DAOs at devcon Bangkok

[theobtl]

Hi all,

Devcon was quite interesting from a governance and DAO perspective. Hope you all stopped my the governance geeks hub (collective intelligence hub)!

Especially Lefteris‘ talk „DAOs Unmasked: The Hard Truths Behind the Hype“, only voicing mild criticism towards ENS DAO and criticizing virtually all other „DAOs“.
https://app.devcon.org/schedule/ZSSKBL
He’s certainly right that the term „DAO“ is stretched a lot these days, even though it’s been like that for a long time.

What were your thoughts or highlights from devcon from a governance perspective?

[kelvin]

I thought Lefteris had some interesting points. Honestly my main point of criticism about the talk is that things are hard and take a lot of time and I don't think Lefteris gives enough space for this. Decentralized governance is extremely hard to get right. I think there's a lot of pressure to just do the easy thing (token voting) but token voting is just pure plutocracy and plutocracy is not very decentralized. I strongly disagree with the idea that token voting is the right approach for strong decentralized governance.

[z0r0z]

I think DAOs are fine. I would say we trust people way too much still. Conceptually they are a tool to maximize freedom and group outcomes.
Not sure what the chief contentions of the video are (if someone can eli5 or provide gist).

[kelvin]

The chief contention is basically just that DAOs aren't decentralized enough. My chief response to this contention is that the existing options for how to decentralize a DAO are bad and that we need more experimentation in the space. Problem is that few people are willing to yolo experiment with some new structure without retaining some control in case it goes terribly wrong.

[copypaste]

Are the potential benefits of DAOs worth it over just trying to heavily minimize them in most cases? I feel like governance minimization has really only been the effective / winning strategy

[kelvin]

Are the potential benefits of DAOs worth it over just trying to heavily minimize them in most cases? I feel like governance minimization has really only been the effective / winning strategy

Answering this is complicated. We first need to understand what "governance minimization" even means. Governance is just a process by which decisions get made. Governance minimization is really saying one of two things. Either (1) you're like Bitcoin and you just agree to basically never change the thing or (2) you're like Ethereum and you have some vague and undefined governance process.

Bitcoin's version of governance minimization is probably the closest to true minimization but it means that Bitcoin is basically useless at actually doing anything. Ethereum's version of governance minimization is actually in my opinion not minimized at all but rather just obscured. Ethereum has governance but most people have no idea how to navigate it. I feel pretty strongly that Ethereum's weak governance is a big reason why so many L2s have popped up. Ethereum wants people to work on things, people want to work on Ethereum things, but Ethereum has no way to natively reward people for working on Ethereum things (which is part of good governance).

In the long term I feel pretty strongly that only ecosystems that get very good at governance will be able to compete.