Ethereum

Or: World Wide Web for a collaborative economy 1. Intro Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are organizations where members collaborate through a smart contract enabled blockchain. Compared to traditional organizations, DAOs are much cheaper to create, their immutability and transparency makes them more trustworthy, and their programmability enables a wide variety of features. It is possible that DAOs are the next evolutionary step for corporations, which makes up most of today’s world economy. ...

When I first read this tweet thread about the Aragon governance proposals voting on a rainy afternoon walk a month ago, my first reaction was blurting out “I’m sorry, but what the actual fuck?” Were I not in public, I would’ve bursted out laughing. Aragon is one of the most promising governance projects in the space, with more than 20k token holders, 70k Twitter followers, and a $14M token market cap. Guess how many people voted in their first round of proposals. ...

I believe one of the most, if not the most, important applications of blockchain and smart contact technology will be the establishment of self-sufficient organizations that are completely virtual: They will use virtual currencies like Ether and ERC-20 tokens to handle all transfers & storage of value. Their collaboration & making of crucial decisions will be handled by smart contacts. Their members will consist of pseudo-anonymous individuals from around the world who collaborate mostly remotely. They will produce products that are purely digital in nature, and use the profits to cover their operational expenses, as well as provide their members with a non-negligible salary so that they may work for the organization on a part/full-time basis. The main challenge of accomplishing such a feat is this: how may we replicate the highly complex, fuzzy, and subjective business logic needed for most organizations using immutable, simple, strict, and objective smart contacts? ...

Disclaimer: No one in the world wants what I said in this post to be false more than I do. One ConsenSys is not all rainbows, sunshine, and unicorns. (to the surprise of no one) The flat governance structure is something that definitely makes ConsenSys unique and enjoyable to work at: everyone treats you as equal, snobby dicks are rare, and no one tells you what to do at work everyday or when you go to work. It would be hard to go back to the traditional hierarchical world. ...