Topic: DACs (Read 2239 times)

nation states define their own law, which defines the corporation. DAC's are not recognized by states. All contracts therefore are not enforceable through traditional law, which makes the agreements pretty much useless for most purposes. there are many interesting theoretical questions, but it seems to me its almost impossible to address those at present.

Okay - but in any case a "company" is still generally considered to be more of a commercial enterprise than a military one.

(yes I know that the term "company" is also used in military but I think most civilians are not so aware of this so you really are *reaching* with that)

I am pretty sure that the C in DAC as far as Dan Larimer is concerned is "corporation" not "company".

I have not heard of Szabo's theory - so perhaps you should create a new topic about it (as this topic is about "Dan Larimer's" idea AFAIA).

Daniel Larimer is the grandfather of the DAC.

Head over to Invictus Innovations and be sure to read the whitepaper.

DACs are going to blow your mind this year.

You should use DAE (distributed automated entities) as the word "corporation" does *not apply* to the military or other things you are listing.

The word "corporation" is *well understood* and shouldn't be "misused" to "mean anything you want".

So to be clear - you are talking about DAEs but this topic is about DACs.

I don't consider *every cryptocoin to be a DAC* so the platforms that would be used for implementing this are only what are referred to as "crypto 2.0" ones (such as Ethereum, Mastercoin and Nxt).

Calling any crypto currency a DAC IMO opinion would make the term DAC *pointless*.

A "corporation" needs to be able to "do the normal sorts of things that a corporation needs to do" - this requires "votes" and typically also "share classes" and even things like "boards".

Actually I now know of at least one New York lawyer currently working on creating a "true DAC" so unlike the AI stuff I was talking about this actually seems to not only be potentially possible but also may in fact appear as early as late this year or early next year.

Whether the US (or any other) legal system will *accept* such a DAC is something that will probably take a fair bit longer.

Hmm... well wasn't HAL 9000's role to basically manage the spaceship (and that was written in the 1960's)?

One interesting quote from the Wikipedia entry on HAL 9000 is "For example, AI pioneer Herbert A. Simon at Carnegie Mellon University, had predicted in 1965 that "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do",[19] the overarching premise being that the issue was one of computational speed (which was predicted to increase) rather than principle."

Well - we still don't have a HAL 9000 even 50 years since it was thought of (and I don't see one about to appear in the next 10 years either) so this is why I find some of this DAC stuff a little bit like the whole AI stuff of the past.

Actually I believe an earlier fictional exploration of the idea of automating away management is Manna, by Marshall Brain:

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel)

It dates from 2003.

It is without doubt an interesting concept but...


the question is when it will move from the world of fiction to the world of reality (am hoping sooner rather than later myself but still think it will take quite a while and if it needs to be an AI then that "quite a while" could easily be another 50 years away).

You seem to misunderstand the purpose of DACs. Their purpose is not do take away work from humans, but to take away power from humans.  That is what differentiates them from robots/AI. To achieve this, they don't even need to be exceedingly complicated (not to be confused with complex).

Many organizations in the world are lead by "Monarch CEOs". These are essentially semi-skilled workers whose role is not so much making strategic decisions as acting as an authority figure who encourages unity once a decision has been made.  The problem with putting a human in this role is that power corrupts. A CEO will always be temped to use his power for their personal best interest rather than the interest of the organization. And even an honest CEO is prone to making irrational decisions because he is a slave to emotions like jealousy and pride.

The big innovation here is that the CEO himself can be replaced by an algorithm that is guaranteed to act objectively and in the best interest of whatever "charter" has been hard coded into the DAC.

I don't think something like fully decentralized power has ever existed. Democratic government and certain religions have attempted this, but ultimately they must always rely on some human as a power custodian. If DACs can be pulled off, they will be one of the biggest innovations in social/political organization in hundreds of years.  Buzzword or not.

PS. Daniel Suarez' novel Daemon from 2006 was the first place where I saw this idea explored in detail. Highly recommended!

Exactly why I think a lot of this DAC talk is about using a new "buzz word" more than using a new useful piece of technology.

Well, a simple pyramid scheme might already work with some simple contract (e.g. pay 1% of all holdings to everybody who contributed to the stash once a week until you run out of money).

Slightly more complex stuff (an example could be to operate an autonomous blog, where you can get paid as author depending on how popular your contribution is and how much ad money/other income it generates) is probably also possible - but once you get into even more complex scenarios defining the algorithms etc. is probably much more work than to just trusting someone to do it in meatspace.

The way it seems to work is that a network of freelance journalists pitch them stories and they decide what to buy. So they get a lot of techies coming to them with stories around cool stuff that made them excited, but the legal/financial side is less covered in this way.

Sounds good. You could argue that the DAC concept could consist of multiple agents working on differentiated tasks as assigned by a presiding agent directing the strategy, also autonomously. But it's a totally abstract idea until someone develops a working example that fulfils the concept. Still, the key takeaway is that cryptocurrency permits it to happen, the banking system isn't structured to allow that sort of thing (with the near exception of the algorithmic trading in financial markets, but they're constantly overseen with parameter changes, design changes or scrapped outright).

The Economist's angle on cryptocurrency as a whole has a curiously targeted approach. They're covering developments in the technology space pretty astutely, but anything that spills over into legal contracts, or economics itself, is peculiarly absent (or only addressed in a deflected or indirect fashion). I suspect they'll end up doing some good coverage in the end though, it's an area that's ripe for one those pull-out reports they often have.

At this early stage I think that DAC is mostly just being used as a "buzz word" to attract investors rather than anything really groundbreaking.

For such an entity to work it would need to be 100% controlled by "math" rather than by individual whim and I don't think we've yet seen anything that is doing this (although maybe such a thing will be appearing soon).

https://github.com/DavidJohnstonCEO/DecentralizedApplications

There's also this, I don't know if you've read it but I think it does fall into your above category, though still informative enough to be worth reading

Well, what I wrote is a little bit misleading for another reason - I found Vitalik's articles a little hard to follow but it sounds like he was imagining something a bit different from StorJ and julz/gmaxwell style agents. A DAC is described as a single entity spread over thousands of machines. An agent is a single instance of a program on (most likely) a single computer, which may be a node in a p2p network, and which competes in the open market against other agents and humans.

Regardless, it's cool that the Economist is picking up on such strange and fantastical ideas.

I updated the Agents page on the wiki to credit julz (re-reading the original thread, I see that he laid out the same ideas as gmaxwell) and to link to Vitalik's articles also.

Neither are good descriptions of what's actually happening. It's an autonomous service, and some of those services can interact with each other. Not very sexy sounding, but at least it's not euphemistic or overblown for the sake of it. And the legislative angle is misleading. These services will re-write the law, on the basis that the resources of those enforcing the law aren't effective enough to prevent the service operating. Pirate Bay and bitcoin have literally made that happen in The Netherlands and New York state just this week.

The first time I read about the concept of DACs and the first time I heard the term DAC used was a few months ago when Invictus Innovations started developing their BitShares project.

Their website seems to have some good info on DACs:
http://invictus-innovations.com/i-dac/

And a longer article by the president of Invictus Innovations:
http://letstalkbitcoin.com/bitcoin-and-the-three-laws-of-robotics/