Where to start building your own DAO, why will oligarchs be the most useful citizens of networked states, and will there be a place for good old cryptanarchism in these structures? These and other pressing issues related to social organization in the Web3 era are answered by the guests of the All Time Half (ATH) conference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUcrQ7hKr4YIs DAO about a new form of ownership?
Briefly: Yes, but this is just the beginning.
Sergey Mendeleev (exved.com ): The concept of DAO is good not only for business, but also for public administration in cases where it comes to decentralization, transparency, and control. I am waiting for one of the UN member states to hold elections on a real blockchain, where it will be possible to vote with a token and automatically sum up using a smart contract.
Andrey Tugarin (GMT Legal): DAO as a company is too small. I am sure that a decentralized autonomous organization as a form of public administration is the next stage of human development. Everyone will get fed up with what is happening now, and everyone will go into what is called TAO.
Is TAO about democracy?
In short: Democracy is only one form of organization, and TAO is a field of experiments.
Denis Smirnov (DeFi consultant): Unfortunately, democracy has distinct disadvantages. One of the main ones is the possibility of "bribing" voters through populism. In a fragmented society where participants are willing to cast a vote in exchange for substantial promises, people will vote for promises, not for results. For the TAO, democracy is not an ideal option, and entities that survive use meritocratic models — the one who will bring the most benefit earns.
Futarchy is one of the options for managing communities, in which the reward comes not for making a decision, but for its consequences. If we voted for a tax increase and as a result began to live worse, then the value of the decision is low, and it is not worth rewarding for it. In the long run, this approach will lead to inefficient participants being washed out of the system.
I will get hurt for this statement, but in networked states, oligarchs will be the most useful members of society. Because as soon as they cease to be useful, society will immediately get rid of them.
Peter Bel (Byzantium): Why futarchy and not panarchy? By tossing dice, generating nonsense, and making random decisions, panarchy looks a little more like evolution.
Is it true that TAO is a form without content?
Briefly: It may seem so, but it's not entirely fair.
Alexander Boldachev (philosopher): TAO is one of the ways of technological organization of activities that does not introduce anything new into existing models: cooperatives have always been there, there was only a technological platform missing.
The whole history of TAO resembles the play of children in the theater: they draw tickets, make perforations on a sewing machine so that the countermark comes off, but it does not come to the performance. Secondly, activities can be so different that there simply cannot be a single mechanism of organization: somewhere there must be an authoritarian leader, somewhere a cooperative organization is suitable.
Decentralization is not a panacea.
Denis Smirnov: The DeFi sector is an example of the DAO's work. If we look at the capitalization level of existing DAOs, we will see several thousand organizations producing a specific impact, it's just often a specific story related to DeFi protocols. DAO works, and all organizations that have achieved something in the field of DeFi gravitate towards this management model.
Peter Bel: The TAO is changing and must change. This is not the story when we came up with a theater in advance and started handing out tickets. What I like about the idea of TAO is that it can be changed from the inside.
Is DAO about technology?
In short: Technology is secondary, community is primary.
Denis Smirnov: Many people on the way to the TAO made this mistake: they created an infrastructure, issued a token and after that they expected people to organize. It doesn't work. When we talk about decentralized organizations, we mean communities. TAO is not a technology, it is an ideology, it just has a good toolkit. Communities first, then tools.
Peter Bel: All DAOs are primarily social constructs. They're about what people have in their heads, what ideas they want to unite around. Like any social environment, it is poorly predictable. It's always an extremely unpredictable story.
What is the relevance of TAO as a political project?
In short: Nation-states do not meet the new challenges facing humanity.
Denis Smirnov: Today we are witnessing several global processes at once, which, somewhat exaggeratedly, can be called another Great Migration of peoples. We have flows of refugees, citizens of states who are not ready to share the policies of their countries, and all this is happening against the background of a general trend towards remote work, accelerated due to the coronavirus pandemic and the development of technology.
Digital nomads are not funny downshifters from the creative industry, as they were perceived before, but a cohort of people who periodically change their location, continuing to create value in different ways. Traditional forms of social management are simply becoming inconvenient for such a format of life.
Networked states are a logical evolutionary variant of humanity. This does not mean that traditional states will cease to exist tomorrow, but accumulating small inconveniences are pushing for changes. The more vividly these processes are expressed, the more we will go into numbers.
Will new forms of identification and alternatives to KYC take root?
Briefly: Yes, but most likely first in decentralized environments.
Andrey Tugarin: When it comes to such volumes, which are made by large exchanges, even Uniswap, then it is necessary to comply. If you don't want to be so big, you can be wise, if you want, you have to follow the rules. One excludes the other.
Denis Smirnov: Decentralized communities already offer us a number of solutions that replace standard forms of identity disclosure, giving a person the opportunity to provide the information about himself that he considers necessary — as bequeathed in the "Manifesto of the cryptanarchist". There are a huge number of protocols that, instead of a state passport, allow you to create a decentralized digital document that reveals not a person's identity, but his actions.
I cannot agree [that it is doomed to exist in sandboxes] because there is an example of El Salvador. He did what he did, not because he followed any ideals of crypto-anarchists — this is a banal long-term solution that can bring certain benefits. Given the speed with which new technologies are emerging, I would not venture to say that this will happen after some long period of time.
Where should a DAO builder start?
Briefly: From understanding your community.
Denis Smirnov: The main task is to understand what the community's mission is and whether formalization of interaction within it is necessary. DAO is a community of people from the Internet who have a common bank account.
Peter Bel: The first thing that is necessary at the start is to set a common goal and gather people who are ready to agree with it on a fundamental level. What is good about the crypto market is that we get platforms and tools with which they can interact. This is the value of funds like Aragon.