Definition
A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is a digital form of human cooperation manage operations or achieve objectives primarily using code rather than people.
Discussion
Overview
In the context of DAOs:
- decentralized means there is no one authority such as an executive team or board of directors
- autonomous refers to rules written by code to run without further input from humans, smart contracts being one use case.
Most countries have laws controlling how groups of individuals may collect and use money. National governments mostly require people to register or nominate a dedicated entity with the government for this purpose and then appoint individuals to make key decisions about the money and manage operations to implement those decisions.
In contrast, a DAO does not typically depend on a nation’s regulatory frameworks but, rather, individuals rely on code to handle everyone’s money. The way this is done is by the code following certain rules voluntarily accepted by the people giving money and issuing digital tokens to those people. The tokens may be used to vote on new rules on how the money is used, thus increasing the democratization of finance to a greater degree than is possible under national government models.
DAOs and Live and Let Live
Due to their inherent voluntary nature, DAOs apply the Legal Principle in the set-up of financial institutions. While the money acquired through DAOs, like any other financial model, may be spent for aggressing purposes, the structure of a DAO offers strong safeguards to self-sovereignty.
DAOs are a primary example of Live and Let Live’s ground-up approach to freedom and peace. By operating outside of public governments and political institutions, DAOs’ network-based structure allows individuals to choose to opt-in to a set of rules rather than spending resources to engage in law reform for changing a set of rules which they cannot opt-out of.
Moreover, DAOs foster a sense of belonging by giving people with shared values avenues to work towards a common cause or set of causes.
DAOs are preferable for free cities due to their non-reliance on national governments and potential for consistent safeguarding of self-sovereignty.