Nick Ayton explores the myths and misunderstandings regarding the Decentralised Autonomous Organisation, where recent bad press with the ‘DAO hack’ hasn’t improved the basic understanding. The hack may have created perceptions as to how a DAO actually works.
Lots of activity, a hot space.
The gaming industry, like music, is being disrupted by Blockchain start-ups that are challenging the status quo. Who wants to challenge the traditional online gaming sector that has an increasingly poor reputation for tampering and moving the odds? Recent successful crowdsale, including vDice.io that exceeded expectations, suggests there is a growing appetite for blockchain gaming investment opportunities.
Ethereum decentralised properties are a perfect storm for addressing the concerns of online gaming that not only squares the odds, but creates a transparent and open environment that players can trust. Random Number Generation delivered by Smart Contracts is proving itself as an ideal technology for bringing change to the sector.
DAO – The Decentralised Autonomous Organisation
The Wikipedia definition of a DAO is:
a decentralised autonomous organisation is an organisation that is run through rules encoded into computer code called Smart Contracts. The DAO financial transactions record and program rules are maintained on a Blockchain.
Is it unreasonable to judge any DAO by the recent event where a DAO was set up as a Venture Fund raising $150 million in crowdsale in June 2016 – and was then immediately hacked and drained of $50 million in cryptocurrency?
A DAO is a software construct whose architecture can vary enormously, it is just a way of building software so that it is sustainable and doesn’t rely on a single trusted third party. A way of scaling trust that is often left to people has issues. A DAO is software designed in certain way.The DAO hack was a result of a bug that left the door open for someone to exploit and as a result the Ethereum community decided to hard fork.
It is clear there are many different ways of building a DAO, which is based on crypto-economic principles that create an eco-system where all the participants have a role and can share the benefits. For the purists a DAO isn’t seen as a platform but as a Peer 2 Peer Marketplace, which is an important distinction. A marketplace that behaves as a sustainable autonomous economy.
New Constitutions
The early DAOs were used as an experiment where developers could understand how autonomous structures as constitutions would work. A good example is The Peoples Republic of Doug which was written in early versions of Ethereum using LLL (Lisp Like Language) to generate Smart Contracts that formed the constitution back in June 2014.
As Vitalik Buterin confirmed back in Nov 2015, LLL was always meant to be a simplistic language, suggesting Serpent is better suited. And now there is Solidity that is rapidly becoming the favored language for Smart Contracts that lie at the centre of a new Democracy.
Are DAO’s therefore misunderstood and getting bad press?
Almost certainly yes, as any new technology comes to terms with itself, and Blockchain is not different, there are those that want to see it struggle and even fail. But these early examples are merely evolutionary experiments on a path to where a new generation of organisations, of self governing economies, of self sustaining eco-systems; to be used, maintained, and controlled by the community itself with the underlying constitution written as software rules.
The aim is 100% autonomy with no delegates appointed making decisions, but inevitably some human involvement is required at the outset. It was interesting to learn that the inventor of The Peoples Republic of Doug was locked out of the system he had created once it was operational.
Ethereum is the creator of the DAO concept that has come a long way in recent years with many lessons learned – not to be repeated.
As Roger Aitken, a distinguished journalist for Forbes Magazine, notes in his article DigixDAO Crypto Trading: Are we seeing a new Gold Standard for Crypto-Assets?
The construct of a DAO has many use cases including the concept of a self-renting autonomous electric vehicle Mobotiq.
DAO for gaming – a new era in Gaming or what?
There are some DAO ICOs coming up that create a coin as a Token which offers certain obligations, rights, and benefits for investors. DAOCasino is a bit different and more like a Token launch rather than an ICO. It encourages and gives incentives to communities of game developers, auditors, and partners to participate in the eco system – where each can receive an income based on the contributions made.
A DAO can be explained as a marketplace infrastructure built on Ethereum using Smart Contracts for the underlying governance to form the constitution. The DAOCasino offers a gaming backbone: A core infrastructure for developers to develop games (back end) and to promote games (front end) – kind of like App Store.
With the Ethereum core development team working on SWARM, their decentralised storage and file sharing solution – and Whisper messaging due soon, the next generations of DAO will evolve as stronger and more reliable.
DAO Gaming Community
Is the future of gaming autonomous gaming markets that are not owned by the large Casinos and Online Betting organisation, but by people who want to enjoy gaming, trust gaming and ensure fair play…? Is DAO the only real way to achieve this?
The DAOCasino is building a community around a marketplace for game developers, auditors, referrers, community members and players so they can enjoy a trusted, open, transparent environment that ensures everyone is rewarded based on contribution. At the start minimal human involvement (delegates) will agree the consensus that sets the parameters of the community, for audit and security that defines how and where the code is checked and the broader governance formulated, and then release the DAO for 100% autonomy.
The future of gaming looks like a DAO
The concept of a DAO has always been a strong one in markets where vested interests and tampering creates distrust – and the temptation to make disproportionate amounts of money from unsuspecting customers. The DAO is a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation, a company, a new type of human organisation operated by its members who create a constitution that cannot be manipulated or tampered with, doesn’t have a management hierarchy, jurisdiction, or legal framework.
As Stephan Tual, founder of www.Slock.it breaking new ground in autonomous business models and one of the original entrepreneurs involved in the DAO, says:
“It (the DAO) is not bound by terms of law and jurisdiction. It is bound by code”.
Will the DAOCasino herald in a new era in online gaming and casinos where a broad range of games are offered and supported – lottery, slot machines, card games, betting terminal and sports betting are vetted to ensure they are fair and trusted by the DAOCasino community? A community eco system that wants to flourish, that by its very existence needs to deliver confidence and trust to players or fail.
I am reliably informed the DAOCasino Token Launch is planned for the spring of 2017. To find out more visit www.DAO.Casino
(The writer is not affiliated with DAO.Casino).
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