[ExI] A decentralized autonomous space agency

Wed Mar 22 16:52:42 UTC 2017

Don't worry Adrian, that - doing all the needed research and then some, and learning from others' mistakes - is exactly what I want to do. I started a working group for this project because I think the idea is cool and worth doing, but I still have many questions and not enough solid answers. I started this conversation to refine my initial ideas, and I especially value the advise of those who have been at the school of hard knocks (I have been there too).

Besides the need for watertight security and the other points you raise, I find this point especially critical:

Also: the DAO, being about cryptocurrency, could at least
theoretically apply its principles to its primary area of operation,
and requires no centralized physical locations. Space requires
hardware, which means there is a place where it is manufactured (or
assembled from distributed components) and a place for launches
(likely outsourced, but launch tends to be the majority of the cost
for small satellites).

In fact, it's much easier to apply the DAO model to projects related to cryptocurrency itself, not only because there is no hardware to build or ship back and forth, but also because most internal and external payments are in the DAO's native cryptocurrency. In the real world things are not so simple. For example, if a DAO project wants to launch a cubesat with CubeCab, I doubt you would accept a payment in whatever the DAO's native cryptocurrency is, so there should be a mechanism to convert crypto to dollars and pay you. That could be done with smart contracts.

There is a lot of initial work to do to adapt the DAO concept to real world projects.

Unrelated note: I am sending this from Protonmail but Gmail is much faster and easier to use, so I think I'll go back to Gmail. Google has the money to develop great services, and it's difficult to develop great services without Google's money - then, perhaps, this IS related to the topic...

--
Giulio Prisco
https://giulioprisco.com/
giulioprisco at protonmail.ch

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [ExI] A decentralized autonomous space agency
Local Time: March 21, 2017 7:31 PM
UTC Time: March 21, 2017 6:31 PM
From: atymes at gmail.com
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>

The DAO was a funding agency/VC-like. It had at least celebrity
status and hot buzz. Space...you'd think it has buzz, but that's
nothing compared to software/virtual anything or biotech (including
health care). The product was the promise of funding cryptocurrency
projects. It's also been basically shut down after less than a year
in existence and being hacked to drain $50M of that $150M. I assume
you wish to create something to create lasting value, not merely
flash-in-the-pan where you can trick people, cash out, and be done
with it as those who got rich off the DAO (whether or not those were
the ones who ran the Kickstarter) did. (If scamming people for a
quick cash out is your goal, I decline to assist.)

In a public corporation, if you or I have enough money, we can buy
enough shares that we do have a say in the governance. Alternately,
we can incite a shareholder revolt, by organizing and motivating
people who collectively have enough shares to matter - which tends to
require arguing well. Mechanisms for delegation - also known as
"proxy voting" - are well established. In a DAO...same deal: only
those who buy a lot of shares, or can organize a voting block among
many people who collectively have enough shares, matter in practice,
no matter the hype. (Karma adjustments devolve to "more votes for
whoever those who write the code that hands out karma - or, worse, who
manually hand out karma - agree with", effectively giving the
karma-controllers more votes to delegate.) No, seriously, a DAO is
basically a corporation, just one that tries to enforce its governance
through computer code instead of through legal code.

There are different forms of "crowdsourcing". Just lazily asking
people for ideas doesn't work well. A far, far more effective version
is known as "research": start with an idea, look up what people have
said about that idea and similar ones (which can involve asking around
but most of it doesn't: you just look up articles and studies that
have already been done), refine and revise, repeat until you have a
model built from solid facts - not "this is cool so people should",
but solid data based on what people have done and are doing - that
shows a strong likelihood of success (which usually includes a
positive return on investment for whatever resources anyone chips in).

Over 90% of startups fail, most often because their founders refuse to
do the research before committing resources - especially other
peoples' resources. In space launch specifically, the average
lifespan of a startup is less than two years, before those backing the
idea give up as they find it hard, or are unable to attract sufficient
funding. (CubeCab's more than 2 years old, mainly because I'm a
stubborn SoB...but also because I did the research and have a viable
enough model to attract a bit of resources and help, not to mention
lots of would-be customers though they generally won't pay anything
until after we've flown something - again, because most space launch
startups die without actually launching. It's a catch 22 we're
working on.)

If I can give you one piece of advice at this stage, it's to do the
research and learn from other peoples' fails. Acknowledge that people
have tried things like your idea - including the DAO itself, but far
more than just the DAO. Know that, any time you think your idea is
unique and special and totally unprecedented, you are wrong: there's
always, always someone who's done something like yours. Your job is
to find these and note how your idea is different - how they failed
and you won't repeat their mistakes (or, rarely, how they succeeded in
this other area and you'll repeat their success).

Let's start with: the DAO itself basically folded; its administrators
are now trying to get money back to those who chipped in as best they
can, but it looks like less than 20% can be recovered. (Source:
Wikipedia.) There are many reasons why it failed; the hack of 1/3 of
their money is notable, but they forked to try to fix that - and even
ignoring that, a 33% drain is less than the majority of the at least
80% loss. What are the other reasons why it lost so much money?

Also: the DAO, being about cryptocurrency, could at least
theoretically apply its principles to its primary area of operation,
and requires no centralized physical locations. Space requires
hardware, which means there is a place where it is manufactured (or
assembled from distributed components) and a place for launches
(likely outsourced, but launch tends to be the majority of the cost
for small satellites). How is a DAO relevant to the industry given
these needs? Potential answers come from the current established
industries - telecommunications and earth observation - which are all
about data, but saying you can take cryptocurrency experience and
apply it to space, with no further elaboration, is like a Web
application developer claiming that experience gives them expertise
about laying cable and setting up telecommunication exchanges. (If
you're familiar with the OSI model, you have experience in layers 5-7,
maybe 4, and you're trying to apply it to layers 1-2.)

But seriously: learn from other peoples' fails, as relevant to what
you seek to do. It's what I did for years to shape CubeCab into
something remotely potentially possible. (And thanks for the like.)
At this point we have something where we can credibly seek funding,
and we've even been invited to present at the Paris Air Show (though I
don't yet know whether we will: the opportunity will cost a lot of $,
and we only have so much). And especially in space, there are so many
fails to learn from.

On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 9:22 AM, Giulio Prisco <giulio at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks Adrian,
>
> re "you have a valuation of $0 right now, so all the shares of it are
> worth $0 too" - that should also apply to The DAO... but they raised
> $150 million in weeks! At the beginning, the novel participatory
> governance model IS the product.
>
> re "Governance belongs to those who buy shares? You have described
> most corporations." - I disagree. You and I (average investors, not
> seriously rich) can buy shares in a public corporation, sell the
> shares and maybe get dividends now and then, but our decision making
> power is nil. In a private corporation, we can't even buy shares. In a
> DAO, everyone can buy shares and everyone can participate in decision
> making. Of course, the votes of those with many shares count more, but
> if you argue well you can persuade others. There's easy delegation and
> "liquid democracy." Also, shares could be karma-adjusted in voting
> (I'm thinking aloud here).
>
> re "The wisdom of those with money is not the wisdom of the crowd -
> and in both cases, for actual working space projects, there's
> fascination but not, it turns out, much actual wisdom." - in other
> words, fascination is easy but wisdom is hard. Of course I can't
> disagree, but isn't this one more reason to crowdsource? If you have
> just one idea it's probably wrong, but among thousands of ideas there
> must be one that is right. The problem is finding that one, and here's
> where crowdsourcing helps. Wings uses an internal prediction market to
> evaluate proposals.
>
> Keep criticism coming!
>
> PS CubeCab is cool! http://cubecab.com/
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 4:56 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
>> To be clear: I offer you this criticism because I want you to succeed. ;)
>>
>> Governance belongs to those who buy shares? You have described most
>> corporations. The problem you are concerned about comes when those who buy
>> are not those who do the work, but just those with a lot of money seeking to
>> make more, by selling later for a higher price, with interests thus often at
>> odds with the workers in practice. (Also, the workers - working on whatever
>> the corp does - tend to know a bit about the field, while the investors too
>> often lack this experience.) These investors often delegate day to day
>> decisions to a few people, who are known as "executives" or "management" and
>> often have way more shares than the workers (but usually less than the
>> investors) because the investors, having appointed them, trust them more.
>> (This dynamic has spiraled way beyond reasonable bounds at many large public
>> companies, but that's a separate topic.)
>>
>> This is especially the case when the just-in-it-for-the-money types get a
>> majority of the shares, making the workers' shares worthless re: controlling
>> the organization's direction, as eventually happens at most public companies
>> if it wasn't already the case before they went public. (This is why, for
>> CubeCab, I'm trying to keep a majority of shares in the workers' hands at
>> least until IPO/acquisition - including my own, and granted I'm "management"
>> if anyone here is. But there are so many really bad ideas investors without
>> much experience in the market would likely try, ironically tanking their own
>> investment along with our hard work. I'm not in this to fail, at least not
>> so easily.)
>>
>> The wisdom of those with money is not the wisdom of the crowd - and in both
>> cases, for actual working space projects, there's fascination but not, it
>> turns out, much actual wisdom.
>>
>> Also you have to pick a project and start gathering resources before the
>> shares are worth anything. No, seriously: there's this thing called
>> "valuation" with lots of ways to calculate it, but by all the good formulas
>> you have a valuation of $0 right now, so all the shares of it are worth $0
>> too. You've yet to do anything new, except use new words to describe well
>> established stuff.
>>
>> On Mar 21, 2017 4:46 AM, "Giulio Prisco" <giulio at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Thanks Adrian, and don't worry, harsh criticism is exactly what I want.
>> The difference is in the ownership and governance model. A DAO belongs
>> entirely to its members (those who chose to buy shares) and all
>> shareholders are empowered to easily vote on all decisions. So this
>> model replaces traditional exec/management layers with the wisdom of
>> the crowd.
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 10:58 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> How is this meaningfully different from the (literally) thousands of
>>> space startup companies all across the world, other than that you
>>> haven't yet picked a particular project or set of related projects to
>>> focus on?
>>>
>>> "Funded by bitcoin/crypto" is not a meaningful difference; more than
>>> one of those others is too. "Assembles space hardware from prefab
>>> components" is true of at least a quarter of them. "Is focused on one
>>> or more potentially world changing projects" is true of most of them -
>>> the dreams run strong - except, again, they have decided which
>>> specific projects they will work upon. Likewise "global, distributed,
>>> decentralized" has been done in spades (not "to death" because it has
>>> proven a viable model - but at this point it's a bit short of saying,
>>> "and our people will sit on chairs").
>>>
>>> And if it isn't, why should anyone care, when they can instead find
>>> one of those startups (one that works on a project that appeals to
>>> them), work with/for them, and have a far higher chance of success and
>>> payback?
>>>
>>> Sorry if this sounds harsh, but you need answers to those questions if
>>> you seek to accomplish anything. Your overview doc acknowledges that
>>> you need to decide on "WHY/WHAT" before moving past that, but it's
>>> deeper than you know: deciding on the what will, necessarily, exclude
>>> people who aren't interested in that particular what - and only then
>>> will you see if you have a group capable of addressing that particular
>>> what.
>>>
>>> On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 3:26 AM, Giulio Prisco <giulio at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> I started a working group to discuss conceptual and implementation
>>>> related aspects of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)
>>>> focused on world-changing space projects. Comments, thoughts and
>>>> requests to join welcome.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> https://giulioprisco.com/a-decentralized-autonomous-space-agency-43232aed471c
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