
A Venture Fund with Plenty of Virtual Capital, but No Capitalist - jrbedard
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/business/dealbook/crypto-ether-bitcoin-currency.html
======
state
Although it's obvious that the DAO is a pretty crazy experiment, I haven't
read anything that completely convinces me it's going to fall apart. I'm aware
that it's daring, that it's got lots of _potential_ vulnerabilities. I'm
inclined, for the mean time, to just sit back and admire the enthusiasm.

------
seibelj
If you found a security flaw in ethereum / DAO and stole a bunch of money, is
it even illegal? Also, that guy who put 1/3 of his life savings into DAO is
out of his mind

~~~
aab0
"If you found a security flaw in ethereum / DAO and stole a bunch of money, is
it even illegal?"

I'm sure it is. No one has ever gotten away with Bitcoin thefts by arguing
'all I did was input some numbers as allowed to the server and sent some
bitcoins to another address'. Is it a good of real world value which you
obtained control over without the original owner's consent? Then it was theft
and a judge will see it as theft.

~~~
lumberjack
I think you missed the point. DAO and the funds they hold are not owned by
anyone unlike Bitcoins who have a clear owner. I guess in some cases DAO can
have a set amount of owners but this is not necessary.

~~~
Zagitta
Perhaps I'm misundertanding you but how exactly are the funds not clearly
owned? It's my understanding that each ethereum invested in the DOA still
belongs to whoever invested them because they at any point can chose to split
their funds from the original DOA into a different DOA where they then can
extract the funds. Returns on investments come back in the form of etheruem
that will be evenly distributed to the DOA token holders meaning that even
they will have a clear owner. With that in mind I don't see how the fund are
any less clearly owned by anyone than bitcoins, maybe you can explain?

------
jcfrei
> _After it collects Ether from investors — the deadline to buy in is May 28 —
> the D.A.O. aims to put the money into other digital currency start-ups._

So the D.A.O. is just a very technical form of angel investing? I think a
decentralized autonomous organization is an interesting concept but I wonder
what the great benefit for society is. Most countries have well established
legal personalities, such as corporations to create consensus between
different shareholders. An it's usually not even expensive to set up. In the
EU anybody can create a corporation in any member country using corporate law
from any EU country, so you get to choose from a wide array of legal forms.
What's the added benefit of a stateless organization? The corporate structure
might exist in a stateless form but apart from that the organization is still
bound by local regulations whenever it actually engages in a market. To me it
seems like a concept dreamt up for a utopian anarcho-capitalist parallel
universe.

~~~
FatalLogic
>the organization is still bound by local regulations whenever it actually
engages in a market.

That seems true, and I also think it's one of many significant problems with
the DAO.

Though imagine if some of the organizations being funded are _also_ DAOs. It
seems very likely that some types of DAO-funded services could operate without
ever being directly exposed to a state-regulated market, except at the level
of the individual users and other participants. Individual humans are de facto
state-regulated entities - but potentially they are anonymous or not expedient
for governments to punish.

------
oh_sigh
Does anyone have any ideas of what the first real uses of the DAO may be?

~~~
mapmeld
There's going to be a vote on whether to fund applicants to the DAO smart
contract system

Anyone can apply, but they need to initiate it through a smart contract on
Ethereum + DAO. Currently there are only two projects, including one by the
creator of DAO... so I think it's set up for a windfall for the creators

------
nolepointer
"Olivier Stern, a 31-year-old French socialist ..."

I stopped reading there.

~~~
Animats
The current President of France is a socialist. So is the Prime Minister of
France. The Socialist Party is currently the ruling party in France.

