Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

This is, obviously, silly. There are a lot of silly cryptostuff.

Silliness aside though, this highlights a point to me. Methods of organising are (1) very important (2) relatively undiverse (3) hard to create out of whole cloth.

The creation/ascendance of "modern" joint stock companies circa 1600 was (arguably) responsible for some serious revolution. The 90s produced some very interesting examples: GNU, Linux, Wikipedia, WWW... These are "organisations" organised in unconventional ways and they produced results that a conventional non profit, commercial or government organisation could not have produced.

New ways of organising are potentially very powerful.

CryptoBro naivety isn't necessarily terrible for this end. It'll produce a lot of stupid moves, but stupidity and creativity are often neighbors. CryptoBros' typically mercenary and/or ideological tendencies might be more of a hurdle.

Besides laws, norms & regulatory structure, what's the difference between a DAU and a joint stock company?

> stupidity and creativity are often neighbors

That seems to be true in movies, but in the real world new advancements are created by experts that know the basics. Serendipity is part of that, but you need to have the basic knowledge.

I will concede, thou, that ideas to be rich can come from anywhere as the only metric is to convince investors, to produce something useful is not required.

I'll not argue that "who" matters. The sense in which stupidity and creativity are neighbors is the difference between expertise and qualifications. I didn't mean that stupid people are more creative. Where unqualified and uncredentialed people can play, you'll find a bunch of clueless morons but also uncredentialed geniuses. Where only the credentialed and qualified can play, say traditional finance, you'll find mostly regular bankers and financiers.

I certainly wouldn't have elected to create the current blaze of cryptmadness, but the fact that most of what it produces is scams and bullshit doesn't mean nothing else can come out of it.

The fact that cryptocurrency schemes like DAOs allow people to raise vast sums of money in very short spaces of time with no evidence of anyone involved having the ability, skills or even intention of delivering anything, seems to be fundamentally flawed to me. It seems that you are only going to attract dreamers who want to be able to get rich really quickly without having to do anything much, and I wouldn't have thought those would include the sorts of people who would be most likely to put in the time and effort and attention to detail and hard work required to build things that are truly worthwhile and which will stand the test of time.

Sure.

OTOH, I think cryptocynicism may be blinding us to the possibility of doing exactly what this hapless bunch did, but actually ending up owning the copyright to something... as they intended. The road from there to something noteworthy is still long, but I don't think it's inconceivable.

As I said, silliness is prevalent. That doesn't mean something useful can't emerge. But obviously, yes, most of most of the stuff happening is a comical blend of mercenary, hapless and foolish... guided by the smell of riches.

> The road from there to something noteworthy is still long, but I don't think it's inconceivable.

That already happens. People who know what they are doing (i.e. professionals) already buy scripts and book rights and make movies out of them. It works pretty well already.

SPAC does the same. See also the Nikola story (the fraudulent electric vehicle company).

It seems to me that the primary mechanism for organising here - as with most crypto projects - is Discord, not crpyto itself. Crypto is just the vehicle for the fanaticism that drives people to Discord

> Besides laws, norms & regulatory structure, what's the difference between a DAU and a joint stock company?

This might have been a rhetorical question but I'll give an answer anyway - this article [0] makes the same comparison and discusses that exact analogy

[0] https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/dao

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