Some notes on being willing to lose: 

The current ARB DAO issue, and the ongoing Stanford student punishment issue, highlight the difficulty in building a robust decision-making system. 

People tend to focus on things like voting and representation, and that’s important, but not nearly as important as losing.

Law and policy for interesting ideas.  Worked at Google and Discord.  Co-founded MobileCoin. 

The *most* important part of any decision-making system is the ability for the system to enforce a decision when it goes against a powerful participant. This can be via social convention, smart contract, etc, but without that you have little more than  a complex system of “thoughts & prayers”.

But it’s fairly rare for institutions like this to exists because if you have power, why not use it to get what you want?

I think the Arbitrum leadership thought that AIP-1 would pass and got caught flat footed when it failed.  (On a linguistic note - “ratification” is mandatory, not advisory, so even their ex post discussion of the vote is nonsensical.)

It’s very good to see Arbitrum reversing their position and breaking up AIP-1 into a series of smaller proposals and, hopefully, they will abide by the results of those votes. 

Onwards towards stronger governance norms in crypto!

For Americans this can be a bit of a blind spot because our two big dispute resolution mechanisms, courts and elections, generally work okay.  Powerful people accept losses from these institutions for the most part.