Back in the days of “theDAO” an often discussed topic was how much a DAO could actually do DIRECTLY and to what extend it would need to rely on delegating power to some “normal” entity that would then execute things on behalf of the DAO.
Since Ethereum made 2.5 years of significant progress Ethereum and thus DAOs have become MUCH more powerful and a DAO can ACTUALLY do a lot of things.
A few examples: Host a website.
A DAO can control an ENS domain. A ENS domain can now point to an IPFS object with the content of the website. ENS and IPFS is not (yet) natively supported by most browsers, however - it is enough to have metamask installed to resolve and .eth domain - give it a try: BlueYard.portalnetworkweb.eth
Bottom line is that for >1million Metamask user a DAO will be able to “host” a website. Dapps like slow.trade are designed in a way (purely client-site) that they could be served via IPFS - thus by the DAO.
Have a Twitter (like) account: https://peepeth.com/ is the Web3 equivalent to Twitter. A DAO can control a handle and decide about what to Tweet. Control of the canonical communication channels can already capture a lot of value of an entity. If you think of companies like https://techcrunch.com/ and https://coindesk.com - controlling the website + Twitter handle captures already a lot of the value of the underlying legal entity.
Create bounties
The easiest way for a DAO to “employ” someone would be to create a bounty on e.g. https://gitcoin.co/
Hold USD
Thanks to DAI, Circle USD, Gemini USD and many more stable coins a DAO will be able to hold USD.
Issue a token
If the DAO ever decides to create a token that could be fully done on-chain. Especiallycontinues token sale models seems to be suitable for DAOs.
this is great thanks @koeppelmann. Are there already private channels of communication available for token holders? In the case of an ENS domain being bid by the DAO, you wouldn’t want the amount to be public since a troll could bid right under the DAO’s bid, forcing them to pay the maximum amount. Also you would need a private space where the salt used to hash the bid could be shown and used to verify the transaction, otherwise DAO members wouldn’t know what they’re voting to approve. I assume there are also further commit reveal scenarios where a DAO would want to verify a transaction before approving it to be sent.
it’s rather trivial to build a chat room restricted to token holders (https://ether-auth.netlify.com) do you know of anything similar being used already for these scenarios?
Those things might evolve. However - in the case of the dxDAO I expect it to have >1000 reputation holders. Thus I would consider every message public anyways to is visible to reputation holders and thus not even bother about private communication platforms.
Practically that would mean that the DAO would likely just buy an ENS domain or someone would offer it to the DAO for some reputation.
In the ENS scenario I could still imagine a private chat remaining private. As any member making it public would directly effect that member by a loss of funds for the whole DAO. Privacy can scale as long as every member has something at stake in keeping the messages private. That’s how some “illegal” torrenting communities stay alive : )
There must be other scenarios that this would be a problem though. In general I like that this system supports Privacy for the Weak, Transparency for the Powerful. So if the DAO were to participate in some external form of governance, their vote would be public from the beginning. This makes sense in terms of accountability of an organization versus private opinion of an individual. But still there must be other private auction scenarios besides ENS that a DAO may wish to partake, or front running scenarios that require commit reveal.
Still it’s not the technology as a blocker so I guess the forum will emerge as the need arises.
Right, but I think that might only work if there is nothing immediately and directly to gain. I think it would be quite likely that one member of the DAO would be malicious and “frontrun” the information that the DAO tries to buy a specific domain to try to sell it later with a profit to the DAO.
On a more abstract level: Let’s say you are negotiating with another entity about a deal you might think that having secrets/ internal coordination is crucial. I think however the advantages to not have that and more specifically to provably not have that can be enormous. From poker we know that it is possible to fully announce your strategy and it will still not be possible to beat you (game theoretic optimum). However - this strategy would involve elements of randomness. E.g. "if I hold those cards I will with 80% likelihood do this and with 20% likelihood to that.
Similar you could envision that a DAO would vote upfront about accepting or rejecting an offer. If the DAO e.g. want to sell something for a price as high as possible it might decide on a mix strategy where it would allow bidders to do only one binding bid and if it is in a specific range it would accept it only with a specific probability. (the higher the bid, the higher the probability)