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Comment by FiReaNG3L | Hacker News Reader

Do we know for sure that a single individual / investment group doesn't hold a majority of shares and is just a normal VC with the added benefit of random people adding their money to the fund for no real benefit to them? If it's the case this whole thing could be a way to take risks you couldn't take with your name + the additional PR from the model.

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If it makes a return for the random people, isn't that a benefit?

That depends. Ponzi schemes generate returns for random people for a while as well. Not that this is a Ponzi scheme but generating returns for random people in and of itself is not always beneficial, you need to look at the longer term to establish whether or not the net result is positive.

Anyone who invests in the DAO can split their money out at any time

It seems like in such an open organization, and considering the problems (1%) that this is trying to address, there would be some tools for querying the wealth distribution. (There may/should be, idk; a few Googles came up empty.)

Yeah but it's anonymous / via bitcoin, no one could stop you from doing a 1000 'small' donations under a 1000 different identities, yet you control them all?

Damn. Of course you're right. And it could all be automated, transparent to you, the cheater.

Maybe they could charge a small per-share voting fee which would be destroyed (or used in some clever, non-game-able way).

I could even imagine automatically refunding the fee for those casting losing votes to avoid wars of attrition... I guess that's essentially an auction.

Wouldn't work, people could group together and remain anonymous.

I suspect that if N honest backers would expect a net gain from a decision even if they spend X/N voting for it, a single owner of N fake accounts would expect a net gain from the same decision even if he spent X voting for it.

Anonymity on the internet pretty much inherently means that you can't tell how many actual individuals a given set of apparent individuals really are. You can tell how much money they have (or CPU power, bandwidth, or various other proxies for wealth), but that's about it. I don't see how this wouldn't be an inherent problem for any cryptocurrency (or crypto-whathaveyou-system) attempting to force decentralization (see; the primary actors in Bitcoin split war.)

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