I recall the mid-summer Virginia afternoon back in 2013 being filled with copious conversations ranging from how to achieve value stability for a cryptocurrency to this strange idea Stan Larimer had called a DAC – a decentralized autonomous company. His drafts contained terms like Steely Eyed Geeks and a nice list of rules definitely inspired by Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov, but with the boyish enthusiasm only Stan could muster. The article (Bitcoin and the Three Laws of Robotics) eventually found its way to Bitcoin Magazine and the Let’s Talk Bitcoin’s blog as well as Vitalik’s September series (1).
I’d like to believe that we were all after the same goal in those more innocent and lower stakes days. All cryptocurrencies, and protocols for that matter, suffer from a fundamental meta problem of governance. Eventually changes will need to be made to accommodate some unforeseen complication, the burning march of ever changing technology and social pressures, or even a black swan event. Furthermore, how do you pay the selfless (sometimes not so much) people who are maintaining the protocol? How do you balance the different interests of various stakeholders from regulators to service providers such as exchanges and miners.
The foundational premise of Bitcoin can be encapsulated succinctly as people suck so just trust a protocol. This line of thought has lead to numerous problems from a lack of recourse for theft (see MtGox and the dozen other exchanges) to dark market operators such as silk road using Bitcoin as their payment network. Furthermore, the rewards to miners are not connected to any external reality- just hard locked and unresponsive to the needs of the network. The protocol marches on like a silent, yet diligent sentinel uncaring in judgement, but utterly fair.
We were interested in DACs because the se…
Thoughts from Charles: Some History, Some Musings and My Take on the DAO
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