[ExI] DAOs, Futarchy, and the future of Extropianism

Adrian Tymes atymes at gmail.com
Sun Apr 11 22:42:19 UTC 2021


If you think that the $100 + $10 to set up the DAO is all you're risking,
you are hopelessly clueless and badly informed.

On Sun, Apr 11, 2021 at 3:32 PM JF <monteluna at protonmail.com> wrote:

> Resources to start a DAO are sub $100. Each user's onboarding would cost
> somewhere around $10. I would hardly call this that much of a "risk".
>
> I just see this as a solid opportunity to use a technology that's so far
> proven it's ability to manage capital financing for groups. There are
> working DAOs now managing billions in capital. If we don't have more
> realistic utilization of capital focused to real goals for Extropianism,
> what's the point? We certainly could continue the mailing list, but
> something more tangible is good here. There's a real technology that has
> proven it's ability to start building a substrate to grow organizations
> from. What do we have to lose here?
>
>
> ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
> On Sunday, April 11, 2021 5:52 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> An emergent system needs some working start, some viable subset of the
> eventual desired state.  What is proposed here is far less than that.
> That's the "at least 10,000-1,000,000 people and some land" - yes, for a
> country, that is the minimum to bootstrap.
>
> Countries are defined by recognition.  Groups with large amounts of
> financial activity can be international corporations, which are not
> themselves actually countries.
>
> The virtue of "fail fast" assumes that lessons will be learned from the
> failures.  Failure while refusing to learn from failures - and this
> proposal is a blatant refusal to acknowledge, let alone learn from, past
> failures - goes nowhere.  This does take resources, so if you commit to
> this approach, you commit to not accomplishing anything.  That is the
> "risk".
>
> On Sun, Apr 11, 2021 at 2:33 PM JF via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> You're right, but an emergent system almost never starts at a full
>> working system. It is always bottom up.
>>
>> This organization would not be a formal country for a long time. It may
>> never. Frankly I don't think countries are defined by recognition, but
>> economic market activity. Regardless if an organization is a country or
>> not, if it has enough economic activity, it will be a "thing".
>>
>> All of this is moot though. The strategic goal is to start somewhere and
>> bootstrap, and set up a system to fail fast for experiments sake. The
>> system is opt-in and anyone can leave. Any member who commits clearly is
>> interested in creating something and doing real actions. There's no
>> particular risk in starting something.
>>
>>
>> Sent from ProtonMail mobile
>>
>>
>>
>> -------- Original Message --------
>> On Apr 11, 2021, 4:59 PM, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>> This proposal is utter bullshit and fails reality check out of the gate,
>> in the same sense as a proposal that "merely wishing for anti-gravity will
>> bring about negation of gravity".
>>
>> A country only meaningfully exists if other, previously existing
>> countries recognize it.
>>
>> The attempts to create micronations and microstates have proven, beyond
>> any reasonable doubt, that land is a fundamental starting requirement to
>> gain said recognition.
>>
>> Therefore, any approach that defers obtaining physical territory until
>> well after establishment as a country will fail.
>>
>> This is known to such a high degree, that even writing the length of text
>> of that article is in excess of a worthwhile investigation.
>>
>> If you want to start a country, get some land (this can be constructed,
>> such as far out at sea or in space, so long as it's not in territory that
>> some other major nation claims) and a large number of people (the exact
>> minimum is debatable, anywhere from 10,000 at the extreme minimum to a more
>> likely minimum of 1,000,000) willing to physically inhabit that land as
>> their primary residence.  Any attempt to skimp either of these - say, by
>> only having 10 or 100 people when the effort tries to get recognition -
>> will fail.
>>
>> On Sun, Apr 11, 2021 at 1:14 PM JF via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Another important detail, it seems while I was writing this, a
>>> particular crypto writer wrote a compelling piece of information about the
>>> idea of a "cloud country".
>>>
>>> https://1729.com/how-to-start-a-new-country/
>>>
>>> This seems viable. In short, it amounts to starting decentralized
>>> organizations to manage budgets to buy "land" for the "cloud country". It
>>> could be very likely that these enclaves only allow people who are part of
>>> the community. There's nothing stopping this today.
>>>
>>> As for some of the messages:
>>>
>>> I have some experiences with DAOs, and using a particular system called DAOHaus
>>> to create MolochDAOs <https://daohaus.club/>, the answer to "how much
>>> money does it take" is "it's fairly negligible". The smart contract is just
>>> a system that allows users and mints new tokens based on a vote. Someone
>>> could put in $10K. Someone could put in $1. Obviously we could, and should,
>>> give more voting rights to people who put in a lot more money. MolochDAOs
>>> are also designed to allow people to "burn" their tokens at any point and
>>> leave. So if you do supply funding and you don't like the direction the
>>> group is going, by all means leave. The goal is to create an emergent
>>> organization, so signal dislike and spin off if you would want to.
>>>
>>> To merge this in with the above, I think a feasible first step might be
>>> to collect some funding to possibly start an online community. I actually
>>> would really enjoy starting a new forum like a Disqus. From that, maybe we
>>> could fund renting physical locations for meetings? It seems like all the
>>> tech movement is heading into Miami, especially in the digital money scene.
>>> A forum does seem more feasible to help speed up actions.
>>>
>>> We could technically do this now.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
>>> On Sunday, April 11, 2021 9:21 AM, JF via extropy-chat <
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> A few months ago I brought up the idea of creating a DAO like system to
>>> further the extropian goals. It seemed to garner some interest and I
>>> figured I would bring it up again since more and more crypto systems on
>>> Ethereum have started to use Zero-Knowledge Proof technology to bring the
>>> costs down, making this idea more viable.
>>>
>>> To give some more context to people who may have not been in the space,
>>> maybe a rough history would suffice.
>>>
>>> A few years ago, the creator of Ethereum, a decentralized smart contract
>>> system, began talking about the idea of prediction markets. Prediction
>>> markets are a way for participants to "bet" on specific outcomes of real
>>> world events. Things like weather, political outcomes, sports, wars, are
>>> all able to be predicted on. In a high level sense, it's an automated
>>> market for people to bet on events, but it aggregates the bets to publicly
>>> produce a probability of the event. Because of this, they become
>>> "predictive" engines that aggregate information of all market participants.
>>> Participants with more information are encouraged to take advantage of the
>>> arbitrage opportunity and "bet more" for the outcome they believe to win,
>>> which reveal more information.
>>>
>>> Read More: https://augur.net/blog/prediction-markets
>>>
>>> An interesting component was created as well in the form of the first
>>> DAOs. DAOs are Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, which in the most
>>> basic sense, are smart contracts which manage funds. They can only do
>>> actions when collective owners vote on outcomes to release funds, making
>>> the operation of capital management a decentralized organization operation
>>> rather than something owned by charter of 5-8 people in a C-level suite.
>>> Currently, many DAOs operate managing billions in the Ethereum blockchain
>>> (MakerDAO, Compound, etc.)
>>>
>>> A new concept which was also hypothesized was the idea of a futarchy. A
>>> futarchy combines the idea of an organization with prediction markets,
>>> allowing a decentralized group of bettors to make decisions. Since it
>>> couples prediction markets, the systems are able to aggregate information
>>> and should over time, allow capital accrual for people that make good
>>> decisions for the organization.
>>>
>>> Read More: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/08/21/introduction-futarchy/
>>>
>>> So with this, with ZKSync tech, DAOs and Prediction markets now have
>>> viable options. Unfortunately this wasn't really available as an option up
>>> until around the end of last year. Futarchies need a bit more application
>>> work before a decentralized, scalable option is available, but technically
>>> is viable.
>>>
>>> With this being said, why aren't we using them? I mean this in a sense
>>> of the people in this mailing list. I certainly love the discussion, but we
>>> now have a cheap way to aggregate information and collect funds. We can
>>> completely run a DAO and actually speed up the actions this group does,
>>> rather than shooting emails back and forth. Ideas are great, but actions
>>> are far more tenable.
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>>>
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>
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