Welcome back, Pilgrim! Here’s what’s happened in town since you’ve been away…
Deep Dives
Bitcoin is Venice
Absolutely massive essay, part of a series by Allen Farrington. Engaging with longform approaches to the space like this, especially ones like Farrington’s which we may not entirely agree with, builds our ability to think critically and protects us from knee-jerk reactions. Bring caffeine and a notebook.
Vitalik Muses on How PoS Could Have Come Sooner
The Defiant (quality resource, recommended) rounds up some of Vitalik Buterin’s recent thoughts on the upcoming Proof of Stake merge for Ethereum. If you read Laura Shin’s recent and excellent book on the early days of Ethereum, this retrospective should be nice followup.
We’re All Marxists Now
Sure, the title is (intentionally) inflammatory. But when you finish this one, you’ll have confronted some assumptions about how crypto economics work, and how they should work. David Phelps’ essays tends to push beyond pat answers and bumper sticker slogans. We can’t wait to discuss this one in the Common Room.
Around Web3
The DeFi Edge: Excellent writer of insightful and practical threads. The link is focused on crypto security, and even if you don’t end up utilizing all of the suggestions you’ll learn a lot. 🧵
Urbit: This project/operating system/parallel internet seems very important, and also a bit mind-breaking. To be frank the editors at the Reformer do not claim to full understand Urbit. Perhaps a deep dive is needed soon. Here’s a start. 🌐
The Taxman Cometh: You’re all probably on top of things, but here’s some thoughts on dealing with taxes and NFTs. Worth it if it helps even one to navigate these waters, just a good starting place. Not tax or financial advice, etc. 🧮
DAOs Are Our Heritage
Community Contributor | JohannesTalbotus
The ability to build a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, allows a community of believers to leverage time-tested techniques to organize people, invest resources, and create value within Christ’s Kingdom. As we see old institutions and systems of the world failing and the trust that girds them eroding, we should work with whatever tools and technologies we can muster to fill the ensuing void with new systems that glorify Him.
What is a DAO?
DAOs have been touted as the “next big thing” phenomena in the world of crypto and Web3. The Ethereum Foundation provides an official definition of a DAO as “an internet native business collectively owned and managed by its members.” For a somewhat more practical definition, DAOs are a community Discord server with a shared wallet. Web3 influencers and experts are calling 2022 “the year of the DAO” and implying that the early adopters in this space will see growth and returns similar to NFTs and dog tokens of 2021. But there is one problem – it is increasingly difficult to define how DAOs can be so influential or what creators can do to unlock their potential.
That is not a roadblock for the Web3 crowd. After years of watching new currencies return astronomical profits for investors and watching jpegs sell for millions of dollars, this community is comfortable with the notion of saying “I don’t know how, but this is going to be big!” For each of these technologies our community should seek to build rather than purely speculate, and we should strive to grasp the “how” of DAOs. A huge chunk of this is to dig into the actual technical aspects of each DAO under investigation. But another part - one that can give us a broad picture view and help those not as programming-centric - is to mine for historical analogues. What if we could create a mental model to judge the structure and use case of individual DAOs, or even grasp the implications of DAOs in general? How might we go about building a successful and functional DAO ourselves? I propose that these insights could be uncovered by studying certain examples in history. Specifically, I propose we study… DAOs.
Where have we seen DAOs before?
Building an organization which is decentralized and autonomous is technology-agnostic, and we have seen such organizations in the past operating under many different names and in many different contexts throughout history. I believe the creators of modern “Web3 DAOs” can be far more successful (or at least get a jump start) if they learn the lessons offered by the proto-DAOs of the past. To borrow a framework from Chris Dixon and Balaji Srinivasan, innovation tends to follow cycles of bundling and unbundling, constructing and deconstructing (separate from the Marxist tendency towards destroying), centralizing and decentralizing. These historical cycles should not be viewed as a pendulum swinging from centralized authority to decentralized autonomy. Instead history is better approached as a kaleidoscope fractally reorganizing society and cultures as tribes settle into cities inhabited by specialized guilds, cities become nations strengthened by trade between unique industries, and nations form empires ruling through local and semi-autonomous governors and generals. This flow is both continuous yet drastically unique from one moment to the next.
Through this motion of bundling and unbundling, there have been many times when people have organized themselves within a framework of decentralization (governance distributed across many entities) and autonomy (the condition of self-governance) - i.e. DAOs. Nothing about the philosophies or incentives motivating a “decentralized autonomous organization” is inherently tied to the crypto space or Web3-native technologies. Therefore we can look to pre-Web3 DAOs to inspire and inform the structure and governance of DAOs today. What Web3 technologies and the cryptocosm do enable are new tools to optimize the impact of DAOs into the future, if only we can apply those tools correctly.
How might we learn from DAOs of the past?
I want to explore various proto-DAOs through history, glean insights from past cases, determine what has worked, decipher what has caused organizational failure and collapse, and distill our findings into actionable insights for believers looking to build DAOs today. Each of these case studies will be viewed as a potential model so that we may adopt and adapt the lessons of history to build DAOs in the Web3 world of today.
What can we learn about coordinating business ventures to positively impact a community from 20th century Chambers of Commerce? How did the fraternal organizations of the 19th century build and maintain a sense of camaraderie across the country and around the world? What caused the Hanseatic League to grow to dominate Baltic trade while remaining unaligned to any kingdom, and why did they eventually lose the trade war to the Dutch Republic? How did nomadic tribal groups form armies to raid and trade with their more settled imperial neighbors? Studying these examples can boost us on to the “shoulders of giants” as we move to build organizations within the crypto space.
For each case study, I want to highlight a counter example which helps to illustrate the model and build upon it. Importantly, we should not reduce this study to “autonomous good guy vs. authoritarian bad guy.” Sometimes centralization serves a key purpose of aligning actors to achieve a goal - there is a reason why militaries are not organized as democracies. For these examples which we explore in opposition to historical DAOs, I will use the framework of “the State” proposed by David Graeber and David Wengrow in “The Dawn of Everything,” specifically as an organized body which encapsulates administration (equating that with centralization), territorial control (authoritarianism which reduces autonomy for external actors), and coercion (authoritarianism which reduces autonomy for internal actors).
Through this journey of exploration, I hope to uncover truths and experiences from DAOs ancient and modern and to provide a foundation of knowledge (and even inspiration) for anyone with the tools and talents who feels called to create in the future.
Alpha Drop
Expect to hear more from Johannes soon, with a whole series planned on historical DAOs.
Get ready for the next Lecture with Josh Ong on April 11 (Remember, POAP available for attendees!)
Pr0ph3t guested on the fantastic Kings and Priests podcast hosted by Reformer holder Michael Whittle.