A DAO or a Decentralized Autonoumse Organization is a term thrown around a lot these days. A DAO is (in theory) run completely on a blockchain. It’s a smart contract (or contract) that serves a community of users as well as has an autonomous governance service.
Today we’re only looking at the governance function.
We have governance to modify a contract (or if a change is large enough, create a new contract) or control a contract’s extra funds (if any). This is done through voting based on weights. There are a couple of ways to do this. The most common is a governance token. (if you don’t know already, a governance token is a freely tradable token that you purchase for voting weight)
So, with that in mind, adding features should look a lot like this: A member of the DAO proposes a change to a forum of some kind. After a review period, the change is brought to an on-chain vote. If it goes through a listing should be made on a bounty platform like Gitcoin (the listing’s content should be part of the vote). After a while people will come forward with their code changes, the DAO members should be prepared to vote on the code to use. The winning dev gets a bounty from the treasury of the contract and the change is applied by the DAO members.
This model sounds great, right? No central authority; just a piece of autonomous code that is governed by the users themselves, not by a core dev team. The code is the one in power, and code only does what it’s told, so it’s a pretty fair system.
The problem with this is that most people don’t do this. Why? Well, in theory, the original dev doesn’t benefit and loses control over his project essentially just becoming just another bounty guy (who happens to know the nitty-gritty of everything). I get this, I’m a developer who’s run on a couple of open-source projects and I would have a hard time letting a project go.
This can be especially hard if there is financial gain involved, giving up control to a possibly massive treasury is something humans have a hard time doing. We want power, always have, always will.
Most “DAOs” are run more like a company with shareholders. The “DAO” members make proposals that are voted on, but in the end, it’s up to the maintainers (who have control of the money) to carry everything. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, it’s just not a DAO.
Depending on the project, it’s more accurate to call them Crypto Based Organization (CBO) or Crypto BAsed Buissnes CBB. They’re still organizations with voting power controlled by a blockchain, but the organization is not autonomous code and therefore not a DAO.
I prefer DAOs over CBO and CBBs, but I don’t have a problem with them. I just wished they would call themselves what they are. I even made up a good term to use.
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