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Tag: governance

Decentralized Autonomous Associations (DAAs): A Variation on the DAO Concept

There is no shortage of experimentation in trying to apply blockchain technology to organizational dynamics [this is different than governing technical blockchain protocols, reference: Let’s Be Clear About What is DAOable and What is Not. Decentralized autonomy in organizations (DAOs) is one popular metaphor that has seen a surge of entrepreneurial activity especially in the past year.

Recent interpretations of the Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) concept have lead to several implementation approaches, including notable ones by Aragon, MolochDAO, MarketingDAO, MetaCartel, LAO and others.

The differences between each DAO implementations abound, but the most common denominator is the desire to inject smart contract technology into how organizations/processes are run. And each one of the above named examples (and other unnamed ones) assumes a different set of assumptions as a starting point.

One new variation is the concept of Decentralized Autonomous Associations that takes roots from the Swiss Association legal structure (recently popularized as the choice for the Libra structure).

In my opinion, any successful “decentralized autonomy” initiative needs to be able to simultaneously satisfy the three key pillars:

  • Technical
  • Organizational
  • Legal

The Swiss Association has lower startup hurdles than a Swiss Foundation. In the context of the DAA, the autonomous activity focuses on certain membership-related functions, which is a realistic scope that doesn’t risk slipping into the abstract during implementation.

Swiss legal firm MME (who pioneered the implementation of the Swiss Foundation structure for launching blockchain protocols) has documented a process to allow DAAs to exist, aided by a set of smart contracts that Validity Labs has started to codify.

Along with Luka Müller and Thomas Linder of MME and Sebastian Bürgel of HOPR Network (formerly co-founder at Validity Labs), I will be discussing the DAA and many of its aspects tomorrow Thursday May 28th at 10:30AM EST / 16h30 Central European Time during a Zoom virtual session. You can register (free) by using this link.

I’m interested in diving further into the DAA concept. I don’t pretend to have all the answers pertaining to how this might evolve, but it’s definitely an area that deserves experimentation and implementation.

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How Ethereum Could Evolve

Aside from Bitcoin, Ethereum is the most important blockchain platform. It has undoubtedly inspired and moved the whole crypto market forward.

Five and half years into its inception, I believe that Ethereum is at a proverbial fork in deciding what future trajectory it wants to choose.

Recently, there has been some public criticism about Ethereum’s evolution that I will not re-hash here. I have been mostly silent, as I wanted to fully analyze the situation and come-up with some solutions, before rushing into judgement. I decided that if I was going to express dissatisfaction, I would do it along a constructive path.

For background, and for some newcomers who have joined the blockchain (or Ethereum) ecosystems only in the past 2 or 3 years, my history with Ethereum and its Foundation takes roots to its inception days in the late 2013 timeframe. Starting in early 2014, soon after the white paper was published, I became one of the first advisors to the Ethereum Foundation, and witnessed up-close its evolution and early emancipation, leading-up to its public sale. Back in 2014, I helped the initial Ethereum co-founders figure out their key messaging and positioning, much of that work still showing its fingerprint today, via the “platform for decentralized applications” moniker. In 2015, at a time when the project was still very technical, I felt the need to explain its implications in a more friendly business language, so I wrote the first business-oriented essay explaining what Ethereum meant and what it could become, The Business Imperative Behind the Ethereum Vision. I remained closely associated with the Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik in particular, helping them gain their footing, until early 2017 when the Foundation dissolved their Ethereum Advisors.

Since then, I continued to be a fervent and vocal Ethereum advocate, speaking at various occasions about the strength of the Ethereum Ecosystem at key events such as DevCon1 in London (2015), Edcon in Paris (2017) and Toronto (2018), ETH-Waterloo (2017), ETH-Denver (2018, starts at 52:00), and more recently, in March 2019 at the Paris ETH-CC with a talk titled Challenges in Growing the Ethereum Ecosystem as a Community. In this last talk, I pondered if Ethereum’s greatest strength,- its community approach, has now become its key challenge. In addition, I’ve attended (or listened to) several core dev or community calls, and regularly interacted for several years now, with developers and entrepreneurs that are using the Ethereum platform.

For disclosure purposes and added context, I do have a few investments in Ethereum-related startups, technology projects or cryptocurrencies. I am therefore vested in the success of Ethereum, so my criticism is not intended to cause it harm at the benefit of another competing platform (as some other critics’ motives are). Rather, my observations are meant to (hopefully) send a strong message of self-introspection and potential change for the better.

First, I’d like to make it clear that I firmly believe that Ethereum still has a significant edge over other players in the blockchain industry. To properly measure Ethereum’s market leadership, you need to evaluate “together” the combination of the several dimensions of factors that determine a given blockchain platform’s success: size of its global community of developers, degree of technological decentralization, number of apps created on it, number of P2P nodes that support it, capital generated from it or invested into its startups, diversity of industries it touches, richness in functionality, choice of development tools and languages, scale of innovation that springs from it, smart contract language capabilities, regularity and breadth of software updates, quality of cryptographic advancement research, and I’ve probably left a few other components.

Add to all of this, Ethereum’s most important characteristic: the fact that it remains dogmatically committed to decentralization as an infallible raison d’être from an infrastructure perspective. Running close to 5,000 nodes harmoniously bestows Ethereum a handicap index that no other blockchain (except Bitcoin’s) can claim to inflict itself with, resulting in actually being a bona-fide sovereign-grade blockchain. That is an ambitious principle to live by, a principle that, once removed, would lower the degree of complexity of achieving scalability and speed, by orders of magnitude.

Today, Ethereum is still the envy of other blockchains, and as an expected result of being the leader, it gets attacked continuously. Most other emerging competitors try to angle for a perceived weakness that supposedly Ethereum has, such as on-chain governance, faster settlement times, less energy consumption, or unclear market messaging. But as I’ve been saying for a while: Ethereum’s most important feature is not a feature. It is rather the strength of its contributing and supporting community, and that’s something that no competitor can copy.

Most other blockchain competitors have stronger central, command-and-control modus operandi as they try to emulate Ethereum’s success in propagating their footprint into global communities or luring developers with grants and financial incentives. In contrast, having started with an original, powerful and magnetic vision, Ethereum’s community gets drawn to Ethereum by their own accord, and in a ground-swell fashion. Ethereum’s grants aren’t focused on luring developers from other platforms, rather they aim to fund efforts that contribute to Ethereum’s own strength. The Ethereum community’s growth  is self- motivated. Many of its community events or hackathons regularly attract thousands of attendees whereas many of its competitors struggle to get a few hundred or dozen attendees at similar functions.

For an update on Ethereum’s strengths and uniqueness, please refer to Joseph Lubin’s presentation in Seoul and video where he introduces the concept of “Decentralized Transaction Processing” DTPS, a new measure that factors the degree of decentralization into blockchain transactions speed as a primordial factor that trumps fast, but less decentralized transaction throughput achievements in other blockchain platforms.

In light of the regulatory uncertainty that followed its ICO, the Ethereum Foundation went out of its way to not centralize itself. By its own admittance, and to prove the (SEC) loosely defined decentralized attributes, the Ethereum Foundation did not want to be a central force that drives or controls the economic outcomes of its underlying cryptocurrency. At the last DevCon 4, Ethereum’s Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi stated: “We are willing to decentralize decision-making and funding, no matter how chaotic it looks.”

However, this voluntary laissez-faire has been chaotic enough to the point of yielding inefficient progress, produced an extreme obsession with consensus decision-making (at the expense of some excessive delays in decisions), engendered overlapping agendas or efforts, and created an overall complacency for making changes happen fast enough.

Despite all this success, it is my opinion that the Ethereum Foundation must re-invent itself once again. How it evolves may determine Ethereum’s degree of future success. Change must come together from the outside, and not only from the Foundation itself. Ultimately, that would elevate the eventual state of effective decentralization it aspires to continuously live-up to.

How Ethereum evolves is a primordial topic today, and I don’t know of a better to way to express it than to lay out my specific thoughts about it.

Here’s what I think should happen with the evolution of Ethereum.

Let’s start with the Ethereum Foundation (EF). If its current annual burn rate of $20 million supporting 100 employees is correct, there is definitely room for improving what’s being delivered, and how its resources could be more efficiently managed. Historically, the EF has not excelled at efficiently managing its people, regularly communicating with the market (although it did so more on its blog previously), or being transparent about how it manages its financial and operational affairs.

I propose to keep the $20 million annual budget, but distribute it differently. Here’s a set of specific recommendations:

#1 Rename the Ethereum Foundation to Ethereum Research Foundation

The Ethereum Foundation’s focus should be on research, not development, and therefore could be renamed as the Ethereum Research Foundation. Let’s face it. The core of the Ethereum Foundation has been research, an area they excel and revel in, but since Jeffrey Wilcke and Gavin Wood left it, they have not been so efficient at rolling out a good cadence of software updates and improvements. I realize that splitting research from development is a delicate operation, given how embroiled both functions have become within the Ethereum Foundation, but there is a precedent if you look at how Microsoft Research is run for example. Budget $7.5M.

#2 Revive EthDev with a Focus on Software Development

Soon after raising $18M from its ICO, the Ethereum Foundation set-up a group called EthDev, a development oriented organization focused on delivering what they promised. I suggest to revive EthDev or form an equivalent organization that is headed by an experienced full-time CTO or Head of Software Engineering. That group should be laser-focused on software development and delivery based on known and agreed-upon priorities, across all aspects of Ethereum’s evolution,- Eth 1.x, Eth 2.0 and sharding implementations included. Budget $7.5M.

#3 Fund EthMarket to Properly and Regularly Communicate Ethereum’s Positions and Updates

Create a small group that focuses on officially communicating all of the work that Ethereum is doing, properly messaging to the market Ethereum’s strengths, and defending/rebutting claims made by the competition. Allow this group to organize the next Ethereum global conference, not just as a DevCon but as a true melding of business and technical communities together. And it would provide a unified voice that can re-reclaim the “Ethereum narrative”. Initial budget $1M.

#4 Spin EthHub as EthEducation, the Education Jumping Point

Energize EthHub’s excellent work, and make it a cohesive jumping point for everything related to Ethereum education for developers. Beef it up even further. Initial budget $1M.

#5 Create EthBizDev to Support the Strategic Adoption of Ethereum Technology

Ethereum can take a page from AWS or Microsoft Azure’s approach to forging and nurturing relationships with key developer organizations. Form a small group, focused on strategic relationships, evangelism, and adoption. Initial budget $1M.

#6 Form an Ethereum Governance Council with a Mixed Business and Technical Composition

This Ethereum Council would become the new Ethereum heartbeat. Initially, it could consist of 1 representative from each of the above groups (except for 2 reps from the Ethereum Research Foundation), and another 4-6 external members with noted business experience in growing and managing tech organizations. A 6-month chair rotation could be implemented. The council would meet once per month, with an agenda of updating each other on progress, discussing issues, making some decisions, and taking back action items to their respective groups.

What I’m proposing is not to shake or disturb any of the good ground community work and initiatives that are already taking place, but rather harness them better. Activities like the Ethereum EIPs, Ethereum Magicians, Ethereum Cat Herders, EthCC, EthGlobal, Ethereum Gitter, EthResearch, the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance, Ethereum Github’s repository would continue as they are vibrant and important, but they will be given extra shots in the arm if a newly invigorated distributed organizational structure takes place. A virtual, but more accountable organizational structure would help ensure that no good efforts (or intentions) are being squandered, nor that unproductive work sucks the air out of an otherwise healthy ecosystem that wants to strive and not spin its wheels unnecessarily.

Basically, what I’m proposing is a measured decentralization of activity, with better accountability and a thin layer of old-fashioned management to oversee the overall progress. In essence, we would be giving more muscle to Ethereum.

Let’s face it: the times, they have changed. We aren’t in 2015 or 2016 anymore when Ethereum was the only viable alternative to Bitcoin. Today, there is fierce competition, and it is a factor that cannot be ignored. Even if Ethereum continues to “play nice”, other players are not. The market mistakes Vitalik Buterin’s pleasant and charismatic personality as a soft spot. Some people conflate Vitalik’s kindness and intellectual generosity as an Ethereum project weakness, and exploit that to their own advantages.

Today, the Ethereum 2.0 that’s needed is not just technical. It’s also organizational. Company re-organizations are a common occurrence. For growth reasons or changing market conditions, what worked then doesn’t work anymore, and it gets changed. There is nothing wrong is being loud and clear about the need to change the structure of an organization, and then to proceed by just doing it.

It is my opinion based on what I’m hearing and sensing that if the Ethereum Foundation doesn’t overtly start to initiate change, that change will happen around them. The proposal to levy a % of mining fees as a continuous funding for development was a direct response to a lack of proper funding from the Ethereum Foundation. Where there is smoke, there is usually fire.

Throughout Ethereum’s journey, the Ethereum Foundation has been its spark, but going forward, we need to ensure it doesn’t become its anchor.

I hope this proposal gets debated and taken seriously. More importantly, that change happens for the better.

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Unpacking Decentralized Governance in the Blockchain Era

On January 10 2019, I made a presentation at the Blockstack “Decentralizing The World” event in Hong Kong. I’m posting my entire presentation as speaker notes. You can also see the slideshare link below.

INTRO

Good morning and thank you Blockstack for inviting me to this special event to talk about the Layers of Decentralized Governance, and greetings to Hong Kong and its tech community. I must confess, this is my first trip to your wonderful city, and I wished I had come earlier.

DISCLOSURES

First, by way of disclosures, I am involved in a number of activities in this sector, whether I’m invested in or advising companies, these are the key one. Some of you know me as the author of The Business Blockchain, the first book to explain the blockchain in a business language. Actually, that book has now been translated into 10 languages, and the first language was the simplified Chinese, published by CITIC, and the 2nd and 3rd were Japanese and Korean, so the Asian interest is very strong.

Let me make a 2nd confession.

We know very little about decentralization, let alone governance models behind them.

Today, in this field, there is a lot more theory than practice, and there are a number of experiments that are dominating. And that makes it exciting to observe and follow.

We are still newbies in trying to apply, learn, push the envelope, fail, stumble, iterate and we are eager to show that decentralization has a future.

DECENTRALIZATION AS RAISON D’ETRE

Of course, decentralization has a future. It’s the raison d’être of the blockchain. The blockchain is the best tool we have today, to implement a future where decentralization can flourish.

STONE AGE

You know, the stone age didn’t end for a lack of stones. So, if you think of centralization as being the opposite of decentralization and where are mostly today, we can’t wait for centralization to die, before embarking on decentralization. We must let decentralization take control of its own destiny.

CENTRAL SYSTEMS FLAWS

There is a school of thought that believes that for a every centralized business that exists today, there is probably a decentralized version of the same that offers a new set of benefits the central version didn’t have.

One could argue – there is nothing wrong with central systems,- think Web-based businesses mostly, but also some monopolies that share the same characteristics, as a starting point. And some of them have grown to be quite large and influential in our lives. The challenge is that many of these central systems or businesses have developed flaws as they grew. Some of them are perceived to be unfair, corrupt, untrustworthy, evil, abusive, inefficient, expensive, or useless.

The reality is that- few of these systems don’t have at least one of these flaws.

INCENTIVES TO MOVE

So, because of these flaws as weaknesses, these systems are giving us an incentive to move to decentralization.

But the incentive must be strong for users to move. There is a psychology of change that is prevailing here, and it goes like this:

People are risk-averse in the domain of gains, and they are risk-seeking in the domain of losses. Let me repeat it.

People are risk-averse in the domain of gains, and they are risk-seeking in the domain of losses.

This means that- you aren’t going to move users or people to try something new if they are currently happy with what they are using, and you just tell them it is “better”. But if someone is currently experiencing a loss, a pain, a defect, a deprivation, or something negative, and you come in and propose to them a solution that doesn’t give them these pains or losses, the motivation to move are much greater and they would gladly do it.

Example- if it is sunny outside, and I approach someone offering them a better shirt than the one they are wearing, they probably won’t be willing to switch it, but if it’s raining and cold outside, and you’re standing there, wet and shivering, and I come to you, and offer you an umbrella or a coat, even if they aren’t the best umbrella or the coolest coat, you will probably agree to take them in order to reduce your suffering.

So, you can’t just say – we’re going to have a decentralized twitter, decentralized facebook, decentralized messaging, etc. just because it’s decentralized. Right now, the best value proposition the blockchain has for this, is that the data is stored on decentralized network that can’t be easily taken down or hacked, and they are censorship resistant, so the government can’t ask for that data, and the companies that run them can’t abuse what they do with that data, because they don’t really own it.

So, the users that you will mostly attract and that will gladly move to a decentralized solution are ones who have suffered a loss or are not happy with the current system they are using.

Question- How many of you have been personally the victim of a data breach caused by a company where you use their service? Ok, of those of you that raised their hands, keep your hands up only IF you were caused some material harm, so please lower your hands if there was no harm that you know of.

See – we haven’t been hit so much yet such that the pain to move away from the Facebooks and other systems is not that great. But if we were hit, we would move in spades.

DECENTRALIZATION UNUSUAL BEAST

Decentralization is an unusual beast.

DECENTRALIZATION IDEAL

And getting to decentralization is full of compromises.

Decentralization maximalists want everything to be on-chain, including the governance aspects. You could say that in an ideal world, we’d have everything decentralized and on-chain, but that world doesn’t exist today. Except the DAO, and it crashed.

Let’s be careful with everything being on-chain. For example, blockchain transactions are irreversible by design. But decision-making wants optionality and flexibility. You cannot replace human judgement with automated logic which is what smart contracts are.

So, we need to design the right balance between different degrees of decentralizations and on-chain vs. off-chain linkages. And that is btw the essence of a good design for blockchain architecture.

DECENTRALIZATION AS COMMUNITIES

Decentralization and open source projects are communities. They are a living organism.

Success will be directly related to the vibrancy and well functioning of the community that is behind them.

Peter Hintjens has written a book called Social Architecture: Building Online Communities, where he names the 20 tools covering all aspects of a community, and the way you use that toolbox is to either measure an existing community or to design a community to help you focus your efforts to where it will be most useful.

All of these apply to the blockchain decentralization projects, protocols, platforms and products that are being conceived today. More specifically, I’d like to draw attention to a few of these characteristics that we must pay attention to (in bold):

–        Strong missions – the stated reason for the group’s existence

–        Free entry – how easy it is for people to join the group

–        Transparency – how openly and publicly decisions are made

–        Free contributors – how far people are paid to contribute

–        Full remixability – how far contributors can remix each others’ work

–        Strong protocols – how well the rules are written, and Good protocols let strangers collaborate without up-front agreement.

–        Fair authority – how well the rules are enforced

–        Non-tribalism – how far the group claims to own its participants

–        Self-organization – how far individuals can assign their own tasks

–        Tolerance – how the group embrace conflicts

–        Measurable success – how well the group can measure its progress

–        High scoring- how the group rewards its participants

–        Decentralization – how widely the group is spread out (here it looks like the author is thinking of “being distributed” as the key factor)

–        Free workspaces – how easy it is to create new projects

–        Smooth learning – how easy it is to get started and keep learning

–        Regular structure – how regular and predictable the overall structure is

–        Positivity – how far the group is driven by positive results

–        Sense of humor – how seriously the group takes itself

–        Minimalism – how much excess work the group does

–        Sane funding – how the group survives economically

SIMULTANEOUS IMPACT

See, the blockchain excels when its impact is being applied simultaneously along the 4 dimensions that it is supposed to address: Technical, Business, Social and Legal. If you only tinker with one of these variables, and ignore the others, your success will be more limited, and that applies not just to the implementation parts, but also for the motivation to get there. You could get away with tackling 3 of the 4 aspects, but 4 will get you covered the best.

DEFENSE MECHANISM

Decentralization, when it’s well implemented is a defense mechanism. It becomes less vulnerable to attacks and offers protection for privacy, security and autonomy.

GOVERNANCE SEGMENTS

So let’s dive into the governance aspects and cover the landscape, as I see it.

Let’s answer the question: where are we applying governance? The reason for this segmentation is that – there is No One Size Fits All. Each one of these segments presents a different set of challenges, drivers and considerations.

Blockchains is where a lot of activity has been, but we should think of the emerging Peer-to-Peer networks as another important segment. An example is OpenBazaar, a decentralized protocol for e-commerce. These typically have a built-in protocols as their engine of sorts, but there is also another category – Protocols and these are sometimes not requiring their own P2P network, but they are to be implemented on top of existing blockchains. Example 0x which runs on the Ethereum blockchain. A 4th category that is emerging is everything seen as a Dapp/App or Platform. And finally, the last frontier of decentralization (arguably), using the blockchain as a tool for social and political change.

DIFFERENT PRIORITIES

So this is my Toolbox list for Decentralized Governance, the layers to think about, and they are different for each segment.

So, if you are a blockchain, you want to optimize for preventing Sybil attacks and a sound consensus process that never fails.

If you are a P2P Network, the priority shifts to installation, self-incentivization and the economics viability of the network.

Protocols – It’s about adoption, nurturing the ecosystem, and providing value to it.

Dapps/Apps/Platforms – Network effects to guarantee success, development of the platforms, and support.

Socio-Political Change – Inclusiveness, Fairness, Wealth distribution.

DIVERSE STAKEHOLDERS

So, once you have focused on these priorities, the other big factor is – Who are the stakeholders that will be interested in defining or participating in your governance. And this list is important. As a reference point, the current governance of companies today includes the board, the company’s management, and the shareholders mostly. But in the world of the blockchain, that list expands and includes new elements such as users, developers, regulators, node operators and even influencers as governance participants in addition to the investors and organizations. And even under these categories, there are new elements- the organizations we are seeing now are Foundations/Councils and in the investor category, we have token holders, not just equity owners. Users also are token holders and they can vote with their token to influence the future of decentralized organizations. Today, users vote with their buying power or they voice their dissatisfaction, but that’s an indirect participation.

MAPPING SEGMENTS TO STAKEHOLDERS

Now, if you put all of this together, what do we have. Think of this matrix where you have on one side the various stakeholders, and on the other the type of decentralization construct you are targeting, and in the middle the Toolbox priority list. So you need to optimize your governance to cover these aspects, without making it more complicated than necessary.

EXPERIMENTATIONS

At the beginning of my talk, I said that we are living in a period where there is a lot of experimentation today with blockchain governance models. Here is a list of some of the interesting tools that are being tried:

Liquid democracy – Form of democracy where the electorate has the option of vesting voting power in delegates instead of voting directly themselves. And they can withdraw it too. (Example of application is D-POS blockchains, Delegated Proof of Stake)

Quadratic voting – Popularized by Glen Weyl in his book Radical Markets (a favorite book of Vitalik Buterin), it’s a form of decision-making where participants cast their preference and intensity of preference. Voters are given a budget to vote, say 10 votes, and they can elect to use 5 of these votes for 1 issue, and the rest on others, so you are voting with a weighting factor.

Futarchy – Form of government proposed by economist Robin Hanson, in which elected officials define measures of national wellbeing, and prediction markets are used to determine which policies will have the most positive effect.

Token Curated Registries – Pioneered by Mike Goldin at ConsenSys, is a way to curate lists with intrinsic economic incentives for the token holders to curate the list’s contents judiciously.

Foundations, Councils and Associations are additional forms of governance structures being added to the experimentation mix.

EXAMPLES

0x – Trying to gradually decentralize the evolution of the 0x protocol

ZCash  – Aiming to find the right balance between ZCash the founding entity and the foundation.

Aragon – Is itself a governance tool, at the heart of which is a set of smart contracts that are coding actions on-chain. They have a governance process too.

Melonport – Here the focus is on Councils that steer the direction.

Blockstack – Recently announced their march towards decentralization in October and are in the process of doing it.

None of these are perfect. All are trying to a few things, and will be expected to iterate and make changes to things that don’t work, but they are some of the leading examples.

Everyone is trying to eat their own dog food, or a version of it. If it doesn’t kill them, then it must be good. But the dog food may not taste the same ….

ARE WE DECENTRALIZED YET?

There was a website that put this chart together. It was an attempt to visualize the various blockchains in terms of the decentralization aspects such as the number of nodes, voting powers, number of wallets, ….

These were not perfect, but it’s a good attempt- at least asking the right question.

DECENTRALIZATION APPLIANCE

It is becoming easier and easier to become part of the decentralized future. Of course, if you’re technical you can download the DAppNode to connect your computer to blockchains such as Ethereum or Bitcoin (maybe later Blockstack?). But you can also buy a cheap box, the decentralization appliance and you just plug it in and it’s always connected. Almost like a TV is always there to receive the signals. Starting price is $400.

DILEMMA – WE ARE STILL DEFINING DECENTRALIZATION

Some blockchains who don’t fully espouse the ideal decentralization architecture of Bitcoin or Ethereum try to water it down, and define decentralization in their own terms, so they focus on the Peer to Peer aspect of transactions validations.

GOVERNANCE AS TOOL – NOT WEAPON

So if you want to experiment with decentralized governance, let it be a tool, and not a weapon. When you look at some of the unfortunate contentious forks that have happened, that’s the equivalent of a separation from the original projects.

Do not hide under the pretext that open source projects are not real companies and that decentralization ethos has to take over above all common sense.

GOVERNANCE vs. GOVERNING

The role of governance is to ensure that there is good governing. Think of the Queen of England vs. the Prime Minister. The Queen doesn’t really govern. She ensures the prime minister is governing properly according to the UK constitution.

12 ISSUES AND CHALLENGES

In Closing, let me highlight some thoughts to keep in mind, and ones that I believe in.

  1. Token isn’t always needed
  2. In decentralization, economic incentives matter
  3. It is not just about voting
  4. Decision-making by consensus is not ideal
  5. Communities alone shouldn’t govern
  6. Premature decentralization of governance
  7. Does Code = Governance?
  8. Transparency / Openness in Self-governance
  9. One size doesn’t fit all
  10. Large gap in governance UI’s (it is still very technical to participate)
  11. Legal and moral aspects of unstoppable P2P networks (who is responsible?)
  12. Obsession with self-governance (DAO was not a standard)

Decentralized governance doesn’t have to be complicated. It needs to be simple, embedded and reliable.

Some software tools and products being developed as decentralized solutions may not have a strong case for being that way. Many of them are just discrete capabilities that have a given functionality, so decentralization governance for them would be a detriment, rather than a benefit.

We must always ask what the purpose of governance is.

SMALL PROBLEMS FIRST

“In decentralized systems, problems can be solved early and when they are small.” (quote from Nassim Taleb from his book, Skin in the Game)

THE BIG PICTURE

Let’s keep in mind that the big picture is the blockchain economy, which includes a direction towards decentralized data, content, storage, computation and protocols. It also includes a set of transactional functionality related to work, rewards, earnings and spendings; and it is meant to target any industry, including the future of nations, law, and government.


BETTER FUTURE

Hopefully, the blockchain can lead us to a new world that is better than the current one, just as the web has brought many benefits to our lives in the past 25 years.

THANK YOU

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