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

Sun Apr 11 23:09:12 UTC 2021

Before doing any of that, I recommend reading up on previous
microstate/micronation attempts, see why they failed, and do not naively
repeat their mistakes like you are proposing to do.

On Sun, Apr 11, 2021 at 3:55 PM JF <monteluna at protonmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>>>>
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>>>
>>>
>>
>
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