Editing Dumb contracts (section)

== Decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) ==

Ethereum defines a DAO as “an entity that lives on the internet and exists autonomously, but also heavily relies on hiring individuals to perform certain tasks that the automaton itself cannot do.”

There’s a lot going on here. A lot, which makes it utterly confusing to make any sense out of this. What’s on offer here seems to have multiple parts:

* The organizational structure
* The level of automation needed
* The level of human involvement
* The software protocol

The idea behind the organization structure for a DAO is that humans only need to provide minimal input into an automated process so that while some things happen automatically – the humans are still ultimately in control. If that sounds a little vague its because it kind of is - the level of automation and how involved the humans need to be is ill-defined.

Putting aside the obvious issues of using “decentralized” in the title for now: my biggest problem with this definition is how it seems to be applicable to a standard human-based voting organization and with Bitcoin itself. The consensus-based properties of a blockchain are unique and are far less vulnerable than a human-based democratic process. So I consider likening things like “The DAO” to “Bitcoin” to be purposefully misleading.

To try sort this mess out I tried to find some examples of a “DAO” but almost none of them were autonomous or decentralized in the same way that Bitcoin is, and obviously a human run organization like “The DAO” that needs humans to invest in other (potentially) decentralized autonomous systems shouldn’t be considered an autonomous structure at all.

As far as I can tell: “The DAO” is functionally no different to any regular programmatic organization run by humans – autonomous in the name or not. I do realize that it’s heavily implied that we’re somehow talking about some kind of next-generation intelligence or blockchain-like structure, but this is a simple smoke screen – for, wait for it – '''nothing new.'''

Even though this term seems to have been constructed to purposely mislead journalists and investors into thinking that Ethereum is doing something ground breaking (and somehow manages to contains '''multiple''' oxymorons), I believe that the idea behind a DAO is still possible and useful. We just have to restrict the definition to only those systems with similar properties to a blockchain (which I’ll refer to as “decentralized autonomous systems” for convenience.)

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