What a paywall! Article really gets going and then cuts off paragraphs in. Had me hooked.
Is the idea you all are subscribers or are we all just commenting on the beginning? The first few paragraphs were just lead in.
283 karma · joined December 15, 2021
Is the idea you all are subscribers or are we all just commenting on the beginning? The first few paragraphs were just lead in.
That said, I'm interested in developments that do follow local laws, or explorations to what extent this is possible. Either that they're succeeding completely not as securities (pure utility somehow), or that they are clearly securities (ie trading stocks on the blockchain).
Even if tokens had all the rights of equity, this is like IPOing your company on day 1.
Is there value in that, or like you offer, is it just openings for scams?
So let's just take that as a premise, "every company IPOs on Day 1."
There seems like some fundamental opportunity there. More liquidity, perhaps paired with better milestones.
Is the extant VC model fundamentally defined by business growth or is it legal friction or something else?
Thinking about the paperwork and legal that goes into each round. There's a lot of friction. You can see SAFEs changing that already.
Your examples about web dev in the 90s got me wondering "what does Coinbase do today with ENS?". They're fans of ENS, surely whatever's great about ENS, Coinbase must be using it.
Well, as of today their ENS profile isn't anything radical [1], just an address, image, and link to their ENS delegate page.
That gets me thinking more about toyota.com. Do you think they had internal sites and computer resources before their public website? Just makes me wonder where their "toyota.com" site came from, was it as simple as "they heard about the web and then BAM immediately built a website". Wary of doing mental gymnastics myself tho, maybe this all just does mean crypto stuff is overhyped and not very useful.
I realize this may seem like moving the goalposts -- but have you thought about comparing to the development of the internet instead of web? Arpanet 1971 means 13 years in is 1984. I figure you've thought this through so will have some good points for why web/1991 is a better analogy than arpanet/1971.
All the stuff you wrote here is really good. Could be a blog post instead of these more ephemeral comments.
Just google it or something, the concept sounds neat. Sounds like you know more about it already. Not a DAO yet? Oh well.
> Curiosity !== "you need to sift through mounds of shit in the hopes to find 'little glimmers spread across lots of projects'"
To me this sounds like a fair description of curiosity! Reminds me of hacking with Arduino or something too. I have fun with it, anyway.
The arguments here are odd. The blockchain isn't built to handle this kind of operation by a non-expert user. Yes, mistakes are expensive. Is that okay? In the same way that a nuclear power plant isn't designed for a rando to go in and operate it.
Yes, raw blockchain stuff is hard and non-experts should not interact directly.
The key question is, is the payoff worth building an entire system around? For nuclear power, yes, because it provides electricity for people to just plug into. For blockchain, maybe, maybe not.
"Just as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones, working on things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces good ones. When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter."
That way I, or others interested in DAOs, can find our what aspects are especially promising to a project like this.
The parent said they were interested in alternative coordination mechanisms. I pointed them to where to find more and how to approach it. This is how curiosity works. I'm not selling any "light". There's little glimmers spread across lots of projects, even the ones that completely fail or grapple with seemingly small issues.
ENS just turned the management of 300,000+ name service records over to a DAO. Now they are grappling with how to update registration prices when domains expire. They have a delegate and voting system for decision making. Registration on expiry prices for ENS itself is pretty boring so reading more about this is likely only interesting to someone curious about alternative coordination mechanisms.
Here's an alternative: The year is 2030. Orange DAO is a distant memory, and cryptocurrencies have all gone to zero. YC continues to grow.
Whereas for ENS you have something real to compare to with .com, including registration data. ENS does seem to be getting some adoption mostly at an individual/celebrity level. Here's the leaderboard of top ENS users by # of Twitter followers: https://ethleaderboard.xyz/
I also think the ENS community in general is curious about the questions you're asking. Fundamentally ENS/DNS is pretty boring, so it's hard to get too wildly speculative.
Edit: thinking of other technology adoption curves. Faster than EVs but slower than web and mobile. Thinking of finance too. What's the adoption of NFCs/touchless payments/chips look like? What about the rise of microlending/lending club etc?
As a user, I find it fun to chat with other crypto peeps about what they're doing...but talking to the outside world seems challenging. I can't really explain how "CompuServechain" isn't just a waste of time...but I'm having fun so I just keep doing that. I got a site setup on IPFS and connected to a .eth domain!
Maybe the difference is now people aren't coming to you for help with crypto, whereas maybe they were with CompuServe and smartphones? So you're playing a different role.
Oh you might get a kick out of this index of all decentralized ENS websites: https://esteroids.eth.limo/#/
The only requirement I know is that it's directed through a .eth, so the site itself may be boring. But most sites in the index seem to be hosted on IPFS and some even ask for a wallet to have app functions.
Agree with your assessment that 100 million is an upper bound. I am curious about a deeper analysis as well that involves defining what "real users" are and then seeing how many transactions/wallets meet that criteria. i.e. of that "100 million", how many of them are simply buying and hodling? How many have done a non-exchange transaction (i.e. bought a thing, not coins. Buying NFTs counts! Or a pizza, or buying software, or staking or something)
The comparison to Diner's club is also relevant. 20 years from zero to 51% of all Americans.
Just getting to your "Why has blockchain user adoption been so terrible and what can we do about it?" section and will edit after that.
Edit: Well worth the read. If anything, the title and top image were a bit clickbaity, but the article itself was great, all the way through to the end.
Overall, the key question you point to is "Why did the web grow 10x faster than blockchain? Facebook 15x, and mobile 35x faster?"
I'm curious about this! Is there a recent technology that did grow at 10x over 13 years that we could learn from? Another way to look at this is blockchain is growing at 23% YOY over the last 13 years. What technologies should we compare it to?
Just to pull on the thread, is blockchain more like "hard tech"? If so, that would be really odd since it's not "hard tech". What has EV growth been like?
Here's a chart [1] from [2] that says about 17 million EVs have been sold since 2012. Let's call that 13 years for the sake of keeping the math the same, but the web grew 100x as fast. OK so cryptocurrency is growing about order of magnitude faster than EVs, but why is it slower than the web? What else develops at a speed that's 10x faster than the growth of EVs, but still slower than the web itself?
[1] https://www.ev-volumes.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/WW-K-6... [2]
Orange DAO being completely separate from YC suggests this is a possibility. Imagine the year is 2030: Orange DAO has more assets under management than YC itself, and has proven greater returns for investors in both percentages and absolute dollar value.
I too am interested in alternative coordination mechanisms. I recommend hopping on the discord channels for these different projects and seeing what you can find. I've personally looked at Constitution, SPICE, and ENS. I would recommend diving into ENS, it's credible and they're working to manage development and budget. Journalists simply don't have the tools or support to dig into the level of detail that you probably want.
There's also some group in Colorado I forget the name of, they weren't in the article though. They bought up an acre of land and are trying to manage it as a group?
Let me know what you find!
I've seen a bunch of DAO concepts that are fundamentally "hey let's make currencies and securities". It's like "uh, remember all the ICO stuff? that didn't work".
Excited to see examples of DAOs that do connect to augment traditional governance structures.
For anyone who gets interested in one of these concepts, I recommend finding the group's Discord and popping in to ask a few questions yourself.
However the depth of the article wasn't satisfying. Regarding SPICE DAO: > "The group’s plan was to produce its own version of the film, with creative decisions voted on by the token’s holders."
From having dug into the SPICE DAO's Discord, I'm surprised this is what the journalist led with. It's an intellectually dishonest take on what the group was trying to do. Having poked around a bit, the people leading the DAO clearly understand intellectual property and were buying the book as something of a parallel project to getting licenses. But there seems to be a big push to paint them as complete idiots. Not sure why though. Maybe they are complete idiots, but not from what I've seen.
From my limited experiences with DAOs, they're not a magical solution to anything, and it will take time to figure out exactly what they're useful for. Nonprofits, hackerspaces, and corporations are all entities that work on mass coordination of incentives, resources, and labor. It's all hard work. DAOs may offer a new toolkit for this type of coordination, but they're unlikely to be a panacea. I am deeply curious to learn which problems this toolkit turns out to solve.
Edit: oh check out Orange DAO, mentioned elsewhere in this thread
Yep, it's as expensive as all hell, I can't figure out why people will really want to use it that much either. But the author is still incorrect.
Or perhaps you're saying Vitalik isn't relevant anymore? Perhaps he's only a figurehead now or something. Or perhaps I have something more to learn about how this all works. Again, sources would be great, I'm curious for what the future holds.