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

Sun Apr 11 22:55:08 UTC 2021

Could you elaborate more on what you think it requires? Let's generate signal and not noise. I have actually started a DAO and am an active member of a few, so maybe I am missing something.

What I'm proposing is very clear:

1. Start a DAO using an already generated framework and raise funds. The DAO manages capital with member funds, and members can leave or join at any point.
2. Put together a forum to begin discussing real use cases for the capital.

It's an experiment in and of itself. I agree it can fail. The failure modes area few people who have cryptocurrencies have their money returned, and a few people waste their time. This is only for people who can appropriately judge risks and who want to join. If not, don't.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Sunday, April 11, 2021 6:42 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>>>>>
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