to chime in on that specific subject well i wanted to ask you uh so what if uh the boat hadn't gone your way so
what if they're voted for l2 scaling would you still be using dash to this day or would you have
um use something else like a fork for example um i would probably have used something else to be
honest um now i in that timeframe, probably would have gone to
something like Bitcoin Cash, but Bitcoin Cash didn't exist for the first year that I was
involved with Dash, so that wasn't on the table. But yeah, that would have been...
That actually, I mean, to be perfectly transparent, I did have deep discussions because I kind of
spearheaded this privacy vote that we had this year. And there was enough resistance where I got worried for a while before the vote.
And I did actually think of, like, what's my personal involvement in this project moving forward
if the network unanimously votes to not pursue any advanced privacy of any kind.
any advanced privacy of any kind.
And so I did think about it.
And so I did think about it.
And I about like, basically, I think my conclusion was I would probably still be involved with
Dash because of what it shows for usability for the average user, etc.
But I would start to dip some of my professional time into other projects more focused on privacy.
And that was like my personal thing.
So basically, it could have been like, I would have, you know, I wouldn't necessarily left the
project, but it was definitely, you know, a thought. So but, you know, thankfully, it's not
something you have to worry about in the future, because it's sort of decided. And it's decided
and it decided ahead of when that becomes an actual problem for me
ahead of when that becomes an actual problem for me.
yeah so i mean that's what i mean uh because you can still decide without the boating um
i think that's the way i do my decisions too because i used to be supportive of
you know other projects and just because i disagree with maybe not the community but just people
leading the projects, I chose something else with a different approach and just do it the
market way.
So do you think that that process is made more efficient by voting? Because to me, it doesn't make much difference.
So my personal opinion, and again,
I'd love to have other people chime in
from their relative perspectives on this.
My personal opinion of that is the most,
I would say the best governance mechanism is the economic governance mechanism of the free market.
Meaning as they call it, you vote with your feet.
Is it if you don't like it here, go use something else and then let the market speak for that.
I think that that's the purest and best voting mechanism.
But at some point, it does sort of, it causes an issue where you have disruption from a lot of forks, for example, like with Bitcoin, there was quite a few forks.
And also, it definitely would make me a lot cagier about dedicating significant time and resources to build and grow a project.
dedicating significant time and resources to build and grow a project. Instead, I would just build and
grow a business that happens to kind of be involved with a project or works on it, but like I can pivot
to another chain. It just doesn't, wouldn't leave my loyalty. I wouldn't get any loyalty at all to
something that doesn't have a governance mechanism because of that, that ability. So there is, it's a
certain thing of where every single business starts out.
Maybe, again, you know what I'm talking about.
Most businesses start out as a dictatorship.
There's one person who owns it and does it.
And if they pay the bills, they make the decisions.
It's just that simple.
You go to that business or you leave.
And then at some point when a business becomes large enough to where it's like a public company or something, then you end up having shareholders and boards and decisions where you vote on, where it's not
just the CEO decides to just do whatever. And then that's the end of it where there's
governance mechanisms built in, because I guess the idea is the risk of this going bad is too big to where now we'd like to, in order for all these people
involved to invest enough in the project and in its success, they want some sort of a fail safe.
They want some sort of involvement to change, to stop bad decisions or push good decisions
in some way. And so it's kind of the same thing. Like if there's
a crypto wallet, if there's a crypto company, if there's a crypto whatever, I can just do whatever
I want, right? I can switch between those very easily. But if you're building like a global
financial ecosystem that everyone's kind of working on, it does make sense to have some way
to make sure that we don't split in the network effect and leave over small-ish
disagreements that we're able to sort of stay together and, you know, preserve the unity of it
over that. Which, of course, in a free market system that has DAOs, you still have the exit
option. You can still leave and go. Again, if the DAO vote doesn't go your way there's still an option
to just go use something else anyway and that's happened many times but just having that ability
to keep everything kind of together i think is it can be valuable at a certain scale vinny did you
want to say something oh yeah i want because i really think that this is a point where I'm very interested in this discussion because I think this, what you are saying here and your own example of, for example, if you disagreed with the decision for Dash scaling with L2 winning the voting, for example, you would be less interested in the project
and maybe consider leaving.
And I think that this is where the fundamental flaws are
for these big decisions.
I think that those are great.
They surely need to improve, as I said,
during my introduction.
And I think that this is the point where they should improve.
I don't have the solution for that
but the main problem that I see here
is related to an article I published recently
called the silent no vote
and that's exactly because of the economic nature
of these votings.
Tokens have an economic value. you need to stake these tokens to
have a vote and i think this makes perfectly sense from a logical perspective but this also
brings some vulnerabilities because most people when when deciding uh for their economic well-being
for their financial well-being and and to start in preserving their wealth,
they will favor it instead of, for example,
casting a vote in a very controversial decision.
And that's why I believe that dolls are okay, are good.
They are not dead dead but they should we shouldn't give too much credit for
for these voting because when they are too controversial most of these controversial
decisions will be decided without a vote they will be decided like in a more social layer in discussions that will be happening publicly in forums,
on acts, in private groups, in private DMs,
people will be discussing what decision
they want to make with others.
There are more influential people than others.
There are people that will follow
these influential figures and so on.
So most of the decisions,
especially the more
controversial ones, will be
decided before the voting even
happens.
And this creates
a very weird dynamic.
If you want to understand
my thesis better, probably read my
article.
Also
the side that disagree with my thesis better probably read my article.
Also, the side that disagree with the likely winning side
perceives that they will likely lose.
There is a strong incentive for them not even to cast a vote in the first hand. They will probably just sell their tokens,
liquidate and protect their well-being
while moving to another system,
another chain and so on.
So this is where I think these DAOs are flawed.
For very controversial decisions,
the incentives are misaligned
and there is a strong chance that the decision will
be made before the voting anyway. So why having the vote in the first place? You know, like,
if the only solution is moving, then you are not reaching consensus on anything, then why voting
at all? I don't have the answer to that. Just something that I keep thinking when I'm
thinking, like, for example, what happened to Sui, that they voted, validators voted in a very,
very highly emotional and rushed decision making because of the hack. Everybody was
kind of concerned about that. And they rushedushed this vote to literally seize the funds
for an account
without needing
the private keys for it.
They created like
a special key
that the SWIFT Foundation,
CITUS,
and another firm
could like sign
in behalf of the hackers account
and seize the funds.
I personally consider this an attack.
And by definition,
this is a 51% attack, right?
It's an attack by the majority.
So where do we draw the line of legit decision making by the majority through DAO voting?
And where do we draw the line for 51% attacks, for example, that is happening under a majority of stakeholders.
I mean, it's a great point. It's hard to say where that, you know, where your solutions lie.
But like a lot of what you're talking about, like what gets settled socially or off-chain, in my experience, happens in the working groups.
And it doesn't even come to a vote for the general token holders unless it's kind of passed through those working groups.
And that's where the alignment happens.
It happens. It really that's that's where the devil is in the details in general governance and why a lot of very simple financially centric finance centric DAOs kind of missed that nuance. l1s or staking dows or whatever uh where your only option is voting with your feet um the
the so i guess the reaction or of like later generation dows that i've been involved into the
problems that you're bringing up is by having you know essentially a governance flow that
by having, you know, essentially a governance flow that mandates everything go through specific
working groups, kind of similar to the committee system in American Congress or parliaments.
So, you know, it's, and then you kind of, the danger of that system becomes voter disaffection, right?
Because they, I mean, just what I've observed over time,
and this is like, this happens with a lot of Molag DAOs
or like snapshot governed DAOs that have a lot of like social layer to it,
which is basically what I'm describing,
that the voters themselves stop showing up to votes unless it's super controversial or super hyped
because of they feel like their voice has been deprecated out of the process too much.
Like they only get to show up to make decisions about things that were rubber stamped before they even got to it.
So, yeah, it's that that is a fraught process.
And I think a lot of what the major,
my, I mean, going back to the original thing
that I said when I started is like Vitalik brought up
a lot of things that he thought that were missing
with that was problematic with that was.
My problems have never been kind of the same problems
he identified. I think the bigger problems we have with DA have never been kind of the same problems he identified
i think the bigger problems we have at dallas are the evolution of the response to what you're
what you just described which is uh moving stuff into a social layer moving it into working groups
creating voter disaffection and then things just happen and that's what we kind of the end result of that ends up being what has been in the meta for the last several weeks, I guess I should say, like with ApeCoin and Uniswap, where ultimately things start to collapse back into centralization and they become DAOs in name only or in the case of 8 point they just stop calling
themselves a doubt so they just vote themselves back into oblivion so yeah I got it's that is I
think a problem that is we're just now far enough into DAO cycles to observe.
Like, just not enough time had elapsed for us to have seen this pattern.
And now it is time for us to actually do the hard thinking about how do we address the social layer abstraction that leads to voter apathy, that leads back to centralization.
leads back to centralization like is that that is a real problem for these types of doubts
Like, that is a real problem for these types of DAOs.
yeah it's like a dow if you can keep it
yeah one thing it's uh it is interesting how one of the biggest, I would say, the biggest criticism of governance systems or governance less systems, I should say, as well, is it tends to be based on off chain stuff.
but the system is on its own insufficient to prevent, you know, power brokering or things
like that taking over. And so, for example, in a DAO-less system, what you do end up having is
a lot of what I've noticed a lot of times is kind of like the loudest voice, the people who are the
most dedicated to making some sort of a change tend to win out. There's some like ast loudest voice, the people who are the most dedicated to making some sort of a
change tend to win out. There's some like astroturfing, there's whoever's involved in,
like, he's gotten entrenched into all these off chain kind of pieces around it, can sort of like
override the will of the majority of stakeholders and voters and users i should say pretty easily and um the i guess the
problem when you have a failed dow that tends to be the criticism as well it's not that oh the
doubt didn't work it's just that people routed around it where there was like for example you
know too much of a concentration of tokens or power ended up in the wrong hands for example and
then there you go or you had you had something it didn't work well enough so therefore you
developed like voter apathy and you had low participation and then someone chose a moment
to strike where you could get high participation and get things to do. And which, by the way, that is kind of an interesting thing.
One time I had a proposal under the Dash Network that was funded for many years. And when it was defunded, critically, interestingly enough, it was a December proposal. So it was literally
everyone is on holiday break, except the trolls never sleep. They have no families or loved ones.
So they came out in droves at that exact time when like a few weeks later, a whole bunch
of people came out like, oh my gosh, I didn't see this.
Sorry, I was away with family.
I didn't have time to, I didn't show up to vote, but basically pretty confident the vote
would have gone differently otherwise. So literally, when I
put in a proposal, I try my very best to avoid the month of December, because it's historically
hard to get enough positive votes, but also the negative vote type people tend to not take
holidays off and just be around for that. So it is kind of interesting to see that.
So maybe what are some of the ways if we could brainstorm, maybe that we could sort of lessen
the effects of these off chain factors that come and actually cause the Dow process to
be subverted. Well, I think it depends on the scope you want to give the DAO.
Like, do we have DAOs that vote on engineering decisions, for example?
Like what decisions are okay to vote in?
Yeah, I guess so.
This is, yeah, Rock, sorry, go ahead before I-
I was just gonna say, is it cool if I invite someone
from Aragon and then also Sterlin Lugin,
who's writing about like a lot of stuff
about like network state and stuff.
Yeah, absolutely.
If you can get them, if they're free to putter around right now, absolutely.
Yeah, let me see if they're around.
Yeah, so this is another thing that I've kind of thought of in regards to the whole DAO thing.
It's kind of a recent thought and i don't necessarily think
it's universal maybe but it's um the tao that governs best is the tao that governs least
that typically once you have you do kind of stuff i love that you like that was a libertarian. I just, I love that. Well, that's, it's the same thing.
It's just sort of like,
if you have a personal weapon for self-defense,
the less you can get away with using it, the better.
Sometimes you might have to,
but you're trying to not use it.
And so I kind of view like DAO votes as something like that,
where if you can,
if you, like, you should try not to have everything go to a vote.
But if there's something that can only be reasonably resolved
by putting it in an official vote,
then you've got to do what you've got to do.
And I kind of find out...
Sorry, Mark.
You're trying to jump in there.
Go say something.
Oh, no.
I was definitely going to yes and you,
but I didn't want to interrupt.
But I might have said it on a previous conversation you and I had about Dallas.
I haven't said it today.
My personal philosophy about how you avoid every little stupid thing coming to a vote
is to apply some just basic management principles to this so whenever i was
hyperscaling my first real experience in a startup doing that we were we started as like a three-man
blog we wound up having like 80 people it was like a 10 million dollar a year run rate you know
organization media organization and so i had a crash course on being a COO.
And, you know, all these people that were smarter and more experienced than me gave me a ton
of like, you know,
general management advice that anybody that probably has an MBA would already
know, you know, just like waterfall and, you know,
you know, what's a fiefdom, what are the only different management techniques,
but like a general rule of thumb, you know,
like there's Dunbar's number for social interaction.
There's like general scaling rules to the size of effective teams.
I mean, ultimately a DAO is about execution at the end of the day.
So if you can't execute, then, you know, there's no point for your existing.
You're just, you know,
sucking down other people's money for cross purpose to what they gave it to you for.
And so I have tried to in the DAOs that I've advised for governance on.
Largely successfully trying to keep DAOs.
Structurally less than about 10 people, right?
And if you need to grow the team, like the direct reports,
people that are paid contributors pass that amount,
rather than just keep adding departments or budgets to vote on,
you organize them into sub DAOs or guilds or committee funded,
essentially DAO-like organizations that are umbrellaed underneath it.
And you have to arm those with effective leaders.
Because at that point, you don't need to super worry about the accountability of your team members.
Because if you get a team that's limited in size to about 10 people, max, sweet spot is going to be like six or seven.
You know who the performers are.
You know who the non-performers are.
And you've got internal custom ways of working.
Maybe it's flat.
Maybe it's hierarchical.
Maybe it's whatever, right?
right? It's what's going to work for that particular team and it doesn't need to be
It's what's going to work for that particular team.
And it doesn't need to be mandated top down.
mandated top down. So just as long as those individual sub DAOs have accountability to
the organizations that gave them accountable to work with, you know, that has, in my experience
for the DAOs that I've written governance for been an effective way to scale without having to,
you know, get innovative with both, right? And I should preface any of this with saying like,
this really only is applicable to, you know, the types of DAOs that need to do work. Like,
not all DAOs exist for that purpose. But like, you know, if you're a DAO that's to do work. Not all DAOs exist for that purpose,
but if you're a DAO that's running an AMM
or if you're a DAO that's running any piece of software
or a media company or you're a trade guild,
these are broadly applicable rules that you can use
to keep things manageable
and it kind of kills that voter apathy situation.
It kills the unseen social layer
because the social layer and the voting layer,
on-chain voting layer are deeply entwined at that level.
So, I mean, that's just kind of my two cents
to kind of respond to like the last three or four
like question marks that have happened
in our exchanges here.
Yeah, I mean, I would agree with that.
Definitely setting things up where you don't need to access
the base governance layer all the time
does tend to make things a lot smoother
where you don't have these issues.
It's just like democratically voting
on every single minutiae of decision, et cetera.
It doesn't seem to make sense.
C.K. Cardano, how's it going?
Do you mind quickly introducing yourself
and then going into whatever you're going to say?
Yeah, Dash.
Thank you so much for having me up, man.
Shout out to you.
Excellent discussion there, Mark, and contributions.
Shout out to Rock, Shapeshift.
See a lot of freedom technology in the room. Yeah, man. So I'm CK Cardano. I said I've been
involved in the space for more than 10 years, and I've been saying that for a few years now.
I'm a big believer in Bitcoin. My fundamental thesis is Bitcoin is going to be sort of the
predominant layer in the market, and then we Bitcoin is going to be sort of the predominant
layer in the market. And then we're going to see the privacy, the scalability, and the expressiveness
of that capital in that 20 to 40%. And that's where we're going to see our dashes, our Litecoins,
our XRPs, our Cardanos and whatnot. And I just love the technology and I believe the next 10
years is pretty obviously going to be a tale of the intersection of artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies.
I think when you look at the rapid rate of value creation, three to five business days is obvious folly and a non-starter.
So, you know, those of us that are kind of, you know, abreast of the technologies in these realities see the necessities of blockchain technology.
And as we also are watching, you know, we crossed the $37 trillion mark in the national debt.
What was it?
11, 12 days ago.
And I think yesterday I looked, we're plus 50 billion more units of U.S. dollars.
And I think we crossed the 11% mark since the beginning of the year.
If you had a million dollars in a bank account in fiat on January 1st of this year, you don't
have less
than $900,000 worth of economic leverage. So just all these things to this topic. And also,
shout out to Crypto Quorum. Dash hosts one of my favorite, one of, I think, the most productive
and open forums for productive exchange in the space, wherever you're building,
be that on Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, Cardano,
Litecoin, all of it. I celebrate it. And again, free markets are going to win, right? And a rising
tide lifts all ships. And when you hear these maximalist talk and there may be to the exclusion
of all these things, it's like, guys, I believe you. Bitcoin will inevitably be a million dollars
and five and 10. But in that world, guys, it's like Ford and Chevy.
Good luck convincing everyone to wake up being a Ford believer.
They're going to go, oh, wow, Litecoin's there.
84 million.
It's less than $100 worth 100 grand.
You know what I'm saying?
So anyway, DAOs.
I was having a great discussion last night about
an open source project that would essentially be like a deployable
DAO toolkit, where like imagine if kind of like an Apple store where you say, oh, okay,
I get this interface.
And I think as is being discussed, there is a limited and maybe even necessary or useful
sort of utility for DAOs, but it shouldn't encumber what you're
trying to do. So I think the applications here is, for instance, open source stablecoin
technology. I think the secret sauce is going to be, let's say you had $10 billion of liquidity
in a circle tether environment, very KYC, very like render under Caesar integrated with the man.
So let's say that's $10 billion, right?
But then above that, you've got an open source protocol like Obamare that might be over collateralized.
It could be all kinds of ways, right?
But maybe doesn't have to have that compliance. But maybe that's a $10 billion liquid freedom layer.
Do you feel me?
And so having a DAO to say, hey, guys, we've got a freedom stable coin that is yield bearing very, very low fee environment. We use
all these freedom technologies and privacy preserving technologies to allow us to at need
go from freedom stable to see, you know, tether circle. So I'm just saying that while I don't
think that Dow's are going to be, you know, thousands and thousands, although maybe, you know, you know, 10 years, who knows?
But I think dozens to even like 100. Absolutely.
And I think if we can recognize their utility and see some of these platforms, I'm going to land the plane here, just for instance, meme coins.
And I know that's very tangential, but just think about this, right? If you were a meme coin and you said, wow, we're the fastest liquid layer, as we've seen based on no substance,
meme coins can move a billion dollars. Now imagine if you had a very savvy community that at Genesis
deployed a DAO that said, here's the rules. Here's basically the things we're going to be voting on,
things like how can we do maybe burn mechanisms or revenue generating things,
things like that.
And then suddenly you're using the liquidity that you get in your meme coin to foster your
odds markets that are launching, your perpetuals platform, right?
So then you're teaching your community how to use kind of insubstantial flashbang whiz
meme liquidity and lock it into fundamental things.
And then it gets into the Bitcoin.
You know what I'm saying?
So I'll land on the plane there.
So I think there, yeah, the DAOs aren't going to be maybe like tens of thousands, but I think it could be dozens to hundreds that are very effective that allow us to open source our major open source hub technologies, looking like Maya protocol Thor chain some of these
stable asset things and maybe some of these more creative savvy meme coin communities but awesome
awesome conversation Dash thanks for having me up um it's it's a privilege to be in the room
yeah definitely thanks for that um a lot done back there for sure uh but uh I just see if he accepted the invite. I just added Carl over here.
Carlos Juar.eth.
How's it going?
You might quickly introduce yourself.
And then if you have a thought on what we've just been talking about,
go in for that.
Or if you're too new to the convo, feel free to listen for a while.
Hello.
This is Carlos.
I don't sit here.
Do you guys hear me?
I do hear you well, yes.
Oh, perfect. Awesome. Actually, I just listened only to the last part of the answer.
I'm not sure what is exactly the question that was made in particular.
Nice. Carlos, do you want to introduce yourself? Did you join from my, I sent you guys an invite?
Yeah.
Nice.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I saw it.
I saw it.
Yeah, so like, this is Carlos, it's Aragon's CTO.
Like for those that don't know what Aragon is, it's a very OG project from 2016, 2017.
We were the first out protocol.
And basically we create a very modular, or we created a very modular system for creating on-chain organizations in whichever
way you want.
From multi-seeks to something that is as complex as you like, and you just go to ergon.org,
and then you can launch it there.
It's completely free, and then you can tweak it however you like.
I still don't like the intro for me.
But yeah, what was the question? Like, happy to answer.
There's plenty of discussion points going around here.
But basically, we're trying to talk about DAOs for protocol level governance.
And as far as are they insufficient, are they sufficient?
And then talking about various insufficiencies maybe in the last
part we were sort of talking about is how a lot of dow votes kind of get subverted because people
take a lot of the actual decision making into off-chain sort of things like they have you know
private chats and then they they discuss votes etc off-chain and kind things. Like they have private chats and then they discuss votes, et cetera,
off-chain and kind of collude before votes ever happen
or they take advantage of apathy and things like that.
So that was generally what we're talking about.
Do you have anything on those things
or should we just kind of keep going?
I'm not sure if it's a little bit nicer,
but like one of the main reasons I see that people are taking some of the decision-making of Chain is because at the end of the day, most
of these protocols aren't giving actual ownership over the user base or the community.
It's like, why would you be voting on something that actually has some real value?
It's not going to actually execute on the chain or it's not going to...
I don't think everyone, for example, has to vote if the protocol is going to do a transfer
of like $500.
That's a waste of resources on everyone's time.
So I think it's a matter of like, if you have a bad decision making or a decision making that doesn't fit your organization, at the end that creates a lot of inefficiencies.
And like, it's probably better to rethink a little bit where your, or how your organization should be managed.
And based on that, you will probably get their outcomes, not just in like the organization, but like but also the engagement of the community.
I think in Dallas, we often put a lot of ownership over delegates, and at the end of the day,
you cannot expect a delegate to take better decisions than a CEO.
So why don't you just take the delegates for the specific parts that make sense.
And like, for example, what you can do is like have the core team or like something
closer, what light of that, which is optimistic governance.
And you have the core team that creates the proposals and then token holders should have
a veto right.
So like should have a way to say actually this is bullshit and cancel it and when
like that starts to give like more ownership and more control over the the the right calls in
the organization and the times that we've seen that with protocols that actually have been true
to like their ideals and what the community actually wants and not just like do whatever everyone else does.
We've seen way better results
and more speed and more optimization.
So that would be my answer to that.
Yeah, interesting.
Yeah, this is definitely a complex... I think it's one of the most complex topics in all of crypto because it's a very technically complicated thing to implement things that work perfectly.
scaling is something that's very technically complicated to get right as well. But at the
same time, it's something that it's a little bit easier to figure out, do we want to yes or no,
if we can kind of thing. And it's just the human element of this tech is always a little tricky.
Adam, do you want to say, introduce yourself and say a couple of words or just introduce yourself
if you haven't caught up with enough conversation? Well, I mean, I think we talked a little bit, uh, before the show about this. I'm
actually pretty, my name's Adam, by the way, from emblem vault. Uh, we do cross chain, uh, stuff,
but not so important, but the, the thing about DAOs and my experience with DAOs and it's obviously
limited, uh, it's kind of all of us are, are limited in what we've, we've done with DAOs, and it's obviously limited, it's kind of all of us are limited in what we've
done with DAOs, but in my experience, DAOs are actually good for very specific kind of one-off
uses. I think the one I'm kind of most proud of being involved with was the Constitution DAO,
you know, where we tried to buy the Constitution a few years ago. Um, and that was successful in
that even though we didn't, you know, weren't able to kind of, uh, buy the constitution,
we got outbid by, you know, some billionaire, um, it, it, it served its purpose. Right. Um,
and I think we've seen with Dow's with, I don't know whether it's, uh, what was the,
the one with, um, Assange, you know, raising money for that,
very specific use cases, I think they actually work really well, certainly with fundraising.
They work extremely well, I would say. But anytime you get into this longer
timeframe, in my experience, they've just become, they become almost an attack vector for people to kind of go after
funds or manipulate, or I just don't see them working long-term. And I've been involved with
a few for various kind of funding mechanisms within communities. And they basically get co-opted by one or two people kind of at the top or in
power. And I just don't see, people just don't have the attention to kind of stick with these
things long-term in my experience. And maybe you guys have had different experiences, but
it just becomes basically a couple of people controlling these things. Um, and they just become gamed. I don't know.
That's just my experience. Anything other than something very specific use case, one-time use,
uh, or one-time funding mechanism. I've never seen them be effective. Uh, they just become
a blob of, of not great stuff in my experience.
But happy to be corrected and shown examples of really good governance or something like that.
I just think it just doesn't work generally beyond very specific use cases.
Hey, Mark, you started to talk there.
I know you just can't wait to be chopping at the bit for this one.
I mean, I agree and i disagree right so i agree that uh
constitution dow is an example of a very specific successful use case i mean it kicked off a whole
season of dow's mine included free ross dow so uh you know it was and like you mentioned assange
dow ukraine dow uh i mean mean, even in the Bitcoin space,
there was the Hong Kong hodl
that was kind of patterned
after the same type of situation,
a little bit more social layer
than on-chain layer for that one.
But yeah, so agree that it's great for these,
like, let's call it Kickstarter type applications
with extra steps. But it's also I've seen like,
so Free Ross Dow existed for essentially two and a half years. And it became an operational Dow
that I think, I'm not going to take 100% of the credit, but of getting Ross out. But I think that we played a pivotal role in making it
politically safe for him to be pardoned. And there were not, we were not without our challenges.
Absolutely. Anybody that was involved in that, I could give you a list of names of people that
lost hair and got grays over the processes that we endured over there at Free Ross Dow. And part
of that was because they were Dows. And part of that was because they were DAOs,
and part of that's just because of the nature of criminal justice and prison reform stuff.
But, you know, I guess I'm in an acrimonious agreement, right?
So I do think that it's just like just like, like I said, top of the call, like
DAOs are as widened, ought to be as wide and varied in terms of how they are operated as
brick and mortar corporations or organizations. But I think if you look at the history of how
the corporation came to exist, even corporations were not meant to have infinite lifespans they
were meant to be they were an evolution of cooperative partnerships that were supposed
to have an end date you know they were supposed to have an end of life and i think that is actually
why the what the dows that you pointed to are some of our best examples is because they understood when they were supposed
to end and then they did. And that should be in the mind of anybody that starts a DAO. It's like,
look, when this stops being useful, there's no mandate that says this has to exist. We're not
subject to infinite growth capitalism. That doesn't have to be our mandate. We write
the rules for crypto, you know, we can do what we want. Well, I'd say like, uh, using, you know,
using the corporate example, um, even the best corporations, like the best corporate examples,
even like whatever Facebook, right. Have basically a King at the top, right. We have Zuckerberg
basically running the corporation, right. It's not like, it's not a blob that kind of decides things. It's one dude who basically
decides things. And, and like, if, if the, the, that's why I say DAOs don't really work because,
you know, the idea of a blob kind of running things, it never works it it turns awful so quickly um that
even with dow is like they're just one-time use even like you're saying the free ross doubt
it was one specific purpose it's get ross out of jail right um which we could all get behind
and i'm sure you guys ran into a whole bunch of shit trying to get that done. And I applaud you for the effort.
Um, but again, it gets back to like the, the sole kind of best use of DAOs is to raise
capital, right?
Quickly raise clap capital globally.
And they actually work really well for specific one-time purposes like that.
But as like a governance vehicle, bro, bro i mean i just show me the example of
a good governance now like i just can't even i've never heard of what i because i can't literally
can't think of how it would even work um other than preventing action like if you want to prevent
action like if we want to like a good use of a dow would would be like, manage the nuclear codes. Great, because nothing would, that would ensure that the nukes never get sent, right?
Like, it's a preventative from action, right?
I don't know.
I just.
So I think, I mean, that's an important thing, though.
The best, like someone said earlier, I forget the phrase, Joel said, like.
The best DAO is the DAO that governs least, something like that.
Something like that, the best governance, yeah. I dow that governs least something like that something like that
best governance yeah i mean i'll push back a bit like so let's think about a project having
no dow versus having a dow maybe just for that to block actions from the the builders and so we
can talk about quick swaps dow so quick swap has had a Dow since inception. It's a relatively simple Dow. It is just we just use snapshot. Community can propose things on our discussion forums, which is our subreddit.
credit. Most of the votes, and we've had a lot, I don't even know, maybe over 100 votes over the
last five years. We probably have one every like week or so, maybe every two weeks or something.
But basically, these votes manage how fees are routed, how tokens can be used. And I would argue it's been really good.
Now, the problem with it is because the team does have a lot of influence over what things get proposed, what makes it. Did Rock rug or is that just...
Yeah, I think he rugged.
Can you guys hear me?
Yes, I can still hear you, although you are clearly in the bathroom or something.
Let me...
I'm in the gym.
Whatever you want to do.
I'm not judging.
Here, let me take this headset off.
It'll be better, hold on.
I had my headset on and I was on the elliptical,
but I got off to talk.
So anyways, I think one of the reasons it's worked well
is because luckily we have a team that's pretty altruistic.
So like I have never sold a single token of quick.
I have bought massive amounts on the open market.
We had a short attack, someone like trying to short quick over the last like week and a half.
And I bought $300, dollars of quick just to defend the
against and try to short squeeze whoever this attacker is with my own funds uh the only small amount of tokens i've gotten from being a founder of quick swap is like a quarter of the entire
percent of the entire supply quarter one quarter of one percent um and i've never sold those and
i had to pay taxes on those and uh i, you know, Quickswap generated $100 million in revenue in our first year.
I never took $1 from the foundation.
I've still, in five years, never taken $1.
So, like, maybe we're lucky we have a kind of good person looking over things,
and maybe it wouldn't have worked so well otherwise.
But, like, so far, I think our governance has been pretty good.
I think it could be more decentralized, sure.
But I think we try to strike a balance between, as you mentioned, at Facebook, you have a
CEO, right?
I don't think we should have any CEO at Quickswap, and we don't.
We have a foundation, a legal foundation.
But I think you do need some levels of hierarchy in human organization.
I think we're learning how to try to flatten those things over time.
But I don't think it's perfect.
And I don't think you could have, like, for example, like direct democracy.
I'm very skeptical of.
I think things like a representative, like republics work better.
I think having specialized people who understand, you know, the product well, or whether it's a
company or a country, those things help. But essentially, it's exactly what you said, Adam,
at quick swap, which is the votes are so that, you me the rest of the foundation anyone else at the team anyone
else is who's making proposals cannot change or use tokens in any way that uh isn't good for the
protocol and um and then if there's changes to fees like one of our recent votes was to switch
from giving the fees from the um so we used to give fees generated from trading and
again we've generated hundreds of millions we're actually about to hit a tenth of a trillion in
volume we're we're like i think like nine tenths of a trillion now uh or uh sorry whatever nine
percent of a trillion whatever uh anyways so it basically just blocks us from using the
tokens for things that don't benefit the protocol. And there's kind of a constitution built around
what the tokens can be used for. And they generally don't go to the team. So like when
we started the protocol, we gave 97% to the DAO and 3% went to founders, which I actually rejected
as a founder. So I don't know,
there's just like some insights there. I think it could be done better. It's not on-chain voting.
I mean, we do vote on-chain on Snapshot. So it's all there, transparent. Everyone can see who's
voting and there's discussion. We have discussions before votes. But the carrying out of things is
not, you know, it's not like you vote and then it triggers
some smart contract. Um, the world isn't really there yet. It's, I mean, there are, I'm sure
Aragon could probably tell us why I hope I'm wrong and that other people are trying to figure
this stuff out, but it is kind of difficult. There's a lot of things that are difficult to
do through a complicated like framework like that. And so far we've carried out every vote,
you know, based on how it is said, we've never gone against a vote or something like some but we have seen that in
this industry where you know there's a vote and then the the team goes against it i think didn't
arbitram right exactly and the other thing was like i mean it's it's so funny you mentioned like
you guys were under attack i've experienced that in other DAOs I've been a part of.
And these were small DAOs, you know, with 100 grand and stuff like that.
But still, we had to like fight off, you know, people basically using, you know, the smart contract itself or whatever to attack to try and basically drain the funds, right?
And all that kind of craziness. Yeah, I don't know. I understand.
And all that kind of craziness.
Yeah, I don't know.
I understand.
That's part of the reason that, you know, it's still a process where even if someone presents, you know, a proposal, it doesn't mean it's going to vote.
Like it has to get support from the community and the discussion.
And it also has to make sense to the foundation that this is not like malicious.
Luckily, we've never had anything like that.
But I mean, there has been hundreds of millions of dollars up for the taking or to be attacked.
But I guess by having some less decentralized elements, you know, we have barriers to protect against that.
I mean we've seen some on-chain stuff, like you could look at like Curve and VE model and Convex and the the curve wars and all that i would argue like there's a lot of games
played there and not necessarily games it's all within the rules is like if i vote for you know
my token or whatever token that i hold to get rewards then we get the rewards but the problem
with that is people are just voting for shit coins or things that don't have any actual volume or revenue.
And then you end up having a bunch of really shitty, low quality liquidity.
And we've seen that that's like a common thing with these VE models across the industry and why most of them have failed, including, you know, a lot of really big ones.
Right.
But I'll pause there.
I think we are confusion a little bit with some other things. A lot of really big ones, right? But I'll pause there.
I think we are confusing a little bit with some other things.
Like, for example, these DAO attacks,
which do happen,
they happen also in the real world.
And not only in the real world,
right now in the application that we are in,
let's all remember that Elon Musk
did a hostile attack to acquiring.
It was not pacific. It was not like Elon Musk did a hostile attack to acquiring. It was not pacific.
It was not like Elon Musk was like peacefully buying shares with the
permission of the CEO.
It was actually the opposite.
And that's why he had to fire all the managers in Twitter when he got in.
And the poison pills, for example, which is a way to defend these sort of things,
it's something that you can also put on chains, just without having maturity.
It's like you are in a startup and suddenly you do an IPO and you're expected to,
like, it's like you launched your token and you're expected to have the same
security or expertise as a company that has done the IPO and has all these years,
I mean, shareholders and board members with that much expertise.
The industry is very young right now.
And like, but most of the issues that we are having, they do happen in the real world.
And when we say that doesn't work, for example, my question will be like, sure, I agree.
But like, we have to say what exactly we are referring to.
Because I do think they work greatly for fundraising.
And I think they also do work greatly to don't go to jail technology for funders.
Because some of the things that we do would be...
At least 50% of DAOs were created for that reason.
Yeah.
And look, if that's the reason, if you are honest with that look it's all good not doing particular like i'm not appointing not not going
to jail is good we should appreciate that our founders don't want to come right so in a more
in a more friendly now in a more free uh free in better environment now, do we even need DAOs, right?
Now that we have a better crypto regulatory environment, do we need to set up these DAOs, right?
Beyond, like, give me the best example of why we want to set up a DAO now in this new environment, other than for money raising for a very specific cause.
Give me a good reason to set up a Dow today.
Consultancy, a trade guild.
You have five friends that want to pool their money and you want one guy to run the treasury for you.
Maybe you want to set up a media company and you've got like four people.
I just rolled out a Dow.
Okay, that one example, I kind of agree with you there.
So an investment Dow.
I just rolled out a Dow this week for a PR company.
Like they literally are just like five guys,
five people on the team that need to have on-chain operations
to manage the finance side of the PR company.
Yeah, I think we have to get over the thing that DAOs have to be rolled
over one million token holders.
Like DAOs can be whatever you decide that is better.
Well, do. The people have, the whatever you decide that is better. Well, do you.
The people have, or the founders decide that it's good
for that specific moment of organization
and eventually will grow into be sort of like a public company.
And remember, again, in the real world,
people can vote if they have shares of a company
whenever a discussion has to be taking place.
So, like, 100% agree.
That can be whatever you like,
as long as it's an on-chain organization
that manages funds and protocols and permissions.
But yeah, 100% agree with you.
If we are talking about token holders,
taking decision-making,
making the decisions on every little thing,
that doesn't work and will never work
but like they don't have to be that way it doesn't have to be a flat structure and that's why what
we try to do are going a little bit to like make structures that feed exactly your purpose uh so
you can actually be an effective of effective organization first and foremost because like
there is if a product doesn't work
because of your governance model,
definitely the DAO won't exist in a year.
Then we will be out of business.
That makes sense to me.
And what you're saying with,
okay, they set up a media company,
they create a DAO for that.
And I'm saying that may be a use case,
but why not just set that up as a multi-sig? Because the reality is like, why have, why, why go to the whole extra
step of all this like on-chain governance? Why not just have it as a multi-sig and we all decide
where the money goes based on a multi-sig? Why do a Dow? Well, I mean, I mean, not, not to,
a multi-sig is a form of a DAO in my opinion.
And now in this particular case, they were set up as a DAO house.
So the answer to why, not necessarily in this particular case, but in many similar cases
would be, why would you set up a C-corp versus an LLC, right?
Like an LLC would be maybe something with a multi-sig,
but a C-Corp would be something set up
because maybe you plan on issuing stock later
if you think this thing is going to grow, you know?
So like a Moloch DAO fork,
like from DAO House or something like that,
like a no-code solution,
that is a perfect mirror of like A-class,
B-class shares in a corporation, right?
So you've got the loot tokens and you've got the governance tokens.
So you've got voting and non-voting shares. I mean, it's,
you talk to any like lawyer who's set up corporations before they're like,
you don't have to explain how loot tokens and governance tokens work because
they go, Oh yeah, I've set up a C court before. I understand it. Right.
So that's what I was,
maybe it might've been before you jumped in on the conversation,
but that's what I was kind of saying earlier in the show
or in the spaces was that like DAOs are just
on-chain corporations or organizations or nonprofits.
Like the use cases, we should be developing the tooling
to kind of match what has existed in the real world at the very minimum for organizations.
Because why wouldn't we?
Why wouldn't we want to be on something where there's a single ledger accounting versus we put all of our money and trust in a centralized organization like the government or a bank?
a centralized organization like the government or a bank?
In our case, something that really works and is completely exciting what you're saying
is the core teams, there is the proposals because they are the ones that know what to do.
Sort of like you would be in a multi-seek.
And then the right for token holders is to protect themselves against malicious activity
and things that can go against their... The right for token holders is to protect themselves against malicious activity and
things that can go against their, so like monetary or financial gain or whatever it
is that they want to be protecting, or the platforming, for example.
You have to have a right to say like, you know, actually, I want to be using this platform.
So you're not going to kick me out.
And that's the protection that you have.
But the decision-making, you are probably not going to be better than the core team
on deciding things.
So what we do is normally the core team creates the proposals, and then token holders can veto some of these proposals.
I usually need something that you can attach to other types of multisigs.
So you can say core team creates proposals, and then there is this sort of like
other councils or multisigs, whatever you want to call them, that can also be, you know, so for
example, court-in-phrase proposal, and then a legal council can say, hey, actually this is not legal.
Or there's a security council that says, actually, this is vulnerability in here.
And these sort of like programmable organizations that are on chain and that have security deeply embedded into everything they do, they can be more effective than other organizations where you don't really know what is going on.
Because everything is, well, everything is different.
All the decisions are decentralized in different platforms and you don't have any way to read it.
You have no way to protect yourself.
And I don't think here is about like,
that's about like decentralizing the decision making.
It's about making sure that everyone can be protected
against malicious actions from the protocol.
I think that's the main thing for me
have stocks almost have equities almost like done it the best way which is you have a ceo you have a board you have etc all that you have a hierarchical structure but then you have
shareholders who have like minimal voting either either requirements or even ability, depending on what kind of shares they have, etc. But they do have kind of, you know, semi veto power if there's something, you know, that gets to a vote.
And they've kind of done it pretty well there. I guess when I was earlier in crypto, I thought, you know, let's completely decentralize and flatten these hierarchies like just completely. And I don't really feel that way anymore. I just have seen so many people try to do it. And it just doesn't really work very well.
hierarchy is a it works you need people who are accountable you need to have one person in charge
of a specific function and if that person doesn't do it right then you go to that person you either
fire them or if they do well they get a raise and um you need to have like someone who's looking
over that person as opposed to if you completely flatten hierarchies,
like, so we actually started LDA like that. We were a completely flat company. Everybody
basically got paid pro rata based on like their, it was kind of basically hours, but there was some
like adjustments for like value. But at first we were just every, you know,
client we had that we incubated, we would just split the revenue and we would put a little
aside for the treasury for costs, you know, associated with running the company. But it
was pretty much just fully distributed flat. Like people would call me, you know, Hey boss. And I'd
be like, Hey, don't call me boss. You know, I'm no one's boss. We're all peers. And we did figure out over time that that just wasn't, it created a lot of fighting weirdness
and some people thinking they weren't getting their fair value.
During that time, did you refer to each other as comrade?
No, definitely not. But yeah, anyway, so LDA over time, we figured out that we had to have hierarchy and the company has run much better since and has gotten so much farther in the world.
But we still have that feel, you know, like when times are tough, like as they are in the industry right now, like I always took pay cuts before cutting anyone else's pay at the company as the CEO.
And then usually, almost every time when I would take a cut, the executives would volunteer to take cuts too.
And like we, I think we went like two years of, you know, bear market before we recently had to make some cuts to some hourlies.
And those were from like, they were still getting paid, and in a lot of cases, kind of bull market
rates. But finally, we were like, okay, the market is really dry right now. Funding is,
people just aren't funding as much. And so we're doing a lot more like long-term equity and token deals and so
there's just not much as much cash flow these days for any project um and so anyways but i don't know
uh we've always tried to run in a kind of decentralized way we started out fully
decentralized and we try to still like maintain that ethos i suppose but we did find there's
tons of limitations and i've seen it happen with crypto projects all the time so i have some thoughts on the difference
between a a dow and a dac in between a decentralized autonomous organization and a decentralized
autonomous corporation but before that i know we've had a sterlin up here for a while good buddy
and he has not introduced himself or given any
thoughts on this so i figure instead of being rude i'll let sterling introduce himself say who you
are what do you do and any thoughts on that current discussion just feel free to jump in
cool man thanks for having me joel rock and thanks for inviting me you guys can hear me
splendidly i I assume.
Cool. So, yep, nice. For any of you guys who don't know me, I've been working in the crypto space or crypto adjacent space for about 10 years. I've been a libertarian for probably
14 or 15 years. I've worked with Roger Verrett, Bitcoin.com. I worked at a cryptocurrency exchange,
did risk management, did communications for a while. And for the last two years, I've been working in the network state space and specifically governance.
So just a few thoughts that I have on this particular topic, if we zoom out and get a bit more high level.
So here's the thing. As a species, humanity does not have governance figured out.
Let's just take an example. A lot of people still... Sorry, you said does not have what figured out? That doesn't have governance figured out, right? Let's just take an example. A lot of people still-
Sorry, you said does not have what figured out?
That doesn't have governance figured out.
Oh, okay.
Not in, I would call it, I would go in so far to call it an unsolved problem. And here's why. So
thinking about democracy as the penultimate idea of governance, right? But we've seen already that
democracy has a ton of flaws. There's a reason that people like HL Mencken said that democracy is the worship of
jackals by jackasses, right? And we, it, it fails over and over and over again. And the reason that
it does that is because it's still prone to corruption. So here's the thing though, democracy,
when it resurged in theged in the 18th century,
into the 19th century, with the Athenian model, and then, of course, it was turned into a, quote,
democratic republic in the U.S. Then as the ancient regimes fell all across the world,
right, the monarchies were toppled. Democracy was just copied and pasted all around the world.
And you hear people, when they talk about democracy, they talk about it as this grand,
great, beautiful experiment. They use this term experiment. I want you to focus in on that for a minute, guys. It wasn't actually an experiment. During that time, what kind of data was aggregated?
What kind of data was studied? What type of data was actually ingested? And then what were the
outputs of that data? Of course, there wasn't any. The mechanisms for doing that didn't really exist at the time. So it was just simply assumed that it was.
I guess you had some simple like you could just look at some examples like the United States and go, wow, they're doing so well. We want some of what they're having. That was I guess it was maybe that simple.
I mean, yeah, I guess that's it. At that point, it's really subjective or relative, right? Because
from my perspective, I think the U.S. is largely a broken country, right? Super warmongering
has all types of internal problems, massive police state. I would say that is a governance
failure and a coordination failure overall, because there's a mismatch between the people
living in that country and then, of course, the quote-unquote
government officials or the bureaucrats. And you can see this because of all the propaganda where
these culture wars are uplifted and everybody, they're taught to be at each other's throat all
the time, so they don't focus on the actual problems of governance that exist. But anyway,
back to the main point. So the idea here is that when democracy got exported all around the world
and it was claimed to be an experiment, it wasn't an actual experiment, the point that I'm actually
making is right now, not only with DAOs, but with this network state, cyber state, parallel society
movement, we have finally the opportunity to actually run experiments in governance and
learn what works. This is going back to the discussion you guys were having about DAOs.
The reason that governance is not working the way that we want it to in DAOs
is because everything always bottoms out with human beings, right?
100% of the time, there's all, and this is my own experience being in a few different DAOs,
namely Colt DAO and a number of other ones.
The problem always manifests around some type of human
drama or some type of human sense-making or collective sense-making ordeal that doesn't
iron itself out and causes various governance failures, communication and coordination failures.
And this is why the conversation completely hinges on the notion that, you know, how do we do this?
Do we need more decentralization? Do we need less decentralization?
Should there be some component of leadership or control?
And the reason that nobody has a specific answer is because we just haven't,
we haven't fine tuned the models that speak to our humanity in,
in the ways that we need them to speak to us. And, and here's what,
so here's what's happening right now.
There's a number of different organizations that are out there who are working on trying to solve
this problem of governance. So just to name a few, and this isn't to defend them. So there's
Radical X Change is working on governance right now. There's an organization called Medigov,
and I actually founded one myself called Polis Labs. And the
whole idea behind these organizations is to actually ingest data around governance and then
create frameworks, models, and prototypes and push an output that people can actually use. And this
can happen along with advisory services. And this is not only just for DAOs and not only happening
in the digital arena and landscape, but also in physical communities.
So just another example.
If you guys are familiar with Edge City, Edge City is a pop-up community that has residencies all around the world.
One of them that's happening coming up in Argentina, it's going to be month long.
So in these communities, there's different kinds of experiments in governance happening, both between the digital component and the human component.
And it's an opportunity for us to actually experiment with different kinds of models in
real time and see what works. And we don't run the risk anymore of people getting cloistered
into these environments. We don't run the risk of people getting hurt or even killed,
hopefully, right? Because that's happened in shitty bureaucracies that corrupt and go downhill right or they get caged in like the
north korea of network states so a lot of deaths in governance over the last millennia absolutely
so the cool thing is is that one of the things that we're promoting and a lot of us in the in
the civ tech space promote is the idea of keeping exit and switching costs. Sorry, the what tech? Civ tech, like civic tech.
Like civilization or civic?
Yeah, civic, civ tech, civilization tech.
So the idea there is to keep exit and switching costs abundantly low so that we can run these
experiments.
And if people get spooked or they don't like that community or they have a problem with
whoever is in charge, then they can simply leave, join another community and engage in a different
experiment. So it's only right now.
Bro, this is, but see, this is where when you say, you know, U.S. is a failed governance
system, but, and I, and I, in many ways, I completely agree, but I still think something
about it is special enough that to me, it's still the best system we've seen in the world, has made the best results arguably and many KPIs.
But one of the things is it didn't stay true. Somehow we didn't enshrine hard enough in the constitution, the rules. it was supposed to be exactly what you said cheap switching or exit costs which is you can go to any
state and there's no barriers between straight between states there's no trade barriers between
states that you're allowed to move at any time and then the federal government shouldn't have
been able to tax you you know across all states so much right or at all i would argue um and that changed completely because now you know
what in california i think i was paying like 38 to federal and like 17 to state after these extra
fucking stupid things because i'm at the top top tax bracket but um so now you move from one state
to another doesn't do much you know cindy was like, can we just move to Texas? And I was like, that just doesn't really change the calculus for me on taxes. So we went
to Puerto Rico, which is much better, but it's still a nice little loophole for United States
citizens. But anyways, I'll pause there. What do you think, Sterling?
Yeah, no, you're exactly right, Rock. I mean, by all intents and purposes, there are some KPIs that the U.S. has performed very well in.
And I think a lot of the reason that the U.S. has performed well is because of its adoption of free market ideas, capitalism as loosely as it can,
that has allowed the acceleration of different kinds of innovation, market dynamics, GDP, those kind of things.
And I think there's definitely some
value there. And I think we see that. The reason why the system has corrupt and caused the problems
that it has, especially with exit and switching costs, is because there's way too much
centralization, right? This goes back to all the conversations we're having in the context of DAOs
and the crypto community right now. The more centralization in any type of system that you have, the more likely it is to either corrupt or to outright fail and to break.
So particularly in the U.S. as an example, all the quote unquote leaders exist in a power vacuum,
right, where they can make decisions almost unilaterally for everyone else. And of course,
that's going to invite corruption. It's going to invite greed. It's going to invite the worst characteristics
and features that we have as a species. So it's very, I think it's already clear to all of us in
this room that you have to have a certain degree and level of decentralization in order to promote
more freedom and more decency in human interactions, human psychology, human relationships.
freedom and more decency in human interactions, human psychology, human relationships.
And I played devil's advocate here. I would argue, I think there is some argument for
actually that part of the United States failings is actually maybe too much decentralization
in terms of being a democracy. The fact is, if we didn't want these crazy taxes,
if we didn't want the government to be so large, we could put people in office like Ron Paul,
you know, and many others who are, you know, like want to spend less and want to have smaller
government, we could put these people in office. They don't get anywhere. Now, maybe that's because
we've been hijacked by this, you know, dual party, actually kind of single party system.
And the founding fathers were wary of that, actually.
They talked about it.
So I think they saw a lot of this stuff possibly happening.
But the problem is when you have democracy, you get a bunch of people voting to give themselves money and take it from other people.
And, you know, it's a boat buying mechanism so i don't
know i mean but if you don't do that then you just get politicians that are completely corrupt and
just give themselves everything so i think if you know who knows maybe this is the best system and
you just have to deal with the negatives of it and you got to like hit rock bottom before people
realize you can't borrow forever and it actually hurts you because of inflation. And maybe the public wises up about it and starts voting the correct way.
Or maybe I feel is the correct way, but subjective. But anyways, yeah, just playing both sides of it.
Yeah, no, that's fine. I mean, you pointed out a lot of the problems and you also, I think,
just like a lot of us are a bit conflicted in terms of the outputs that democracy has created.
Because let's be fair, there are some versions of democracy that work a lot better than U.S. style, right?
I just spent a month in Switzerland at the Zoo Switzerland pop-up.
actually works a lot in a lot of different ways that have better outputs and produce
better, I would say, better degrees of human flourishing than a traditional representative
style democracy does. But anyway, that's really not directly here nor there. But I will say that
what we ultimately have to be able to do and to think about is that there can be new models of governance.
See, this is, I think, where I guess I can add a bit to this conversation.
There's a lot of work happening in the CivTech space where we're already starting to push forward with different ways of envisioning either democracy or envisioning whole new models.
or envisioning whole new models, right?
Radical X Exchange have talked a lot about this notion of quadratic voting,
where voting is weighted across preferences and heaviness skills,
where it allows people then to use, like they could use tokens
or some type of money to then vote or allocate funds in a certain direction.
This has also been talked about by economist Robin Hanson
and what he referred to as futarchy,
right, where you put your money where your mouth is in terms of your vote.
And this is, the idea is to create a scenario where you don't have a super majoritarian voting mechanism that creates either corruption or creates rule by the 50 plus percent who end
up winning whatever the election is, because all we would refer to
that as is a mobocracy or a thugocracy or a kleptocracy. And that's not the type of atavistic
civilization that we want to live in. We want to be able to push the needle forward. And I'm of
the mindset that we're just beginning to start innovating and unlocking new human decision-making
processes, new collective sense-making processes, and new
ways to understand each other's psychology in a way that allows for a level of human flourishing
that we haven't ever seen before. And that's all part of this network state, cyber state,
parallel society movement. At least that's the vision that I have. I could be completely
over and over and over again, but for me, I won't accept that. I want to be able to try to
innovate or at least help us move in the right direction as a species, lest we get stuck in these
corrupting zero-sum game dynamic mechanisms that currently exist. That's all.
Ryan, you've had your hand up. I do want to ask you if Sterling, we can go back to, but yeah,
Ryan has his hand up. Just like if you could design, like if you could have been there with
the 55 delegates, the founding fathers of America, and if you could have done something different,
is there something we could have done that could have protected it now that we have hindsight being
2020? But yeah, Ryan, if you want to, sorry, Joelel i don't mean to take your co-host but i
wanted to pause that so ryan's a friend i was going to get him up anyway hi ryan would you
mind introducing yourself real quick and then just uh jumping on in yeah uh i'm ryan i've been
i've been working in the dash dow for for quite a while and i just wanted to say that a few points here.
I think first and foremost, everybody here working in a DAO, you're the guys working for the free market.
And everybody that's not working for a DAO, you're not really working for the free market.
And I know that sounds harsh. I know somebody, I posted that as a tweet, as a reply to this space itself, and I got some flack on that for drinking the Kool-Aid a little too much.
But it's true, and I'd be willing to defend or debate that point to any degree that anybody wanted to.
But the DAOs are the new free market.
If you're working for dollars, you're working for the government.
working for dollars, you're working for the government. Second point is, I think it was
Rock that made this point, is yeah, I think that the point, the reason that the United States has
been so successful is because it's been decentralized. Too few people, especially
in the crypto space, look to and worship decentralization.
People need to have the balance more on the side of centralization
within their DAOs or within their sub-DAOs
because that's where responsibility happens.
You can't have a system that's effective
and have just the whole group being responsible.
It doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way.
Humans don't work that way.
Hierarchies evolve for a reason.
And then the third point is...
Before you go from that point,
I'll just say as a CEO and as a venture studio
that's built multiple unicorns
and has experienced decision fatigue
within companies and things,
a million percent, I've totally,
one of the big things I do when it comes to decision making or action, like if people,
let's say there's a task for a company, whatever it is, managing a social or, you know,
finding investors or whatever. I always make sure there's one, not 10, one point person on that task because now they can delegate.
That's fine.
But they are responsible.
And I need to know if it doesn't go right, who do I go to?
And the biggest thing there is if you have three people on a task, if three people are like, oh, we can tag team that.
The problem is then it might not get done and they all just kind of think oh, I thought he was gonna do it
I thought he was gonna do it. But go ahead, right? Yep. Yeah, no, I fully agree with that
The third point that I wanted to make was you know
Dows are different things for different people
The several people have spoken today several people are involved in Dows at different levels
There are
Layer one Dows. I think Decred mentioned that
they're a layer one DAO. Dash is definitely a layer one DAO. And then there are layer two DAOs.
And I think the distinction is important because it depends on what you want to accomplish.
So DAOs can either be as big as an economy. So somebody said that
DAOs can either be as big as an economy. So somebody said that DAOs are like the new version of a corporation. And I think that's true for Layer 2 DAOs. For Dash and for Decred and anybody that has a token that's more of a monetary token, so Dash is trying to be money, Decred trying to be money decred trying to be money presumably
you're trying to get your coins to be money those dows are kind of the dows that that control those
or that that are set beside those those are more like economies than corporations and um
the only way that we can actually be successful as cryptocurrencies is to have DAOs along with that because you have to have the balance between capital and labor.
If you don't have any kind of cryptocurrency that's trying to be money, including Bitcoin, if you're trying to be money, you need a labor force to create the value to give the money the value that it should have. Otherwise, it's just a speculative token that's actually worse than even an equity token, let alone a monetary unit that goes along with an economy.
and corporations that we have these DAOs associated with can figure out how to scale
and employ more and more and more and more people and not have this scarcity mindset
of, you know, we have a limited supply token, so we can only have limited supply of labor.
That doesn't work.
The United States dollar is big because it knows how to scale.
And as soon as crypto figures that out,
like how to scale a labor force,
then we'll be able to scale the free market.
And that's what this is all about.
That's what I think 99% of you are here for
is at least to some degree, besides the get rich thing, which everybody's interested in.
But most of the people in crypto are here because we want to have free markets. But
we don't have free markets until we're able to scale DAows to a point where we don't talk about it in terms of dows
anymore it's just like this is the dash economy this is the decred economy this is the uh you
know so so and so economy and people just people don't people work for for these organizations
and it becomes normal instead of like this super fringe niche thing to cut you
off why why do we need dows for economies to run i don't get that well because what's the alternative
you you don't need you don't need dows to organize people i i work with people all the time we don't
interact through dows we pay each other in crypto.
We don't need to.
The payment layer doesn't need to be run through DAOs.
There's no way to have effective scale of any.
Like you can have a whole bunch of freelancers that make temporary alliances.
But, you know, I mean, look at Dash.
It's a great example is a multi-year verging on multi-decade projects with a huge ecosystem and
a lot of people involved. Look at any layer one. No, I get you. So you're saying, you're saying
to replace corporations, we just replace them with that. I get you. I get that. Yeah. Yeah.
That's what I'm saying. It's a, there's, there's gotta be some sort of like organizational fabric
that they can all interact with when, when a project exceeds the size of what one person can handle.
But Ryan's statements were a bit bold.
There was a couple.
One was that you're not a free market person if you're not working for a DAO.
And I would push back and say companies can be very free market when the government kind of gets out of their way.
So why, I guess let's start with that statement. Why can't you, I mean, companies are free markets.
Yeah, that's the boldest statement I made for sure. I was wondering if anybody would push back on that.
It's just the rabbit hole that I've gone down.
You look at a company, if a company is trying to be a free market company, how are those companies funded?
Well, they should be funded by providing value in the form of services and goods and commodities to consumers that optionally choose to buy them.
Sure, they provide goods and services,
but how are they funded? Was the question that's not, uh, they're funded by raising money,
like either through not always. Okay. 99% of companies that are formed are created by
raising money. That's not the way all. You're going to have to raise money to buy the companies, man.
Come on, man.
That's not the way.
You don't raise money first.
Most people, most small businesses, most businesses are started by individuals.
Sure, but where do they think they're going to look at the money from?
If you're a plumber, where did you get the money to buy your tools?
Even an individual.
I mean, look, I mentor this young. I'm not saying that everybody's venture funded i'm
saying everybody is funded by money and where does that money come from
and where does that maybe one way someone might phrase it that money has to return to the
shareholders the the investors either way so i think we're getting to the end of the space,
so I don't want to open up the big debate right now.
But I am willing to defend that claim.
And I'm not saying it as necessarily to, you know,
I've been there and I may be there again.
I may be back there at some point where I'm working for dollars.
Right now, I have the fortune of working for cryptocurrency, which I consider the free market.
But I place the blame on the DAOs themselves for not figuring out what governments have figured out about how to employ a large labor force.
That's why most people don't work for the free market,
in my opinion, right now. Actually, Rion, I don't necessarily disagree with your premise
that all companies have to raise money, whether either raising money from their dad or from
their day job or from shareholders. Everybody's got to put together at least a couple grand to start a business, right? But can you explain what you mean by, okay, let, you know, any of those examples I
just mentioned, if you're a, if you're a tradesman or if you're a guy that starts like a web design
company and you're, and you're, you're not working for the free market, what does that mean?
I'm just, I just mean that most people, okay, you gave a couple examples, like a tradesman, lineman,
or whatever. Most likely they're working for a large corporation that's funded by
either debt or equity fundraising. It's just a fact. I mean, I'd like it to be other guys.
In my first five companies in life, I never took any debt ever.
So I don't think that that's always true.
I mean, I guess at larger scale, it's a lot more common.
I think in this crowd right here, potentially we have more entrepreneurs.
But I think it's 90 plus percent of people, they just work for somebody else, a big corporation that has gotten so big
because they've raised money. We can debate this. I don't have the facts right in front of me,
but this is my experience in life when I look outside of the crypto bubble is that 99% of people
or at least 90 plus percent of people work for a large corporation that's become so large because they've piggybacked on the banking system and raised huge amounts
of money to compete with those small individual entrepreneurs who did want to work in the
free market.
They got out-competed.
They got out-competed and now most people have to work for a large corporation.
I think this is a fact.
I guess what's your overall point to it?
So we could debate the details of whether funding is required, yada, yada.
But what is the overall point?
The overall point is that a lot of the companies,
they're not creating goods anymore.
We look around the economy,, we see that it's pretty
crappy, right? And it's because most companies, they answer ultimately to the funders, and that's
ultimately the government. And everything that the government makes is watered down, and we do the best that we can with it. But to the degree that crypto can figure this out
and compete legitimately with government-funded corporations,
that's the degree that we'll save the economy
and actually bring back the free market economy.
That's the overall point.
So if DAOs are dead,
the free market is dead,
in my opinion.
And if DAOs can thrive,
the free market will thrive.
Let me actually chime in
on something interesting
because I kind of feel like over
the course of this conversation what is and isn't a dow and the roles for a dow slash not for a dow
have really kind of you know the the definitions have started become a lot more clear uh so first
of all it seems like um one thing that i should say that makes like a DAO more than just an on-chain corporation of sorts is the decentralized and autonomous part of the organization, not just that it's an organization with voting.
means that there's not one entity or just a few entities that get to decide everything.
But in my opinion, also, decentralized also means open participation, meaning anyone can plug in or
plug out without necessarily the consent of existing people. And so, for example, if you have,
let's just say you started DAO and there's like governance tokens or whatever, and they're just free floating on the open market and no one controls their flow or not, then you can potentially someone can acquire governance tokens and then just, hey, guess what? My first day on the DAO. Good to meet you all. Just show up. And no one can stop that. Whereas if it's like you have to current members have to vote on
someone else coming in or out, maybe that's more of just a corporation than a DAO in my opinion.
And so first of all, on the smaller scale, the smaller scale, like when I think the DAO solves
a lot of problems at the very small type of a scale where it's a bunch of buddies coming together and it just like, you know, who's going to hold the funds? Who's going to be the treasurer kind
of thing? Who's going to? And then we all sort of like agree to decide. And it's like a lot of
times where you have a lot of inefficiencies and problems, they come from when you have some kind
of problem. Like the guy runs off with the money. Like how many times have I seen that happen at like the super local tiny level? Or, you know, you, you
disagree and then someone rage quits, you haven't figured out a good governance system yet. And so
that's kind of like the very small level kind of. And then obviously the entrepreneur type level
where you run a business, I, I, I don't think that should be a DAO in most cases personally,
because anytime you have sort of collective decision making, there is a socialization
aspect to that, which means the socialization of risk, which I think is kind of the point of the
DAO kind of is to diffuse the risk amongst more participants, but also the diffusing of the reward where if
someone makes a smart decision, it's not necessarily everyone is equally awarded for that.
And in the free market's hyper-efficient engine, I think that maybe the lone entrepreneur might be
the most efficient element in the entire world. I haven't thought deeply on this,
but it strikes me as the mini dictator
who takes all the risk and all the reward,
has all the decision-making power.
And a lot of them die, not literally die,
but as in the business doesn't work.
And that fine-tunes makes only the best come out.
When you start to have the very large way at way at the top, then you kind of want like a megacorp.
You kind of want probably a corporate structure or something like that.
Where the DAO makes sense at the highest of levels.
And again, this is just my, I've been thinking about this for the last like hour or so.
But, you know, I might change my opinion later.
But so far, this is what I seem to think.
When you end up into something that a lot of people would consider, would call like a public
good or something, whereas it's like public infrastructure or whatever, that's like where
a tragedy of the commons could take over or where typically people tend to want like a government
to come in and manage because it's like everyone deals with it. It's not just, oh, stop using this company, use another. It's tends to be like, you know, I'm going to trigger
all my libertarian friends by like bringing up, guess what example I'm going to use? Anyone want
to chime in? The roads. But so for example, things like the roads
or public type of things
that typically are done by governments,
maybe a good alternative there
is to run them as a DAO,
again, a true DAO
where it's decentralized and autonomous
and open participation
to where anyone can kind of come in or come out and participate you
can't exclude people from from participating that you could kind of um in a certain extent
you could kind of equate a representative government of sorts as a dao although i don't
think that's true because first of all, it's not autonomous because
it doesn't self-execute. Like if you vote for people to take office, you don't necessarily
have those people take office. If there's like corruption or something like that,
someone doesn't get in. It doesn't execute itself. You still have to trust people.
But it's sort of like analogous to that in that anyone can
participate if they can legally vote, they can vote for this. And then anyone could run for
office technically and get in there. Anyone could then vote for what happens to public funds,
things like that, or how much public funds should exist. It's kind of the idea of a modern DAO,
but it's not really executed because it has a lot of
human failings and I would say technological failings as well, because you still trust
things to execute and there's a lot of things that get in the way. Brock, you wanted to chime in on
that? Yeah, I would argue that, I mean, I see your point that it's not executing autonomously,
but you could make the same argument for like quick swap or most DAOs that have still on chain voting, but someone has to execute the action because we don't have pure autonomy or best systems built, best practices built yet.
And it provides protections. But anyways, obviously, I think it would be nice if we get things fully autonomous. But I think the autonomy segment the autonomy part of the DAO is similar to the
word decentralization, the first part, and it's a spectrum, right? So I would argue that
in some ways, democracies are a type of DAO. I think it's a fair argument. And I also think
if you can combine the best of our Web3 DAOs with the best of the American government, Representative Republic, I think that could be the best system.
I don't know.
Yeah, it's interesting.
The ideas, as it is written, there's nothing new under the sun.
The ideas of how do we get this kind of stuff done have been going on for millennia.
And the ideas get better, of course, over time and technology goes gets better over time.
But like, for example, just in the representative democracy kind of thing, you have to be a
voter in order to vote.
How do you become a voter?
Well, in let's just say in the US, you have to be a citizen.
You know, then you get to decide who can and can't be a citizen. Some of it S you have to be a citizen, uh, you know, then you get
to decide who can and can't be a citizen. Some of it's birthright. Some of it's not, you know,
and also there's, um, like there could be arbitrary laws created that would make someone a felon,
therefore not able to vote. There's a lot of like kinks to the system, right. That don't make it,
I guess, a perfect Dow. And a big part of that is
like, I would say anonymity of some kind has to be involved for it to be a real true DAO,
at least on the tech level of things that you should be able to let someone who just proves
that they can participate and they don't need to prove who they are in order to participate.
They just need to prove participation.
And we don't quite have that.
But that's kind of like my thought structure of things
is like a lot of arguments of is a DAO good or not
tend to be based on, I guess, those four super broad categories
I put out of like five dudes in their truck doing whatever at the bottom
to then the entrepreneur to then the entrepreneur
to where then the corporation to then the giant like government type thing or a public good type
thing that's, you know, kind of affects everyone type thing. And just in my initial thinking of
that would be down at the bottom, you want a Dow, then for the business, you want a dictatorship,
essentially, a free market dictatorship. And thenO. Then for the business, you want a dictatorship, essentially, a free
market dictatorship. And then you move up to the corporation, a traditional corporation probably
works out well, or potentially a DAO, but let's just say that. And then at the more what people
tend to call public good stage, that might be better for a DAO, where people, and I think it
might be worthwhile to say, to think of DAOs as the evolution of
governments to where government was the best that people could do at the time, maybe. And now that
we have decentralized options that work a little bit better and more autonomously, maybe this is
the next evolution of things. But that's kind of where my head is right now, but I'm like committing to this or writing a book about it yet. You know, when you say like at the corporate
level, kind of dictatorship, which is in some ways true, right? And, you know, I've had this
question in my head for, I don't know, the last few years, and I've been just noodling on this
idea. When I look at countries like Dubai and Singapore and others that are not democracies.
You know, maybe you can make an argument that Singapore is, but it's been two leaders for
70 years.
I would call it more of like a benevolent dictatorship, but they are clean.
They have good free market policies for the most part.
Same with Dubai, clean, safe, really good for businesses to come build.
And it makes me wonder, is democracy the thing that we got right?
Kind of back to what Sterling said earlier, is it, and I'm kind of paraphrasing and adding my own part, but is it the democracy that was the key element?
I'd like to think so to some extent.
Or was it just like good free market policies and and allowing capitalism
to flourish like could i guess my thinking after years of thinking about this is that
yes you could have i think you could actually have a better free market dictatorship than you
could have uh even a democratic but i think they're just going to be rare cases because over time,
corruption inevitably ensues. And even if like you get one dictator that was super great, well,
then how's his dad going to be? Is he going to be, or how's his son going to be? Is he going to be
better or is he going to be worse? And then over time you just get corruption overtaking. So you
get these, I feel like rare cases like Dubai or Singapore, but that democracy on the whole,
probably, or like a representative republic or some form of democracy still is the right way to go.
But I'm not sure. And I was, that made me thinking, I think of what you were saying about,
like, what if the states had had total autonomy over how they ran? And what if, you know,
individual states could like elect a king, you know,
and then if you didn't like it, you just go to another state.
I almost think the U.S. would be better off in like 20 different ways.
That's just one random way I just thought of.
But I almost think the U.S. would be so much better off if federal was way more constrained
than they were in our constitution and that the states had full autonomy and can run their own experiments and do no taxes or high property taxes or high taxes and etc.
I tend to agree obviously and that makes me biased being Mr. New Hampshire over here because
by a lot of broad-based freedom indexes, New Hampshire as far as the states are concerned
ranks as the number one freest state in the U.S. on a lot of metrics, which is kind of strange being
in the northern New England area, where that tends to be like a solid blue region. And blue
tends to mean higher restrictions on personal freedom and higher taxes these days. And part
of that is because in the state-based system... Which isn't that weird,
by the way, sorry to interrupt, but the word liberal means essentially freedom, right? And so
liberals fought for freedoms, personal freedoms, the right to be gay or to use drugs and have
autonomy over your body as long as you're not're not hurting people i mean it's supposed to be like libertarian right but it has completely shifted oddly yes i mean maybe bitcoin's not the
only thing that could be hijacked around here oh um anyway all right all right as i was saying
the interesting effect with i i found that one of the reasons why New Hampshire is surrounded by is a very purple state, but very liberty leaning purple state in a sea of blue and people that places that rank very low on these freedom indexes is like a vortex kind of effect where this is the optionality where every single town, for example, on the Massachusetts border is very, like super strongly read. Like it's really hard
to get any Democrats elected in those, those towns. I call them the refugee camps because
they just move like right over where they can still go say work in Boston or something like
that and live right there. And it kind of exercised the optionality because if you wanted to drive from, let's just say like horizontally from
Kitteria, Maine on the, um, on the ocean there to the West end of Vermont, whatever city's there,
all those three States, it's probably like two to three hours drive. It's like not that far.
Like, so if you don't like it, you can leave kind of, if you're living in Massachusetts, Vermont,
If you don't like it, you can leave kind of. If you live in Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, you can, it's not that hard to move just a little bit to get to a very much freer jurisdiction. And so you have that optionality. What I think would be better is if you could have the certain regions, like for example, 90% plus of Maine's territory is very much, I would say like red, which, you know, New England
can, tends to, um, translate more into just Liberty as a, as a whole, because the kind of
more undesirable, uh, red state elements in terms of a freedom perspective, just aren't that strong
in New Hampshire and in New England in general, You could have like Western Massachusetts
and almost all of Maine geographically
and good pieces of Vermont could just,
if they could just say we want to be under,
like let's just say on the county level
or the city level,
but say we want to be part of New Hampshire's scheme
and their laws and stuff.
And if they could vote every four years
to just move over,
that extra optionality,
I think would really, you know, kind of help out. One of those things that I think, again,
maybe it's just a figment of crypto DAOs the way we are now, because the DAOs are a free market.
Anyone can, anyone can use any crypto they want or not. But I would, is the, the option to exit. It's not just, oh, I get to vote. And if I don't like how
I vote, I just, I'm sad or I respect the governance decisions. And so for example,
I'm trying to like in the history of from my, just, I will have to get a long history of like
the dash votes over the last decade or something, the governance votes, and just analyze them.
But for example, I know that a certain number of people left the Dash ecosystem to go to PIVX back in the day.
Oh yeah, I remember that.
It was over privacy concerns.
I don't think there was an official vote on anything privacy related that didn't go their way and they left.
But it was like, well, what we like is not happening.
So we're going to go over here.
And then I think Smart Cash was mostly people from PIVX moving on there.
But whatever.
Firo is another one where they saw the certain.
It was, I would say, as a result of dow votes because the dow kept on voting
for dash core group whose a figurehead at the time was trying to downplay privacy to try to
not have so much heat from regulators and i know that at least ruben from fero who kind of runs the
project now kind of said that that he that he was until then, and he kind of moved off. So that is sort of like an exit.
And I would argue that because of all this kind of stuff, first of all, the Dow vote removed this person very explicitly, actually, in 2022.
So because of rough mismanagement, they literally were going to defund the entire core team if he didn't resign.
And he resigned minutes after the votes came back in to refund them so it was a very explicit firing by
the wow that's that's a pretty cool like case of governance so i mean like we get excited in um
quick swaps when when you meet yourself yes oh wait was, wait, was there a mute button? Did I mute everyone accidentally?
Um, I'm not sure, but I got, I was muted. But anyways, I was saying, you know, we get excited
at quick swap when a vote goes against what we propose. That's actually an exciting moment for us.
Even if it's like, even if we might think the thing that we're voting on was good for quick
swap when the community and the holders vote against it we're
like whoa that's pretty cool that's actually like governance in in action good governance i think
but yeah that's pretty cool to see that they said hey we don't like what you guys are doing
fire this guy or we're not going to fund you that's really cool yes and interesting on the
dow side of things a lot of a lot of the Dash core group had gotten consistent funding for
like eight years or seven years, something very long and very high vote totals for the
most part.
It was kind of thought of unheard of that they would not get something passed.
And a part of this, there was a certain, a growing segment of dash's user base which has actually
only grown since then has been from the cis region the russian-speaking uh region of the world
and i've asked them directly by the way about why are there so many of you in dash over the last few
years like what are we doing to attract you like what can how can we help you more and they don't
seem to really have a great answer.
Other than just like... Why are all you Russians here?
I'm joking.
Well, the funny part about it is Dash's primary use case
is as a payments method and a money,
which is illegal to do with crypto in Russia.
And there's a lot that are literally in Russia.
And so that's why it's a little bit more of a mis-
I mean, usually when things like, or not usually usually but a lot of the time when something's illegal it's
because it's a great use case and the government wants a monopoly on it so um i mean look my
mining bitcoin is illegal in china but it sure still happens right um yeah it makes sense that
russians i mean russians are sanctioned course, they have to use something like Dash. Yes, absolutely.
So anyway, but a big portion of this community was sort of instrumental in the vote.
And again, this isn't like the current people who, you know, people thought were part of the Dash DAO for the most part kind of participating.
It's just random.
People from a different country who never were explicitly outreached to reached out to
they just decided to join and then now they had a decide they they had a deciding power in one of
the biggest dow votes in the entire group things history so it just that's the autonomy part of
things um but then of course i would say that that, but also the, and this is just, this is very
much just my opinion at this point.
I mean, I don't know how widespread it is in the Dash community, but I kind of view
the, a lot of the Dash community has always cared deeply about privacy, but we're kind
of convinced to be a little quiet about it or prioritize other things for a while.
And at the same time, now that the leadership that kind of maybe convinced them is not there anymore,
now seems to be much more receptive moving back that way.
But also, I do think that there's a certain amount of maybe market share loss that happened as a result of not being super hardcore,
not at least sounding wishy-washy
maybe on this one issue and that's kind of like a where a turnaround is coming and again as i
mentioned uh we did have a dow vote couldn't you have just been more transparent and said like hey
guys we love i mean i've said this publicly about lda why we haven't worked on privacy projects over
the last decade because like we're huge on privacy A bunch of our team members are like hardcore on it,
but we don't want to be martyrs. I'm sorry. I want to, I want to fight for freedom, but I don't want
to go to jail and I don't want to die for it. You know, I, I would do it if I had to, but you know,
I think maybe lying and waiting for the right moment. So like, for example, now we're starting
to work with privacy projects because the regulatory framework has loosened.
But couldn't you have just, couldn't the leaders have just said like,
hey guys, we don't want to get in trouble and we don't want,
we want to be friendly to regulators.
Maybe that's not cypher punk, but hey, look,
if the community wants to take that on, have all at it, do it.
But we, as like figureheads like we just we can't do
it i wonder if there's a way you could have done that or if that's even too dangerous that probably
would have been worse to say it that way whereas just like the softening of the met the kind of
idea was to not again not my idea so maybe i can't speak intelligently to them, but it seemed to be the vibe was,
no, no, we care about all this stuff,
but let's just not talk to it.
Just kind of like, you know, let's just say if you believe in like,
like there was a time when being a cannabis user
in the US was unpopular.
And I mean, it's still technically illegal
in a lot of the US, right?
Or at the federal level.
It's completely legal in the whole u.s
basically right technically but there was a time when it was um if you admitted to that it was like
admitting to being a criminal it like was a little sketchier to do where people would they would
never say so people who advocated for it would just be like you know well you know criminal
sentencing is not good and like etc etc but, et cetera, but just wouldn't be like, there's nothing wrong with smoking weed
to get high for just because you wanted to, there's nothing wrong with that. And so it might
have been a similar idea, but anyway, basically it never was really a technological decision.
It was more like a public messaging decision. And at the end, so a few months ago, there was just an explicit vote
that I kind of got going about technologically, let's should we advance with a few, a few
technological improvements. And it was, you know, as I mentioned, strongly in the yes favor, but
like not overwhelming. It was like, you know, three out of four, yes, kind of. So strong, but not like completely unanimous.
But now that there is that actual like decision,
now we don't have to be like worrying about it nearly as much
because, you know, it's out there.
The whole thing came together and it kind of worked.
But I don't remember where we even got on this tangent
about what we were talking about right before I went into
like, let me regale you with the history of our early years.
Well, I guess I'll just add one piece to it.
I don't know if this will probably won't jog any memory, but I mean, this is something
that public, you know, faces have to do in the world.
I mean, politicians don't always say what they actually mean. And either they're trying to deceive their voters
into voting for them,
or they are doing some kind of strategy.
I mean, Trump saying they're going to keep tariffs on China.
I mean, there's an adversary there,
so they can't tell their true moves.
They might say,
we're going to fucking bomb the shit out of you,
but it's to scare them
when they have no intention of bombing them
and all kinds of reasons. Anyways, but like you see as another example of this from
our industry, Michael Saylor. Michael Saylor knows damn well that Bitcoin could challenge the dollar,
right? But he never says that. He never says that. He says actually completely the opposite,
which is, you know, it supports the dollar. And, you know, now,
whatever, we have stable coins, and we have, you know, and the dollar will continue to get stronger as a currency, but Bitcoin will be a store value. I don't think he fully believes that.
I think he knows that it could become a currency that and it could destroy the dollar over time.
I mean, I certainly believe that. I think even the people on here that aren't as big of fans
of Bitcoin because of decisions over the years would probably still say there is a chance that, you know,
Bitcoin takes out the US dollar someday. Is there anyone here who would say 0%
Bitcoin may take out the dollar someday?
Come on, do you really have to think about zero percent come on man well i wouldn't say zero
percent what i would say i don't know maybe i'm giving it 75 that it does
well i would say 80 to 90 percent that crypto as a whole takes out uh the dollar how much of that
will be bitcoin i think it I think it'll be impossible
to even tell in real time about, I think it's just fiat as a whole is going extinct over the years.
But anyway. Agreed. But yeah, anyway, that's the situation where he can't say what he really means
because we're trying to Trojan horse our way in to the regulators and to the governments and to
the countries and the kings and whoever controls, you know, controls all these things, you know, we're trying,
we have to, and I always hoped this would happen. And I never thought it would work out as well as
it has. And some people will argue that they're co-opting us, but I would argue we're co-opting
them. We're taking over the governments and we're taking over the currency systems and all these,
We're taking over the governments and we're taking over the currency systems and all these.
But I always hoped, and going back to 2015, that we would just Trojan horse slowly our way in.
Kind of the first they laugh at us, that kind of stuff.
And I think we really have in a lot of ways.
And again, some people will say, no, they're taking us over.
And maybe it's a little
of both maybe it's a a nice little cooperative uh symbiotic relationship for the time being
until we destroy them and become parasite on them yeah i mean definitely like as a technology
updates i think that the powers that be would rather have permissioned
tech and not permissionless tech involved and i also think that the people building the
permissionless tech would rather have less influence from these big entities that don't
have our best interests at heart and i kind of think that neither side's getting what they want
100 but like the big entities get to survive by using the new tech, the new money. And then
unfortunately we have to deal with a little bit of their annoying influence here and there. So
there's that. Yeah. I mean, but it's all Trojan horses in my book, like USDC and USDT are temporary
plays to me. They're going to be like temporary as in maybe 10, 20 years, but they're going to,
and they're going to be probably massive, right? They might be a majority of the world's money movement, kind of sadly to me.
But that seems to be the path.
And then you get everyone on the rails.
And then once the government starts becoming overbearing on stable coins, like they've done with the dollar historically, weaponizing it, sanctioning people, freezing people, taking their money, all of these things that all the governments of the world have done. As that happens, then people will move to the more decentralized
stuff, especially as Bitcoin or other things become less volatile.
To me, stable coins are just a temporary thing. Bitcoin, Litecoin, even Doge, Dash,
these things will be, you won't need stable coins.
Why would you need that eventually?
The main reason now is because of the volatility.
Yeah, I definitely agree with that.
But yeah, so on the Dow thing, here's the thing about dows uh first of all we're talking we ended up kind of
segue into kind of government things when we're talking about old dow for a small corporation
for a non-profit these little things here or for a crypto how do they decide these things
um as far as like replacing a government or government type services. What do you guys think about that?
Is it a good thing to do?
Is it a good thing to try on the local level?
Is it not maybe a good thing?
Like maybe we just get rid of government
and don't have anything that's anywhere,
anything like it at that kind of a level.
Anyone got any thoughts on that?
Sterling, you think a lot about this, I think.
Yeah.
So I think when I think about governance, and first of all, let's just talk about governance and government so that people can distinguish the difference between the two.
But it's kind of something that Joel hinted at.
So government is just coerced governance, right? Governments just tell people
how to live, what to do, how to solve problems, what the rules are, et cetera. And then that
typically happens at the barrel of a gun. That's just government. Governance is just collective
decision-making, collective sense-making. It's figuring out dispute resolution. It's figuring
out how we can actually get along.
It's basically terms of service and mutual understanding, right? So if we think about
what will happen in the absence of government, will it be DAOs? Will it be something else?
How I see it, if we just imagine a blank slate, right? Society tabula rasa. We have a situation
where there's going to be a multitude of experimentations that potentially take place or can take place.
This is just assuming like power vacuums don't emerge and it just becomes the same situation we're in because now we have different kinds of technologies.
Also, we have years of collective wisdom that we've accumulated.
So the idea is that experiments are run in different places.
Some places may choose
to embrace a Dow model. Some places may choose to adopt a, like a Switzerland S Canton model.
Some may even choose to be more top down in some ways. And I'm not just saying this strictly
hypothetically, because this is actually what's happening across the globe right now, right?
I mentioned the parallel society movement.
I want to give some examples so that people can be very clear.
This isn't just me abstraction mongering.
So you have the Switzerland experiment, which is a pop-up city that occurred in Switzerland,
which is considered a governance and innovation experiment that lasted a month long.
They are now looking for a permanent hub in Switzerland.
And I think they actually want to try to embrace the Canton model and actually work as a Canton, potentially in Switzerland.
So you have Edge City, which had a pop up in California, one called Esmeralda.
They also, I mentioned earlier, they're having one in Patagonia. And then, of course, you haveinkering with different kinds of governance modalities.
They also, I mentioned earlier, they're having one in Patagonia.
They're experimenting with different things
and they're also implementing DAOs.
They're implementing just different kinds
of human forms of governance.
So I think what we'll continue to see
is a ton of different experimentation
in how society is organized and how it functions.
And I think we're gonna gather a lot of data around this.
And I don't just mean like hard data, blockchain and platform data.
I also mean like sociological data, talking about experiments, using things like focus
groups, interviews, surveys, understanding the actual human dynamics.
Something that I say a lot, a lot of people talk about, oh, we need all the hardware.
We need all the software.
We have all of that. We have all of that.
We have all that in the world, but we don't always have the humanware.
We don't always have the human component ironed out.
And this is where I think solving governance is really going to happen.
And it's sort of an unappreciated perspective.
So I'm going to stop.
I don't want to go on and on about this topic.
want to go on and on about this topic, but the short story is that it could be a variety of
different mechanisms that allow us to solve governance. But ultimately, this kind of stuff
is usually broken down on paper, or it happens with some kind of technology. You can have high
tech, or you can have low tech. Any of that can matter. But I personally, my personal preference,
and this is, Joel,
where you and I probably agree, I see technology playing a huge role, specifically decentralized
autonomous organizations, in developing the governance modalities of the future.
Yeah. But I don't think I can really add very much to that it was pretty
pretty eloquent and yet succinct um one thing i will kind of um pivot to briefly i guess because
you know we have been going for a very long time so i know some people are gonna get start getting
tired and like shuffle off but one thing i think is um something that had a, so I mentioned like personally, my concern,
like my concern with lack of governance is what caused me to really prioritize
DAOs in my own attention. But on the other side of things, I have found that a lot of DAOs from
just the funding perspective, as far as you, you have money money and then you distribute said money, tends to be or can be
inefficient. This is one of the oldest things in the Dash Great book is back in the end of 2017,
the price was high enough that the Dash Dow is kicking out like 10 million per month
of treasury funding. There's some pretty cool stuff you could do with that. And I would say that to a great extent, the Dash Dow
today at like a fraction of that is doing better or the same or almost the same as then. A lot of
money was being just wasted. And I think, I mean, some of it had to be the Dow grew up and the people
involved learned how to be a little bit smarter in what they vote to fund this project, then if someone has a smart vote, too bad, it goes with everyone.
And then you fund something dumb and then everyone loses.
And you don't reward that.
Or if everyone does something smart, the person who pioneered that smart decision,
it kind of gets lost in the crowd and you end up having dumb decisions.
Whereas then you go to the dictatorships of an entrepreneurship or a
business whereas the business makes all the decisions and takes all the risk i mean they
just they go out of business if they suck but then if they they do well they keep it all they get all
that money and they just keep it and obviously a mixture of having like businesses and DAOs like that I think is good but any thoughts about the
inefficient allocation of capital problem in a DAO any thoughts on that I guess
um yeah that's interesting like in some weird ways it has parallels to like socialism, but not really. Anyways, like I guess, you know, one of the big things libertarians debate about is like, could the streets and roads dow and uh if that dow sucked
and wasn't spending the money that you volunteered to it well well and and companies would donate
money to it because they need to use the roads and neighborhoods would donate money or it could
be various kind of layers of an onion and if there was one that was doing shitty stuff and the roads
weren't working well you'd stop donating to them and you donate to someone else just a random thought yeah so well
just on the roads real quick because it's it keeps coming up and it's also something i have a little
bit of experience with i grew up in the north part of sonora in mexico my parents are cattle ranchers. And for like miles, like 30, 60 miles, there's
unpaved roads there that are not maintained officially by the government. And so the local
ranchers all around would every couple of years or something, uh, get together and fund a tractor
to come and just grate the roads and keep everything kind of working for everyone.
And, uh, there were occasionally people who did not want to do their part.
When is there here, their turn to do this?
They'd be like, no, I don't want to.
And then they were kind of shunned in a business sense,
or no one would do business with them because they're like,
this is the prick who won't pay for the roads.
And so there are ways of solving this without an explicit government.
But on the funding thing, I guess one of these issues is the just thinking out loud brainstorming. I mean, yeah, imagine that.
Sorry to interrupt, but at a larger level, if government – like this is the thing with governments is everyone thinks they're the only ones that can do certain things.
But it's only because we've given them that,
and so now we are crippled by them doing the thing.
Now we're not going to find a way to solve it
because the government does it for us.
And so Rhodes is a good example of that,
which I'm not convinced that we shouldn't have government for Rhodes.
As a hardcore libertarian, I don't know.
But, I mean, at the same scale that you just talked about,
imagine if you needed a big interstate freeway going across the country.
If who would do it?
Someone would fucking do it.
Right.
Either there would be volunteer money or you would just have a bunch of corporations that are going to use that road to make money would all gather together and put money together to make the road.
Or a private company would make the road and charge a toll, which governments do, too, anyways.
Someone would solve it, though. right? I think. Yeah. I mean, that's a great thing for like a
Dow, for example, especially because if you could then vote to give a contract to something else.
In fact, when I made a presentation for the New Hampshire state legislature explaining to a bunch of 70 and 80 year olds what a Dow is. And I kind of used that as an example to just try to get them
to figure out the thing. I think it works. You started with Rhodes or you started with
New Hampshire? Well, I started with like a snow plowing thing, you know, basically.
Because Rhodes is something the most hardcore libertarians struggle to explain. Starting with Rhodes is probably an uphill battle to try to explain to an old person who doesn't understand doubts.
Yes, but everyone pays for their own snowplow around here for the most part.
Joel likes the challenge, though.
challenge. Yes, of course. But so as far as it seems like there's this binary type thing of
you either have like a business that you're running this way, like you either have a
individual decision with individual risk, etc. Or then you also have a collective
risk problem where you collect that you socialize the risk, but you socialize the reward as well.
And what I think that DAOs are missing is some kind of a hybrid or middle ground in a way.
So for example, I would like it to somehow have like the, the, the goal I would say,
and you know, I've, I've, there's many technological ways of maybe approaching this,
but the goal I would say would be to have it where let's just say the Dow votes to fund something that let's just say an investment vehicle of some kind.
And then you have the yes votes and the no votes.
These guys think it's great.
These people don't think it's great.
And obviously the collective funding goes to the yes votes if it passes.
funding goes to the yes votes if it passes. But what I'd like for there to be a thing is
instead of everyone kind of loses if it's a dumb decision, I would like the people who voted for
the dumb decision to somehow suffer a little more, or the opposite is true, where the people who
voted yes for this collective decision, if it turned out well, then they end up doing a little bit better.
I like that. You could almost make it a betting model, like a predictions model or something.
I just don't know technologically how to do it.
Ryan, you're chatting.
Do you have an opinion on that maybe?
Can you imagine if politicians put their money in on these things?
Like who were the politicians who said,
let's put $29 billion towards
fixing the homeless in California, and then homelessness went up 40% in the next few years?
They would be, maybe you could even short them. Maybe prediction markets help you. Sorry,
but go ahead. I'm going to have to run here in a second. I have another Spaces, guys.
I pinned it in the Jumbotron if anyone wants to come.
I pinned it in the Jumbotron. If anyone wants to come, we're talking about tokenization.
We're talking about tokenization.
Bit angels, right?
Yeah, for bit angels, tokenized assets.
Joel, if you want to come, I'll even call you your real name, Joel, to be nice to get you to come.
But if you want to come, you're running joke.
Yes.
Yeah, so I'll answer your question, Joel.
To go along with my previous comments as well, all of this is free market stuff, right? So if you're in a DA. However, there's a simple model.
So in that respect, I'd like your idea.
I would like to see that implemented and tried.
However, I have, through my 12-year-plus crypto journey, I have gained a newfound respect for the economics of government and how they've become so successful. Even though
I loathe the ethics of government, I'm an anarchist in that sense, I've gained a respect for
the banking system, government financing things, making roads, things like that. Like they do, certain things just can't be funded
outside of the government.
Take nuclear power, for example.
But on a smaller scale,
just to get back to the main point here,
one of the things that the banking sector has innovated
and has tried and true, tested,
is just the simple concept of loans.
So if these, right now, DAOs are, for the most part, grants.
But if we flip that model and said, hey, we don't give grants anymore.
We just give loans.
It's up to you.
We'll help you.
We'll help you get started.
We think it's a good idea, but we don't think it's such a good idea that we're just going to give you some money.
Let's give you a loan, and then you find a way to get revenue in your own little thing.
We're not going to micromanage you.
We're just going to give you a loan.
You find a way to get revenue.
Like the QuickSwap guys were saying something, how much revenue you guys have gotten.
And that's awesome.
Yeah.
A hundred mil in our first year.
Yeah.
That's not to the foundation.
That's to basically all shareholders,
either token holders,
LPs,
some to foundation.
And now we burn most of it.
So we're burning like almost a half a million dollars of quick per month.
Yeah.
Anyway, sorry.
Okay, I got to go.
I'm so sorry, guys.
If you guys want to come to the next space, Rion, you're invited.
Everyone invited will be talking about tokenized assets.
And I did want to say I'm going to tease something that I wish I had time to talk about here because it's about like how we can make either DAOs or decentralized things. But this is something I thought of during Defund the Police.
As someone who like I support that we need police, but I don't love their tyranny.
I thought about how we could do like almost Uber, but for police.
And you could even have like a DAO model in it.
But anyways, I'm going to go.
Maybe I'll mention it in the next spaces if we have time.
But if you guys want to come, see you guys there.
Joel, this was a great space.
As always, this is one of my favorite spaces in a long time.
Thanks, Sterling, for coming, and Carlos from Aragon who came.
And then I'll let you, Joel.
Thank everyone you invited.
Much love.
See you guys all soon.
Bye-bye.
See you, Rob.
Bye-bye.
Thanks for coming.
Yeah, just to wrap up the thought that I was going down.
So we don't have to
reinvent everything the the traditional markets have invented a lot of really good
business structural models like like loans raising capital to either through debt or equity and that's
one of the great things about dash platform that i'm looking forward to is you know if if our masters will allow us, we can start issuing equities and even securities.
I'll just use that word
because that covers the equities and the bond issuances.
And that's really, that's the way to do things, right?
That's the way to give people money
and expect something in return. so you can still do grants and like like dash has has focused more on
infrastructure than than a company like quick quick swap which is the point that i was making
they're making revenue and and could we have funded some things to make revenue earlier on?
Yes, but at the sacrifice of some of the more infrastructural things that we've been building.
So we're more of a long-term play here.
But yeah, we do need to get back into that idea of like, we expect some revenue out of the things that we're funding.
like we expect some revenue out of the things that we're funding and that revenue needs to go back to
the investors somehow
yeah um just thinking from like a dow voting type perspective of i'm almost wondering.
So it's, I'm almost wondering if there's an easy way to like, for example, it's easy enough to tokenize revenue from a proposal.
Let's just say you put up a budget proposal and Mark, feel free to chime in
on any of this stuff because, um, I have a lot more pigeonholed in my knowledge on DAO stuff.
So if there's something out there that's already kind of working like this in crypto,
love to learn about it.
But it would be very nice to, like, imagine you're going to say,
hey, let's vote for this, you know, revenue producing thing.
And then two thirds vote for it, one third votes against it.
And each voter gets a voting
token as a result of that. And you get, it's a different token for yes versus no votes.
And then as a result of the effort, let's just say this thing produces revenue,
then it goes to token holders proportionally, or part of it does, let's just say,
and it more than would go to the yes votes than the no votes because they were instrumental in
making it happen. So that something like that could make it so that even though it's a collective
decision, the individuals earn, the individuals profit more from a good decision. Now, then you have to do the other side where you have like a
cost thing, where if it's maybe you find a way for the guest votes to actually have to pay for
a vote in some way, like give up a little additional, a little of their own money as well
to make something like that happen. Maybe there could be like a runoff voting type strategy
type thing where if it's like an overwhelming vote, it just gets funded from the treasury.
There's no difference. All voters are equal kind of thing. But if it's a contentious vote,
then you have that thing where, okay, well, if you want to still trigger a funding,
then the yes votes now need to put up some extra money to push it over the line.
And then that money is then, you know, it's at cost, it's at risk.
And then they would be able to profit from something like that, which of course is super
hard to program in for all possible, for all possible outcomes.
But I don't know, what do you think?
I don't know. What do you think? Is there anything like that out there or any kind of approach to that?
Is there anything like that out there or any kind of approach to that?
You can do something very close to that already with depending on which part of your implementation you want to lean hardest into. of Robin Hanson's futarchy, which is a complicated governance system.
It's been mentioned a few times on this call
where you basically,
it's a, I mean, it was originally proposed
as like a governance for everything model,
but it could be used in the context
of on-chain projects as well.
And it has to do with like basically betting for success
the second way that i would implement it using existing no code tools that are out there
um without you know having to really make it a science project with instead of being issuing
tokens for uh yeses versus nos you could implement almost everything that you said just by
monitoring on chain activity via snapshots and and or using like a moloch dal um it gets a little
tricky i mean the devil's in the detail i wouldn't say tricky the devil there's a lot of devil in the detail, I wouldn't say tricky, there's a lot of devil in the details in terms of are the funds being dispersed into a main treasury vault or a non-main treasury vault?
You know, are they protected from rage quits or not? Do you want to have a rage quit mechanism
built into it? I mean, so the Moloch DAO approach to kind of what you're talking about, it mitigates risk similarly, but not precisely how you mentioned was if you have a vote where it's controversial or, you know, some minority of people feel like it is a deal breaker for them to continue to participate or
be associated with that uh dow after this decision to spend this money goes through
there's a period of time well i mean you can always rage quit but there's a period of time
where you can like a usually like a uh what do you call it uh there's like a grace period uh
what do you call it?
There's like a grace period between the passing of the proposal and the
implementation of the proposal,
where if a certain threshold of members rage quit,
it reverts the proposal entirely.
So yeah,
there's,
there's a,
you know,
different checks and balances that exist there,
but in terms of like compensating or rewarding folks,
more or less,
you wouldn't actually need to issue secondary tokens for that
because all the, you know, the, the,
most of these DAO structures, you know,
NAMS DAO, MOLOCK DAOs, even, even snapshot,
all that stuff is registered in some way on chain
where you can pull it and,
you know, create a reward structure based on that. And you just would probably want to enumerate that in the DAO proposal that, you know, this is the terms of your vote, this is what you're getting.
Because really at the end of the day, you know, these are just contracts between a group and its constituent members
right um and so that's why uh you are you we have ex in in this crowd mem the examples of successful
dows that are essentially run almost entirely at the social layer like there's no on-chain execution
at the social layer, like there's no on-chain execution, right?
They'd run a snapshot vote and then someone enacts that snapshot vote, you know, out of
a multi-signosis safe or something, right?
And that's because, you know, the social layer of that DAO, that the community is strong
enough to enforce compliance voluntarily with you know basically
what our sentiment snapshot votes um and then you know that's so i don't know i'm kind of rambling
at this point but basically there's a lot of ways to skin the cat on what you're talking about there
um without issuing new tokens uh and doing with no-code or low-code solutions.
Yeah, that definitely makes sense to me.
As a historical example, interestingly enough,
there was a highly controversial proposal in...
It turned out to be highly controversial by the end, I should say,
in the Dash DA dow many years ago
called kuva cash that was sort of like a payment app and remittance service focused on sub-saharan
africa particularly zimbabwe and the person running that ended up doing some sketchy things in the end
and they ended up sort of splitting the dash community into at one point which is kind of crazy
splitting the dash community into at one point, which is kind of crazy. Um, so, but the interesting
part is, uh, one of their later proposals, they said, if you vote to fund our thing,
yes, votes will get, you know, a part of, we'll get equity in this thing. And it was interesting
because at the time, you know, I mean, and I, it's still, it's kind of like a bribe, right?
You're just saying, if you vote for my thing, I will get you, I will get you something for it.
And to encourage that specifically.
Now, the, where it gets a little bit more, I guess, nuanced is if this had been something like, if you are a yes vote and you donate to this out of your own money as well.
So then you take some risk, then you get some equity back.
Something like that because that only rewarded the one side of things and not the other.
But if there's something that can be super easily built, right, or something can super easily set up to where it's not this huge, complicated or manual process
or anything. I think that could be really, really kind of interesting.
I mean, you just basically either with Moloch DAO or
snapshot vote, you know, first of all, you meter what your reward
is going to be or your penalty is going to be in the vote
proposal. And then as part of the proposal you
would probably want to like have a multi i mean if you're this is all assuming evm to it by the way
so in that you would have like a multi-step execution that you pre-built as part of that
proposal if it passes uh that issues the tokens that represent that reward. And then, you know, depending upon like how that reward comes in,
that's either like streaming rewards, like, as you can,
there's smart contracts for streaming profits, you know,
as they come in and automatically giving them out to the constituent owners of
that or who is entitled to it. Or you could even have like a, you know,
this is where this is the profit or loss date.
You know, that's a Snapchat. It's going to be three months from now or six months from now.
And, you know, what remains of the treasury will be deposited into this Gnosis safe.
And then you just slap a exit vault smart contract on that safe and then people can take those those tokens that they got you know that represent you
know how they voted or how they participated in that particular governance snapshot to to redeem
whatever's in that treasury yeah about something to work on for sure i mean um i think that these
kinds of things are also like problems that are problems that really
exist beyond just like the localized crypto DAO kind of world.
And yeah, I think if there's good, like, obviously, I come to the kind of realization that
tech in cryptos, I especially, but maybe tech as a whole, is almost like a secondary importance.
That primary importance is the people involved and how they're able to work hard and sell this thing and make it work.
But I do think that having solid tech and incentives, like well-structured incentives especially, is just such an amplifying effect.
incentives, like well-structured incentives especially, is just such an amplifying effect.
So it would be very cool to see a system that has this whole hybridized DAO thing involved
where you do have a way that they can kind of put extra risk on certain people or not.
It could be...
Well, just off the top of my head, I do like the idea of
the sort of runoff voting where now you have to pay, where if everything is unanimous,
then it's unanimous and it's just fine. But if things get contentious, if there's a contentious
vote, but it's still like yes, if it's a contentious, like no's still a yes if it's a contentious like no vote if it's
clearly like no then that's no but if it's contentious and it's very close to a yes in
some way to just make it or part of it has to be crowdfunded and so people aren't willing to put
money behind it to add it like let's just say you're asking for like a hundred grand and if
you get like unanimous or like super majority support,
it just gets paid out of the treasury.
But if you're at,
if you get to like 52% or 54% support for it versus like 46%,
then you only 67%,
only 67 grand is able to come out of the Dow provided that the rest of it gets made up by donations.
And then once that amount gets hit, then it kind of goes out.
And then by having like a hybridized system like that, it's just like, you know, if you can't get consensus, then it's not just, oh, well, whoops, we won, we get our way.
It's like, oh, how much do you want it?
Do you really want it that bad okay well then prove it with more than by doing a super hard vote which is giving as well you put
some money behind it it's not just your initial stake you got to up your stake in in order to
make this work so that could be an interesting thing so you can actually do that as well with
a moloch dow because of the separation of concerns between governance and
loot tokens you can issue more loot tokens uh based upon contributions and you can have that
those contributions be uh directed donations or directed investments uh by by the uh the proposal
uh and then when,
so that would actually be like
you're kind of juice up the situation.
And instead of having a governance vote,
you could have it put to the investors
with a directional vote.
There's like a directional vote option
with a Moloch down.
Where you can basically,
it's a non-binding vote,
but it's used for measuring sentiment of the masses.
And that way it's kind of a,
it accomplishes what you're talking about.
And this is again,
stuff that you can do with EVM tooling without writing a single line of
code.
Yeah.
Very interesting.
Would be cool to have.
It's always a possibility that Dash gets evm at some point in the near
future but well that's a discussion for another day um anyone else have any sort of final thoughts
we're probably getting good to wrap this thing up pretty pretty soon um anyone have anything
that wasn't covered or any other thing you want to say um go once going twice?
Well,
I know that Xano checked out a little while ago,
but it has kept the account going.
So it's basically just a couple of us speaking.
So I think it would be good to wrap this up.
Thanks everyone for coming.
This has been a great chat.
Nerding out over DAOs and governance is something that i personally find very fascinating
and i've loved chatting with mark in person about this before and it's not something that everyone
really is into and i'm kind of shocked about how calm how uncommon dows or explicit governance is
in crypto i'm not saying it's that uncommon, but for as important as it
is, it's still kind of niche in some ways. So I definitely like to explore these kinds of
conversations in the future. So thanks everyone for showing up. This has been a great chat
over in the Jumbotrons, the BitAngels space, which I'll be less active in, but I'll probably
pop in and be around to say stuff for at least a few minutes.
And next week's subject is going to be, drum roll, should cryptos market themselves?
Now, this is kind of a weird thing because some people would say, duh, yes, but there's
historically been a lot of the more OG things.
Like, for example, in the early days, Dash was one of the only projects that had anything considered a budget that you could do to pay someone to host a meetup or run an ad or something.
And got kind of branded as like a marketing coin in a super negative way, right?
That's, oh my gosh, you got to pay for marketing.
It's terrible.
And it's kind of swung, you got to pay for marketing is terrible. And, uh, it's kind of
swung way in the other direction now, but even right now, the Thor chain community is be, a lot
of people are pushing back against trying to like actually market Thor chain. It's kind of weird.
And there's a little bit of a fight inside the community going on right about that now.
So I thought that'd be a fascinating topic to um explore i know um zan has
been doing a great job with on that front lately and really you know the influencer space other
things like that and um it's just kind of an interesting thing about like obviously companies
market themselves or or are marketed or whatever but like decentralized protocols should the tech
just speak for itself and should all reach be just purely organic or what's the role of marketing in that that could be kind of interesting chat so be
prepared for that one again as always uh this is going to be at 1 p.m eastern slash 5 p.m utc
every thursday if you want to speak feel free to message ahead of time as well just hey can i speak on a
spacer or whatever or you should let this guy speak this is great um as well as come up and
request during the actual uh show and um as always thanks suzanna for co-hosting and download the
edge wallet if you haven't already um hopefully they'll be back to actually pop in for next time. But if not, you know,
go for that. Thanks everyone. Have a great week weekend. And if of course, if you're one of them
peoples that celebrates independence day, that's happening tomorrow in the US. So I mean, I know
Canada just had one, for example. But the real the real event try to trigger some people have a happy weekend
and holiday etc and don't be afraid to message me as if I'm working because I
probably will be anyway a little bit so thanks everyone oh yeah follow this
account and share the space if you liked it at all just hey everyone you should
listen to the space it was a great discussion and yeah I'll see you guys
around next week.
Bye-bye. Thank you.
