Nick Szabo  🔑

I have talked to tons of blockchain devs about traditional corporate governance. Nearly none get interested. Yet the problems devs are trying to solve are longstanding corporate governance issues for which solutions & thinking (albeit not perfect) exist. Baby/bathwater issue.

So now people w/ DAOs & other formal gov projects (Tezos, EOS, etc.) are realizing that voting issues are super complex--hard to avoid free-rider problem, hard to balance trade-offs of: a. participation vs. 'minority tyranny' w/o quorum set, b. tyranny of majority vs. fiduc duty.

I suspect people are going to realize that traditional models offer a range of solutions that strike a quite reasonable balance of interests tested IRL over centuries & "business DAOs" will end up looking like corporations with a smart contract escrow instead of a bank.

So is that it then? DAOs are just entities with a bit of smart contract & token augmentation? Maybe, but not necessarily. For groups that care deeply about anonymity & opsec--because they might be operating in oppressive circumstances or legal gray areas--blockchain is more than

'a nice to have' and might be closer to a 'must have'. I'm not sure if/when we'll see meaningful experimentation in this area with real stakes, but that is what interests me most with DAOs. Most current DAOs seem to have little to do with this.