There's an interesting back story to this team that you won't find on their website. One of the founders spent 5 years in the Marines in Somalia after receiving an engineering degree, then went to law school, and returned to Somalia to start a law practice. And he writes software on the side.
Who cares, you ask? This is someone who understands the importance of the rule of law -- having seen life without it as a soldier and as a lawyer -- and what it means to live in a country where promises can't be enforced. The rest of the team is just as impressive (and modest). That experience appears to inform the philosophy behind the project:
"Given that the aim of Project Ðouglas is to demonstrate the utility of ÐAOs in everyday applications and to advance the state of the art, it is our view that compliance functionality is not only an added feature - it is a prerequisite. Public, corporate, institutional and government buy-in will require it."
As someone coming to the topic of "replacing the Bitcoin Foundation" cold, this would really benefit from a short, Plain English description. This tells me next to nothing:
> an adaptable software package which is designed to be modular, easily copied, and easily modified - and therefore used in many different applications. We intend to use Eris as the relevant platform when we incorporate the Association at a later date, but we will not be limiting future development of the platform to that single application.
"Governance in a Box" would be a better description. Imagine anything that needs to be governed by consensus, including corporation bylaws, town ordinances, 'foundation' advertising spends, Internet group meeting agendas, etc. Eris appears to be a basic framework for instantiating any of these in a way that brings trust and high transparency to a group of individuals with common goals and interests. It's one of the more powerful things the blockchain brings us!
That's actually very much what we are going for. I have spent much of my career at the intersection of international development and legal reform and the idea of having a governance framework which can be used for making collective decisions in a way which will not rely on central nodes of corruption or failure.
I found this (a page or so in) to be a good summary of "why should I care":
the proliferation of ÐAOs in user-friendly applications has the potential to allow the public to claim back control over their data and over their privacy on the internet.
> As someone coming to the topic of "replacing the Bitcoin Foundation" cold
I'm not sure it's entirely designed for that purpose, though that does seem both an obvious and relatively easy application of this concept. Instead, I think they purposefully made it a little more generalized so it could be applied to a lot of different spaces. For example, I can see how this framework, or at least the concepts that it implements, could be used in a decentralized social networking application...as some of these same concepts we implemented a long time ago in DIASPORA* and Tent.
This cute "ÐAO" acronym isn't actually defined anywhere on the page. I assume, based on the HN link headline, it refers to a "decentralized autonomous organization". I looked for that in the page but the word "autonomous" never appears (the words "decentralized", "decentralised", "organization" and "organisation" all do). I tried searching the page to find out whether they actually defined "ÐAO", but was initially thwarted when I typed in "DAO" and found that doesn't appear on the page either because of the insistence on using ÐAO.
More importantly, Ethereum and some of the other "Bitcoin 2.0" protocols are tackling the technology behind distributed consensus and trust (using crypto blockchains for something other than payment), but there's the additional question of how do you make your cute technology interface with the real world's legal systems (if not for you, then for all the organizations your DAO will interact with).
The interesting thing about these guys is they're a team of both developers and lawyers... part of this project is the packaging of the technology on top of Ethereum, but part of it is figuring out the legal frameworks needed to grant legal authority to a distributed crypto consensus network.
I'm no lawyer, but I think it's compatible with contract law...
If you wanted to create an organization represented by a DAO in this system, then you would still need to register a legal entity with your government to represent your organization (for tax and regulatory reasons). But that organization could have exactly one bylaw saying, essentially, "this organization shall operate according to the DAO uniquely identified as ABCXYZ123". Then you do all further work in the DAO.
If you wanted to create a contract of some kind, you wouldn't need to do even that. A "contract" in law is fairly general: it's an agreement, entered into voluntarily, between multiple partners for their mutual benefit. It's often done on paper, but not necessarily: they can be created orally, or via email. There's no reason I know of that a DAO couldn't create a contract, as long as you could show to a court that it fits all the normal criteria for a valid contract.
The main complication in all this is that it's unusual and, at least at first, judges wouldn't know how it works and would want proof that it creates a legal contract.
Great points. Eris is agnostic as to what happens outside of the blockchain system. We have purposefully built it so that it could be as centralized and linked to a legally incorporated entity as users like or it could be as decentralized and independent as users like. As to how contracts work, they are simply code. What we would recommend is that if people are interested in having smart contracts that for the time being they would have a coded contract married to (and integrated with) a "normal" contract which conversely integrates the coded contract. Doing such would make it relatively straightforward (we think) for a judge to understand what was happening.
> I'm no lawyer, but I think it's compatible with contract law...
There was a neat talk from the silicon valley ethereum meetup a few months ago where a lawyer dives into the technical definition of a legal 'contract' and what parts of that Ethereum code does and does not satisfy:
(One of the key insights there is although Ethereum uses the term 'contract' to describe its autonomous code, Ethereum contracts do not by themselves satisfy the criteria for a legal contract in common jurisdictions... 'autonomous agent' would be a better term for Ethereum to use)
I've been thinking about it for several months now. Blockchain technologies make things like this a reality - we just need someone to write the software and make it easy to use for multiple use cases. I'm thrilled to see someone working on it so soon!
The idea's been percolating for a while - one of the major facets of blockchain technology is that it can be used to effect many kinds of transactions, where traditional finance is just the simplest one to conceive of. Simultaneously there's been a thread of philosophy arising from various sources(Singularity writers, cypherpunks, Anonymous) that advocates new governance forms that fully exploit digital technology.
My favorite book on this is Binding Chaos [0] - most of the material in it clarifies problems with existing governance structures and their inevitable tendency towards power inequality. The remainder suggests that a better system would contain two major concepts: stigmergy - essentially, "space-making" instead of our existing "leadership" model, where environmental changes can automatically direct the next action of the group - and epistemic user groups: Communities that are focused on a particular form of expert knowledge and its study.
We already have some models for this in open source projects, Wikipedia, etc. but the book is light on specific implementation ideas. What is really needed is software innovations on these concepts, and blockchain hacking is one way to go about it.
Looks interesting, but where is the Eris repo? (Note: it's currently private, see Edit 2 below)
It's described as being under MIT but the only repos I find under the Project Douglas Github account are Jekyll-based websites (and forks of Ethereum projects). When I click on the link to the Eris license, I only get a 404.
Is it private now?
Edit: To be clear, I don't blame them if they've made it private. They may have feared a third-party trying to take credit for their project and going after the cash bounty. I'm just interested in looking at the source code, if it's available to the public.
Edit 2: In a reddit post about Eris, the (presumed) developer writes "Repo goes public shortly. Should have a unified method for test driving sometime this week hopefully. (Maybe as early as tomorrow)".
Indeed, you are correct we were a bit worried about that. We about 3-P theft. Also, we are not natural coders so we've been furiously trying to clean up the code so it is somewhat presentable to people who do code for a living. That process should more or less be finished and we will open the repos very shortly. To be honest, we were a bit amazed at such a response to our small proposal and did not bargain on the reception we have received today. In any event the repo will be available at GH:project-douglas/eris before midnight tonight GMT.
Great, I look forward to taking a look. By the way, what do you mean by "3-P theft"? The sentence seems to be missing a word or else there's a typo. But I can't quite figure out what that might be.
Yes I am one of the "developers" though I do not consider myself worthy of that title. More like guy who codes. :P And yes I made that post. Just to clear that up. And we are really excited to have you all look at the code. Sorry for the delay.
Yes, as I mentioned above, I see their Github account repos. However, all the repos there are either Github pages, white papers, or forks of Ethereum projects.
Presumably, that's the repo they refer to when they describe this accomplishment in the white paper:
"...Eris, a platform which allows developers and users to deploy consensus driven applications which rely on decentralized architecture and a consensus driven blockchain database backend."
I have been thinking a lot about what can be done in this space but have felt the need to find some smart people working on the field so I could get an entry point into existing work. This is exactly what I have been hoping for!
Same here... a DAO's framework is what we've been waiting for... The current examples (ethercasts, etc) were "too light".. hopefully they'll make one about Eris!
Been lurking the Ethereum forums for a couple of months waiting for something like this.. I read about the "The People's Republic of DOUG" [0] and found it a nice reference ethereum app... but this is much more interesting..
It will help us kickstart some projects we have in mind... I'm beyond stoked.. Thanks for your contribution
The people's republic of DOUG is based on an older version of the very same core DOUG functionality which operates sort of as the kernel of the DAO. We definitely look forward to your comments.
I just kept on reading this (not knowing anything about the Bitcoin Foundation) hoping this would allow for something like the automated corporations that feature in Accelerando (and other books, for sure). It's okay, I'll wait :)
It is possible. How we have designed the voting module allows it to be swapped out for other modules when a DAO is initialized (or later if there is sufficient consensus for such a change). We have a rep weighted module as the default module and we hope to built additional modules in the coming months for other voting mechanisms.
We are building off of Ethereum and tying in Bittorrent to produce a platform which allows us to build these applications. So what we are doing is taking the tools we are being given and putting them to use. :)
Unless I'm missing something, the quoted text doesn't appear in the article. Please don't make something look like a quote if it isn't. You can always add "(paraphrased)" or some such.
Who cares, you ask? This is someone who understands the importance of the rule of law -- having seen life without it as a soldier and as a lawyer -- and what it means to live in a country where promises can't be enforced. The rest of the team is just as impressive (and modest). That experience appears to inform the philosophy behind the project:
"Given that the aim of Project Ðouglas is to demonstrate the utility of ÐAOs in everyday applications and to advance the state of the art, it is our view that compliance functionality is not only an added feature - it is a prerequisite. Public, corporate, institutional and government buy-in will require it."
It'll be exciting to see what's next.
Congratulations Dennis, Casey & Preston.