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How to Dao

Session 1

Session 1 prep

Welcome to the How to DAO course! We will be 100 people from across the globe tuning in live for 2 hours every Wednesday 4pm-6pm UK time, starting 22nd Sep.

If you haven't already, please join the How to DAO Discord via

https://discord.gg/MN4XDBQukC⁠

and introduce yourself in #introductions.

A reminder: You will be sent prep tasks at least a few days before each session (allow 1 hour), and homework at the end of each session (allow 1 hour). To get the most out of the course you should also set aside at least 2 hours per session to go back through the notes, read some of the links provided and make sure you've understood everything we've covered. So that's a minimum of 6 hours per session for maximum benefit (1 hour prep, 2 hours live, 2 hours revision, 1 hour homework).

The first hour of the live sessions will be used to underline some of the key points from the preparatory reading/watching, as a tour of the rest of the notes from the session, and sometimes to give live, on-chain walkthroughs of certain tasks. The second hour will feature presentations followed by Q&A with a number of experts from the DAO space.

For this first session, my approach is to provide you with a 'map of the territory' along with a ton of high quality content, and then leave it up to you to pick which areas you want to go into deeper. We won't have time to cover everything in detail. I suggest you use the 2 hours revision time to read more about anything you found particularly challenging or interesting.

OK, here's the prep for the first session:

Let's generate some excitement by starting with this pair of high-rhetoric/high-production value/low-on-specifics videos from the first DAO hype wave in 2018:

⁠

Aragon - The fight for freedom⁠

(5m)

⁠

Introducing DAOstack (v2)⁠

(5m)

From there, check out some content on the development of organisations, game theory and coordination failure:

Watch

The Laloux Culture Model⁠

(until 6m45)

Watch

Coordination Games - Christopher Coyne⁠

(8m)

Read

Know Thy Enemy: Coordination Failures⁠

by Kevin Owocki (one of our guest experts for session 1)

Read at least one the following articles:

⁠

A Prehistory of DAOs⁠

(by Kei Kreutler)

⁠

DAO Landscape⁠

(by Coopahtroopa)

⁠

A beginner's guide to DAOs⁠

(by Linda Xie)

Listen to at least one of the following and start/join a thread offering some reflections in #session-1 in the How to DAO Discord:

⁠

DAO Panel | Kain Warwick, Coopahtroopah, Tracheopteryx⁠

(Bankless, Aug 2021)

⁠

Meditations On Moloch⁠

(audio version of the well-known

essay⁠

)

⁠

Slaying Moloch | Ameen Soleimani & Kevin Owocki ⁠

(Bankless, Oct 2020)

⁠

'Humanity's Phase Shift', Daniel Schmachtenberger⁠

(Rebel Wisdom, Nov 2018)

Finally, read the DAOhaus docs pages:

What is a DAO?⁠

The Bank⁠

and

Membership⁠

Note, I won't be going into detail about how blockchains work. If you need that background, watch

Anders' Blockchain Demo⁠

⁠

You're encouraged to start discussions about anything from this session you find interesting in the #session-1 channel in the How to DAO Discord.

See you on 22nd Sep at 4pm UK time at

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/96014715205⁠

(same link for all sessions).

Best,

Stephen

Session 1: Introduction to DAOs

Santiago Siri (

@santisiri⁠

) is the cofounder and president of Democracy Earth, a non-profit organisation backed by Y Combinator that is behind the UBI Universal Basic Income token on Ethereum and the Proof of Humanity protocol. He is also Executive Director of DAO Education and the author of Hacktivismo, published 2015 by Random House.

Featuring Santi:

⁠

"Identity is The One Vulnerability Being Exploited Across All Systems. It’s the Mother of All Battles:" Santiago Siri⁠

(The Defiant podcast, May 2020)

⁠

Meet the Man With a Radical Plan for Blockchain Voting⁠

(Wired, 2018)

Game theory & coordination failure

⁠

Introduction to Game Theory⁠

⁠

Conclusions from

Coordination Games - Christopher Coyne⁠

How to solve coordination problems:

Formal standards: Rules that are codified by certain parties/rules about how parties are supposed to act, and/or

Social conventions: A regularity followed by people belonging to a group/a shared expectation of the correct way to behave

(It seems to me this isn't really a binary, it's more a spectrum of formality. What's important is that there's communication and agreement on rules/conventions.)

⁠

The Evolution of Trust⁠

: an interactive guide to the game theory of why & how we trust each other

Conclusions from The Evolution of Trust:

⁠

"Build relationships. Find win-wins. Communicate clearly."

Key passages from

Meditations On Moloch⁠

(OG essay on slatestarcodex.com,

audio version here⁠

)

"Things are easy to solve from a god’s-eye-view, so if everyone comes together into a superorganism, that superorganism can solve problems with ease and finesse."

"The two active ingredients of government are laws plus violence – or more abstractly agreements plus enforcement mechanism. Many other things besides governments share these two active ingredients and so are able to act as coordination mechanisms to avoid traps.

For example, since students are competing against each other (directly if classes are graded on a curve, but always indirectly for college admissions, jobs, et cetera) there is intense pressure for individual students to cheat. The teacher and school play the role of a government by having rules (for example, against cheating) and the ability to punish students who break them.

But the emergent social structure of the students themselves is also a sort of government. If students shun and distrust cheaters, then there are rules (don’t cheat) and an enforcement mechanism (or else we will shun you).

Social codes, gentlemens’ agreements, industrial guilds, criminal organizations, traditions, friendships, schools, corporations, and religions are all coordinating institutions [that aren't governments] that keep us out of traps by changing our incentives."

From

Know Thy Enemy: Coordination Failures⁠

"If only there was a technology that allowed groups of humans to choose to easily coordinate with one another! A transparent substrate for trust games where everyone knows where they stand and whose rules can’t be changed on you.

My belief is that this is the ultimate legacy of Ethereum [/smart contracts]. We can now program our values into our economic system—the final form of a stateful internet could allow us to coordinate the actions of multiple economic actors and therefore could solve coordination failures."

Where we're going with this: DAOhaus DAOs (and other no-code DAO platforms) provide crystal-clear (cryptographic) expectations of what the 'rules of the game' are, such that they enable and encourage a higher standard of coordination/co-operation.

No-code DAO platforms have the potential to act as a Schelling point for 'co-operating with money', effectively standardising what it means to be a multi-stakeholder co-op and massively reducing the cost/friction of both inter-organisation collaboration, and participants switching between organisations.

More on multipolar traps

⁠

'Humanity's Phase Shift', Daniel Schmachtenberger⁠

⁠

Daniel Schmachtenberger on Byzantine Dreams⁠

⁠

Us vs Them: Game Theory, Multipolar Traps and In-Groups/Out-Groups - Daniel Schmachtenberger⁠

⁠

Describing Multipolar Traps - Daniel Schmachtenberger⁠

⁠

Self Interest As a Multipolar-Trap - Daniel Schmachtenberger⁠

⁠

Multipolar Traps: When Evil Thinks It's Good - Daniel Schmachtenberger, Aubrey Marcus⁠

The evolution of coordination

⁠

The Laloux Culture Model⁠

⁠

Developmental Perspective on Organizations⁠

⁠

Reinventing Organizations YouTube channel⁠

Coordination in nature

⁠

Starling murmuration⁠

⁠

Blacktip Reef Sharks in Huge Shoal of Fish at Kuredu Maldives⁠

⁠

Interaction ruling animal collective behavior depends on topological rather than metric distance: Evidence from a field study⁠

⁠

Inside the ant colony - Deborah M. Gordon⁠

⁠

The Waggle Dance of the Honeybee⁠

⁠

Does decentralization bring us closer to nature?⁠

Computational biology

⁠

Nature, In Code - Learning JavaScript programming while learning about nature⁠

⁠

The Nature of Code⁠

⁠

p5js | Flocking⁠

⁠

Sebastian Lague: Coding Adventures⁠

⁠

Modeling Murmuration - Smarter Every Day⁠

⁠

Ant Pheromone Trail Simulation⁠

⁠

Ants!⁠

Ownership and decision making in the legacy legal system

Provocations on property/ownership

⁠

11 Practical Steps Towards Healthy Power Dynamics at Work⁠

(take note of Step 11. Share the ownership!:)

"My concern is that words like “non-hierarchical” and “self-organising” [can] create a smokescreen, masking the real power dynamics that are ultimately determined by the ownership structure."

⁠

What Is Property?⁠

(Investopedia)

⁠

Noam Chomsky on property rights, equality and democracy⁠

(video)

⁠

Umair Haque on artificial scarcity⁠

(Medium)

⁠

Charles Eisenstein: A Beautiful World of Abundance⁠

(Resurgence)

⁠

Own Your Data Foundation⁠

⁠

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon from

Proudhon: What is Property?⁠

(video, 17m)

In his 1840 book What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government,

Proudhon⁠

claimed "

Property is theft!⁠

" (La propriété, c'est le vol! – see

this video⁠

for more).

From

Is Property Theft?⁠

(Psychology Today, 2019):

"Interestingly, a careful reading of Proudhon shows that he might have had some workable, realistic ideas, consistent with human nature and evolution. He did not believe that economic change could be obtained by revolution, but only by gradually increasing acceptance of his proposals. He believed that some wealth inequality was inevitable and acceptable; his long-term goal was simply decreasing grotesque wealth inequality. As an anarchist, he did not see government ownership of the means of production (socialism) as a solution, although he accepted the inevitability of government because there will always be people who want to regulate the behavior of others. His goal was simply to minimize governmental control. His hope was that people would see and embrace the wisdom of economic mutualism, which involves voluntary, cooperative, mutual assistance among laborers, resulting in benefits to all workers. There would be no violent overthrow of the government or economic system, but rather a gradual replacement of the politico-economic system as mutualism slowly increased over time."

Ursula K. Le Guin & The Dispossessed

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

⁠

ursulakleguin.com⁠

⁠

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin⁠

(2018 documentary film. Those in the UK can watch on

BBC iPlayer⁠

)

⁠

Legendary author Ursula K. Le Guin dies at 88⁠

(The Verge)

⁠

Ursula K. Le Guin Was a Creator of Worlds⁠

(Humanities Magazine)

⁠

The Fantastic Ursula K. Le Guin⁠

(The New Yorker)

⁠

Ten Things I Learned from Ursula K. Le Guin⁠

(Paris Review)

⁠

Ursula Le Guin: 'Wizardry is artistry' | Ursula K Le Guin⁠

(The Guardian)

⁠

Hopping Through Time With Ursula K. Le Guin⁠

(Huffington Post)

From

‘The Dispossessed’ By Ursula K. Le Guin: An Embodiment of Postmodern Anarchism ?⁠

"The existence of an explicitly anarchist society on the moon of Anarres has led many critics of The Dispossessed to focus only on the traditional anarchist themes of this novel. Yet the truly radical legacy of this novel is that it transgresses the boundaries of conventional anarchist thinking to create new forms of anarchism that are entirely relevant to life in the postmodern condition. Le Guin updates the conventional anarchist project and positions anarchism to move into the third millennium...

The strongest and most direct statement of Le Guin’s anarchist vision appears in her 1974 novel The Dispossessed. In her attempt to embody anarchism, Le Guin constructs a highly traditional anarchist society on the planet Anarres. Drawing on the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century anarchist writers Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, she imagines a society [without] the state, organized religion, and private property."

From

The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – Simple Lines⁠

"A key concept in the social imaginary on Anarres is the idea of society as an ecology, within which people have a ‘cellular function’ – a way of living that is their ideal contribution to the whole. This is a vision of economics built on biology and ecology rather than physics and mechanics... The central values of this society are solidarity and freedom. There is also a rejection of the idea of private property. This runs counter to our familiar notions of individuals and their stuff. This ideology is manifested when people are accused of being ‘propertarians’, or of ‘egoising’ when talking about themselves. The emphasis on non-possessiveness is also found in a sentence such as ‘You can share the handkerchief I use’ [as opposed to, 'You can borrow my handkerchief']. Le Guin skillfully investigates the tensions that emerge between individual desires and a sense of the common need."

From

Ursula Le Guin: 'Wizardry is artistry' | Ursula K Le Guin⁠

(The Guardian, 2014):

"The “dispossessed” of Anarres are, of course, those who attempt to live without property, but also without a certain kind of language. They have no possessive pronouns (not “you can borrow my handkerchief”, but “you can share the handkerchief I use”) and abjure possessive sexuality. “The language Shevek spoke, the only one he knew, lacked any proprietary idioms for the sexual act … The usual verb, taking only a plural subject … meant something two people did, not something one person did, or had.” Like much of Le Guin’s writing, this is marked by her engagement with the women’s movement, and the notion that a patriarchal language will produce a patriarchal world."

Ownership of organisations

There are two distinct types of ownership rights relevant to organisations:

Voting rights (green): who gets to make the decisions (most importantly, who can fire you!)

Economic rights (blue): who has a claim on company profits

Traditional

⁠

Worker-led/steward-led

⁠
⁠
⁠
⁠
⁠

Golden shares

⁠

Golden Share Definition⁠

(Investopedia)

⁠

Armin Steuernagel on how to keep a mission driven company independent and raise capital⁠

(podcast)

⁠

New Belgium, A Beloved Brewery, Is Sold To International Conglomerate⁠

⁠

Why Employee Ownership Wasn’t Good Enough for This Organic Food Company⁠

"A golden share is a type of share that gives its shareholder veto power over changes to the company's charter. It holds special voting rights, giving its holder the ability to block another shareholder from taking more than a ratio of ordinary shares."

From

Steward-Ownership: Rethinking ownership in the 21st century⁠

"The Golden Share holds veto rights on all decisions that would effectively undermine the company’s commitment to steward-ownership. This veto-share is held by a “veto-service” foundation such as the Purpose Foundation. To be a veto-share provider, a foundation must be self-owned and have clear provisions in its own charter that enable it to use this veto right

to protect the provisions of steward-ownership."

Case study: Equal Care Co-op: a multi-stakeholder platform co-operative

⁠

Equal Care Co-op⁠

are building a new, co-owned social care platform that puts care givers and receivers in charge. By incorporating as a multi-stakeholder co-operative, their digital product and accompanying service is owned by and accountable to the communities using and sustaining it. They arrived at the platform co-op model as a response to systemic inequities within the social care system, seeing it as a practical route to centering choice, power and ownership with the two most important people in care – the person giving and the person getting support.

⁠

Supported member: You are being regularly supported by Equal Care Co-op (whether that's voluntary or paid support) Advocate member: Your relative or friend is being supported by Equal Care Co-op but they cannot be a Member themselves.

Investor member: You support our aims and have invested in our Community Share Offer.

Worker member: You are regularly contributing your labour to Equal Care Co-op, whether that's paid or voluntary work.

There are no rows in this table

⁠

Participatory budgeting

⁠

From

What is participatory budgeting? A 60-second guide⁠

"Participatory budgeting comes in all shapes and sizes, but basically it looks like this:

Ideas are generated about how a budget should be spent

People vote for their priorities

The projects with the most votes gets funded"

A popular web2 tool for participatory budgeting:

Cobudget⁠

"Cobudget is a tool and a methodology that makes resource allocation participatory. It enables all members of an organization to get involved in decision-making by proposing projects and allocating funds to the proposals they like."

Blockchain 101

Bitcoin: the first cryptocurrency

⁠

Visions of Bitcoin: How major Bitcoin narratives changed over time⁠

⁠

The Many Faces of Bitcoin⁠

⁠

Bitcoin Is the Biggest Big Short⁠

⁠

Bitcoin Rap Battle Debate: Hamilton vs. Satoshi

⁠

(video)

From the spacemesh blog:

⁠

All the World's a Game - Are You Ready to Play?⁠

⁠

Relearning How to Play (the Language and Money Games)⁠

⁠

Our Universe Has Always Been Decentralized⁠

From Balaji Srinivasan:

⁠

Bitcoin becomes the Flag of Technology⁠

⁠

Crypto-Civilization | Balaji Srinivasan⁠

(podcast)

⁠

Balaji Srinivasan on The Future of Bitcoin and Ethereum, How to Become Noncancelable, the Path to Personal Freedom and Wealth in a New World, the Changing Landscape of Warfare, and More (#506)⁠

(podcast)

"Perhaps the most enduring source of conflict within the Bitcoin community derives from incompatible visions of what Bitcoin is and should become. Businesses building on Bitcoin, believing it a cheap global payments network, eventually became nonviable when blocks filled up in 2017. They weren’t necessarily wrong, they just had a vision of the world that ended up being a minority view within the Bitcoin community, and was ultimately not expressed by the protocol on their desired timeline… Visions of Bitcoin are not static. Technological developments, practical realities and real-world events have shaped collective views."

⁠

E-cash proof of concept

Cheap p2p payments network

Censorship-resistant digital gold

Private and anonymous darknet currency

Reserve currency for the cryptocurrency industry

Programmable shared database

Uncorrelated financial asset

Ethereum: the world computer

⁠

Vitalik's whitepaper⁠

⁠

ethereum.org⁠

⁠

ethereum.org/learn⁠

⁠

Bitcoin vs. Ethereum: What's the Difference?⁠

⁠

How Is Ethereum Different From Bitcoin?⁠

⁠

What Is Ethereum?⁠

⁠

A gentle introduction to Ethereum⁠

⁠

How does Ethereum work, anyway?⁠

⁠

Mastering Ethereum e-book⁠

⁠

What is Ethereum? (EthHub)⁠

⁠

Understanding The DAO Attack⁠

(story of the most famous hard fork in the history of blockchain)

From

Bitcoin vs. Ethereum: What's the Difference?⁠

"Ethereum proposed to utilize blockchain technology not only for maintaining a decentralized payment network but also for storing [and running] computer code which can be used to power tamper-proof decentralized financial contracts and applications."

From the

introductory chapter of the Mastering Ethereum e-book⁠

"Ethereum is an open source, globally decentralized computing infrastructure that executes programs called smart contracts. It uses a blockchain to synchronize and store the system’s state changes, along with a cryptocurrency called ether to meter and constrain execution resource costs…

Ethereum’s purpose is not primarily to be a digital currency payment network. While the digital currency ether is both integral to and necessary for the operation of Ethereum, ether is intended as a utility currency to pay for use of the Ethereum platform as the world computer.

Unlike Bitcoin, which has a very limited scripting language, Ethereum is designed to be a general-purpose programmable blockchain that runs a virtual machine capable of executing code of arbitrary and unbounded complexity. Where Bitcoin’s Script language is, intentionally, constrained to simple true/false evaluation of spending conditions, Ethereum’s language is Turing complete, meaning that Ethereum can straightforwardly function as a general-purpose computer…

The original blockchain, namely Bitcoin’s blockchain, tracks the state of units of bitcoin and their ownership. You can think of Bitcoin as a distributed consensus state machine, where transactions cause a global state transition, altering the ownership of coins. The state transitions are constrained by the rules of consensus, allowing all participants to (eventually) converge on a common (consensus) state of the system, after several blocks are mined.

Ethereum is also a distributed state machine. But instead of tracking only the state of currency ownership, Ethereum tracks the state transitions of a general-purpose data store, i.e., a store that can hold any data expressible as a key–value tuple... In some ways, this serves the same purpose as the data storage model of Random Access Memory (RAM) used by most general-purpose computers. Ethereum has memory that stores both code and data, and it uses the Ethereum blockchain to track how this memory changes over time. Like a general-purpose stored-program computer, Ethereum can load code into its state machine and run that code, storing the resulting state changes in its blockchain. Two of the critical differences from most general-purpose computers are that Ethereum state changes are governed by the rules of consensus and the state is distributed globally. Ethereum answers the question: "What if we could track any arbitrary state and program the state machine to create a world-wide computer operating under consensus?"

From the

whitepaper⁠

"The intent of Ethereum is to create an alternative protocol for building decentralized applications, providing a different set of tradeoffs that we believe will be very useful for a large class of decentralized applications, with particular emphasis on situations where rapid development time, security for small and rarely used applications, and the ability of different applications to very efficiently interact, are important. Ethereum does this by building what is essentially the ultimate abstract foundational layer: a blockchain with a built-in Turing-complete programming language, allowing anyone to write smart contracts and decentralized applications where they can create their own arbitrary rules for ownership, transaction formats and state transition functions… protocols like currencies and reputation systems can be built in under twenty [lines of code]. Smart contracts, cryptographic "boxes" that contain value and only unlock it if certain conditions are met, can also be built on top of the platform, with vastly more power than that offered by Bitcoin scripting because of the added powers of Turing-completeness, value-awareness, blockchain-awareness and state."

Smart contracts

From

What is Ethereum? (EthHub)⁠

"While the word "contract" brings to mind legal agreements; in Ethereum "smart contracts" are just pieces of code that run on the blockchain and are guaranteed to produce the same result for everyone who runs them. These can be used to create a wide range of Decentralized Applications (DApps) which can include games, digital collectibles, online-voting systems, financial products and many others."

From

Chapter 7: Smart Contracts and Solidity of Mastering Ethereum⁠

"The term smart contract has been used over the years to describe a wide variety of different things. In the 1990s, cryptographer Nick Szabo coined the term and defined it as “a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on the other promises.” Since then, the concept of smart contracts has evolved, especially after the introduction of decentralized blockchain platforms with the invention of Bitcoin in 2009. In the context of Ethereum, the term is actually a bit of a misnomer, given that Ethereum smart contracts are neither smart nor legal contracts, but the term has stuck. In this book, we use the term “smart contracts” to refer to immutable computer programs that run deterministically in the context of an Ethereum Virtual Machine as part of the Ethereum network protocol—i.e., on the decentralized Ethereum world computer.

Let’s unpack that definition:

Computer programs

Smart contracts are simply computer programs. The word “contract” has no legal meaning in this context.

Immutable

Once deployed, the code of a smart contract cannot change. Unlike with traditional software, the only way to modify a smart contract is to deploy a new instance.

Deterministic

The outcome of the execution of a smart contract is the same for everyone who runs it, given the context of the transaction that initiated its execution and the state of the Ethereum blockchain at the moment of execution.

EVM context

Smart contracts operate with a very limited execution context. They can access their own state, the context of the transaction that called them, and some information about the most recent blocks.

Decentralized world computer

Session 1 prep

Session 1: Introduction to DAOs

Game theory & coordination failure

Session 1

Session 1 prep

Session 1: Introduction to DAOs

Game theory & coordination failure

More on multipolar traps

The evolution of coordination

Coordination in nature

Computational biology

Ownership and decision making in the legacy legal system

Provocations on property/ownership

Ursula K. Le Guin & The Dispossessed

Ownership of organisations

Traditional

Worker-led/steward-led

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Golden shares

Case study: Equal Care Co-op: a multi-stakeholder platform co-operative

Participatory budgeting

Blockchain 101

Bitcoin: the first cryptocurrency

Ethereum: the world computer

Smart contracts

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⁠
⁠
⁠
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