Dear Decreders, Recently there is a lot of traction around the DAO concept (decentralised autonomous organisation). It is quite an interesting concept, which imho applies to the development of Decred as well. Link which provides some background information: https://daohub.org/ Would it be possible to make the Decred Development function as a DAO?
I would argue Bitcoin itself is a DAO. I would expect most blockchains are. If the users wanted to collectively ban all of Satoshi's addresses from ever spending coins because you think he received them unfairly, this could be done. Users could do the same with the premine coins or airdrop coins. @davecgh provided a tool that is used to track all transactions coming from the "developer premine", so it would be trivial to find these outputs and remove them if all the miners of Decred were to agree on it. Users could hard fork and change the developer address/portion of the block reward or remove it completely. They could inflate the currency and remove the current subsidy algorithm, and make any other arbitrary change they wanted to. If tomorrow Bitcoin wanted to switch to making all governance be based on a contract, they could as long as the miners consented to it. It's a question as to whether or not this will have the desired effect of providing a solid foundation for development. One might argue that Bitcoin is effective because the rules encoding the standards of the network are simple and difficult to dispute ("fair"). This may not be the case for a complicated contract whose outcomes are unpredictable.
I believe this is possible, but it would require a decentralized method for allocating the development funds. I am keen on removing the dependency of Decred on the dev org (DHG). In the rush to get Decred live, we punted on this issue and decided to go with a conventional corporate entity for funding the dev work.
A first step towards this goal would be to create a voting system for decred. Now, we already have voting with Proof of Activity, but thats just for voting on the acceptance of blocks. What we will need for this is a voting system for voting on RFPs. For a basic idea, I can imagine the community voting with signatures from their holdings. A method for collecting this signatures needs to be implemented, and a web interface for viewing the tally. For it to become a full DAO, the funds would need to be held via smart contract and voting would be fully decentralized, but these can be implemented later. The basic idea is just to get to the next step. This itself, could be an RFP. Does anyone know of any prior works that implement this type of voting?
Agreed, a DAO based on a complex contract could make the development more complicated and thus less effective. The explanation of @jy-p is also totally logical. Having a central group (DHG) that makes the decisions is way more effective and efficient than consulting the public before every decision (especially in the start-up phase). However, now that Decred is gaining more and more public attention, I think it is wise to implement some sort of community voting system. @raedah mentions a voting system to vote on RFPs, in my humble opinion this is a very good idea. Community-based governance and Decentralisation are the core principles of Decred. Therefore, I think a DAO is the way forward. Perhaps we could start a dialogue with the Ethereum community on how to design and implement an effective and efficient structure?