Bootstrapping A Decentralized Autonomous Corporation: Part I

See also: http://letstalkbitcoin.com/is-bitcoin-overpaying-for-false-security/; http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7119/bootstrapping-an-autonomous-decentralized-corporation-part-2-interacting-with-the-world/; http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7235/bootstrapping-a-decentralized-autonomous-corporation-part-3-identity-corp/. Corporations, US presidential candidate Mitt Romney reminds us, are people. Whether or not you agree with the conclusions that his partisans draw from that claim, the statement certainly carries a large amount of truth. What is a corporation, after all, but a certain group of people....

In the first two parts of this series, we talked about what the basic workings of a decentralized autonomous corporation might look like, and what kinds of challenges it might need to deal with to be effective. However, there is still one question that we have not answered: what might such corporations be useful for? Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik once suggested that one application migh be a sort of decentralized Dropbox, where users can upload their files to a resilient peer-to-peer network that would be incentivized to keep those files reliably backed up. But aside from this particular....

In the first part of this series, we talked about how the internet allows us to create decentralized corporations, automatons that exist entirely as decentralized networks over the internet, carrying out the computations that keep them "alive" over thousands of servers. As it turns out, these networks can even maintain a Bitcoin balance, and send and receive transactions. These two capacities: the capacity to think, and the capacity to maintain capital, are in theory all that an economic agent needs to survive in the marketplace, provided that its thoughts and capital allow it to create....

William Mougayar is a Toronto-based angel investor and four-time entrepreneur who advises startups on strategy and marketing. Here, he discusses what makes a successful Decentralized Autonomous Organisation, or DAO for short. The concept of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization/ Corporation is an idealistic outcome of the crypto-tech revolution. Its roots originate in themes on organizational decentralization that were depicted by Ori Brafman in Starfish And The Spider (2007), and ones about 'peer production', aptly described by Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks (2007). But these....

The term decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is often used in the same breath as "smart contract" or "blockchain". DAOs are touted as a new form of legal structure in which ownership, management and control are automated and human involvement is limited or removed, based on a previously agreed upon set of rules. To a lawyer, this sounds a lot like a corporation, a legal fiction that grants personhood to a human created organization governed based upon a rule set (either contractually agreed upon or imposed by law). Among other things, a....