Autopia

Really enjoy this rather prescient presentation given by Ralph Merkle in 2018 on DAO Democracy. It casts deep into the future and is increasingly relevant today. DAOs were a somewhat nascent concept then (*still are*) and it's interesting to note the absence of topics of conversation today such as agents and automated governance, for example. A few takeaways... https://youtu.be/WOrOFV5dLXo?

citizen 01 of the city in the sky /autopia

One of his core beliefs is that a self-reforming DAO democracy could be a viable alternative to analog governance processes. In his system, the DAO would orient itself toward passing bills that maximize future collective welfare. He argues that by using a prediction market mechanism to reach consensus, DAOs will be able to update components of themselves more fluidly. "DAO democracies will have to predict something about the future of the democracy." 

He begins by describing Bitcoin as the first DAO, how its PoW architecture aligns incentives and creates a system with useful properties that would benefit democracies: immutability, transparency, distributed, non-stop, rule-based. I really like this framing as some DAOs would benefit from thinking about their communities as network validators. From this approach, participants perform simple, explicit tasks, and the organizational complexity of the DAO is emergent from those actions. 