Hello, Aragon community!
I’m new here and I’d like to discuss some questions.
I’m wondering whether Aragon can ever substitute legal companies in the future.
Aragon can store, manage, collaborate, and making decisions on how to allocate tokens.
It’s still far from establishing autonomous organizations, but we may be able to use those functions to establish corporations on the Ethereum blockchain.
Corporations on blockchain have following values.
simple (no obligation to complicated tax return/social security calculation)
cheap (no needs to hire tax counseller accountants )
global (The hub is on the Internet)
So, my questions are
what do you think of the missing parts for establishing blokchain company?
Are there any organizations using Aragon as the primary place?
That is a good question. I suspect there will always be demand for “legacy companies”. However as we move into a tokenized world, Most assets will be represented on chain and thus much more effectively managed by a blockchain based organisation.
Also what exactly do you mean by autonomous? do you mean not requiring human action or not requiring centralised planning and governance?
specific answers to your first question
for I think digital native organisations (an increasing proportion of organisations) the biggest missing part is decentralised key management. every organisation needs to manage its secrets, it cant be public. How dose an Aragon DAO have a bitcoin wallet etc.
like wise for blockchain based company’s that exist in the world of atoms, how do you enforce property rights
the second part of your question. have a look at Apiary its still a work in progress but you will be able to find all the most important metrics there
Agree. I also think there will be legacy companies in the space of atom.
Also what exactly do you mean by autonomous? do you mean not requiring human action or not requiring centralised planning and governance?
yes, that is exactly what I mean.
for I think digital native organisations (an increasing proportion of organisations) the biggest missing part is decentralised key management. every organisation needs to manage its secrets, it cant be public. How dose an Aragon DAO have a bitcoin wallet etc.
I think this will be solved by relying on contract wallet in ethereum, which doesn’t need private key and can be managed with multisig. For Bitcoin, I think we have to make multisig, but problem is that maxmum member is limited to 15(as far as I know)
like wise for blockchain based company’s that exist in the world of atoms, how do you enforce property rights
This is a huge problem. I think thats why many crypto projects have their foundations aside from DAO/DACs.
the second part of your question. have a look at Apiary its still a work in progress but you will be able to find all the most important metrics there
Personally I think all of the basic elements exist. You say:
It’s still far from establishing autonomous organizations, but we may be able to use those functions to establish corporations on the Ethereum blockchain.
What do you think makes Aragon “still far from establishing autonomous organizations”? What do you think is missing?
Yes there are quite a few. BlankDAO and Melon come to mind.
While Uniswap is quite “autonomous” I’m not sure I would agree that it is an organization. It is more like a marketplace - a specific protocol for exchanging assets - that relies on the underlying Ethereum protocol for actual execution of trades. And Ethereum and bitcoin are autonomous in some ways, and not in others: for example, people run the mining machines, people buy the coins that miners sell to sustain their machines, people write the code that fixes bugs and adds features, etc.
So I think until there is Generalized AI there will always be some form of reliance on humans for these systems. DAOs are no different: we could build a DAO using Aragon that behaves a lot like bitcoin: it mints its own tokens and distributes them to people who provide the organization value, the way bitcoin mints its own tokens and distributes them to miners who provide value to the network. The difference might be that the value miners provide to bitcoin is computationally verifiable (hashes) whereas the value that workers provide to a DAO requires some sort of human evaluation (for example: does the website built by a contractor match the spec that the DAO asked for).
I think there are currently very few valuable tasks that are 100% computationally verifiable, and for that reason most DAOs will necessarily rely on human evaluation of work. And that’s ok! We are talking about human organizations after all. And these are quite possible to build using Aragon today.
Absolutely. If DAO/DACs want to truly and fully participate in the regular economy at this point in time, they need to be a legally recognized entity. Awarding the artificial entity with a legal status (e.g. limited liability status for corporations) is a needed and constitutive rule for a organization to fully function within the regular economy. The status is need for the organization to enter into legally binding, enforceable agreements and to protect its members.
This needs gets a little less relevant as long as the entity in questions acts only within in the crypto-environment and only enters in to smartcontract-agreements that enforce themselves autonomously. But even in this case the limits are pretty low, just a small flaw in the code can lead to a big and existential problems (see TheDAO-Hack) that make human intervention needed. Thats why the Aragon Network with its Dispute resolution mechanism is such an important next step for truly autonomous organizations.
Protecting participants of DAOs from unlimited liability in the real world is the other big task. And unfortunately it can not be solved within the crypto world alone. As long as the “old legal system” does not recognize a DAO as a legal persona and thereby shielding the participant from liability, every action of the DAO can lead to tort claims against each member of the DAO.
That is the point. I would even argue, that the “autonomous” in a DAO does not mean that it does not have any reliance on humans at all. A organization is “autonomous”, if it does not rely on specific humans, has governance/incentives system that keeps it running even if a project leader leaves and has a certain level of censorship resistance (esp. towards Governments and its Managers).
Bitcoin for example is, in my opinion, is a DAO and does rely on humans in a big fashion. Not just the core development team is run by humans also the mining is under the control of humans. The mining itself might be computationally verifiable, but the rigs need to be setup by humans and humans decided which protocol to run and if their Miner is participating in updates or forks. Humans will for a long time be need to perform governance tasks, the big challenge is to structure does governance tasks in a fair and transparent way.
The DAO can make the decision process more transparent, make the crowd the platform to a trusted-third-party that is governed by the users and fight corruption. But DAOs will and should not try fully get rid of human involvement in (economic) activity.
My plan is to continue to develop my Avatar Phi Rho with AI, NLP, my own values etc so that it can start acting for me in some situations eg responding to emails and phone calls when I am asleep or not around - to answer questions about my non-profits but the plan is also for Phi Rho to eventually act for me within the DAOs I am involved with - and continue on in this way after I am frozen to look after my interests! Clearly there is a long way to go with the tech development but the legal issues are probably the bigger problem . .