[HN Gopher] DAO votes to join Blender Development Fund as Patron...
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       DAO votes to join Blender Development Fund as Patron member
        
       Author : madjin
       Score  : 90 points
       Date   : 2021-12-06 19:41 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.blender.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.blender.org)
        
       | cblconfederate wrote:
       | I assume this is Decentraland looking to attach itself to popular
       | open source projects for publicity. It's actually good if it
       | works for them, but i dont get their product. Very few people use
       | it, their worlds look childish and nobody is in them. Yet somehow
       | they sell their parcels for millions.
       | 
       | In contrast, opensimulator.org is open source, self-hosted,
       | decentralized, much more beautiful, has an active and happy user
       | base of thousands, and it gets $0 in funding from anyone. The
       | main developer doesnt even get any donations. how does that make
       | sense
        
         | zucker42 wrote:
         | Blockchain mania.
        
       | ksec wrote:
       | I really need to find the time to go and learn what DAO is. But
       | if anyone could do a ELI5 would be great.
        
         | SuoDuanDao wrote:
         | Decentralised autonomous organization.
         | 
         | Picture a corporation, but instead of a board and CEO the
         | shareholders vote on what to do directly. I'm sure someone more
         | knowledgeable than I could come up with a better analogy.
        
           | brighton36 wrote:
           | That's the brochure description. The evidence would suggest
           | that this is a run of the mill cryto ponzi.
        
           | garrickvanburen wrote:
           | That's consistent with my understanding.
           | 
           | They seem to be functionally identical to a Board of
           | Directors or how a co-operative might run.
           | 
           | Though as I understand, with potentially a very large number
           | voters in ever-changing cloaked identities (as voting right
           | tokens could be continuously bought & sold).
           | 
           | Today, in the real world - DAO's are an LLC coordinating on
           | Discord, or Zoom, or other common communication tools.
           | 
           | That DAO coordination happens fully in cyberspace is promoted
           | as a unique differentiator to how businesses run today.
           | 
           | In my experience, the key unique characteristic of DAOs are
           | that you may not know who you're doing business with.
        
           | joshmarlow wrote:
           | I think that's a pretty good analogy. I'll add a few other
           | details to color the picture.
           | 
           | DAOs can also be built to support fund disbursal through a
           | m-of-n multisig - ie, a certain number of members have to
           | vote on a transaction.
           | 
           | It's also possible to do things like create NFTs and setup
           | recurring revenue from them to go back to the DAO which
           | distributes them to their members.
           | 
           | Side note - in WY, DAOs have some degree of legal standing
           | now (IANAL): https://www.wyoleg.gov/Legislation/2021/SF0038
        
           | ajross wrote:
           | Also instead of a legal entity with the ability to petition
           | the government for redress of grievances, it's just a bunch
           | of data emitted by some smart contract code.
           | 
           | This is going to turn out to be important the first time a
           | DAO gets significantly scammed. Someone's going to take the
           | money and run, or otherwise violate the "contract" that the
           | DAO thought it was "enforcing", and... there won't be
           | anything to do. There won't be any way to fix it. The smart
           | contract doesn't handle the edge case of having to hire a
           | lawyer on its own behalf.
           | 
           | I mean, just to take this particular mostly-harmless
           | situation as an example: that membership in the Blender
           | Development Fund presumably includes some amount of official
           | input into how the money gets spent. What if the DAO has
           | specific desires or expectations, and Blender simply chooses
           | to ignore them?
        
             | tpxl wrote:
             | > This is going to turn out to be important the first time
             | a DAO gets significantly scammed
             | 
             | Badger DAO got scammed for 120 million USD last week and I
             | doubt they were the first.
        
               | ajross wrote:
               | To be clear, that attack (also the The DAO event that
               | caused the ethereum fork) was a hack. It was a bug in the
               | contract that got exploited. And that's a risk too.
               | 
               | But even if a DAO does everything right, technically,
               | they're still subject to the problem of having to trust
               | entities in the real world (e.g. "whoever on the Blender
               | foundation gave them the address to pay") to behave the
               | way they promise (e.g. "actually hand them an address
               | under the control of the Blender Foundation"). It's
               | trivially easy in this world to just cheat.
               | 
               | And in the real world, with real people on both sides of
               | the transaction, that's addressed in the courts. And it
               | works, and fraud as a proportion of our economy is quite
               | small. But that protection doesn't extend to anonymous
               | smart contracts.
        
             | riidom wrote:
             | What you can expect as a corporate (or any) sponsor, or
             | corporate membership, as it's called, is defined here:
             | https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/ The two
             | (short) PDF's go a bit into detail, but in a nutshell they
             | can fund core projects, access meetings, and "more closely
             | monitor" progress they are interested in.
        
             | dcolkitt wrote:
             | This is a misunderstanding. Many DAOs have off-chain legal
             | entities attached.
             | 
             | In American law, corporations are people. American Courts
             | will give a very high leeway to respecting whatever
             | corporate bylaws dictate. Including being governed by code.
             | 
             | It's very easy to register a Delaware LLC which states that
             | it's board decisions are whatever output a smart contract
             | spits out.
        
             | dbt00 wrote:
             | > This is going to turn out to be important the first time
             | a DAO gets significantly scammed. Someone's going to take
             | the money and run, or otherwise violate the "contract" that
             | the DAO thought it was "enforcing", and... there won't be
             | anything to do. There won't be any way to fix it. The smart
             | contract doesn't handle the edge case of having to hire a
             | lawyer on its own behalf.
             | 
             | This already happened, and they hard forked the Ethereum
             | blockchain to revert the hack.
             | 
             | https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2016/07/20/ethereum-
             | executes-b...
        
         | ranuzz wrote:
         | I have spent some time learning about DAOs and this is what I
         | understood. Please correct me if there is a mistake.
         | 
         | Coined as Decentralized autonomous organization, they are
         | decentralized applications whose main function is to handle
         | fund disbursement. They work more or less as any other treasury
         | but in a more transparent and automated way.
         | 
         | What further separates them from the traditional treasury is
         | that they are essentially a piece of code that runs on
         | blockchain networks, like Ethereum, Cardano, Solana etc. It
         | makes DAOs a lot different from traditional organisations and
         | businesses from an economic and regulation sense.
         | 
         | Let's take an example DAO and how it operates. There is no
         | defined template of a DAO yet so I'll use this open source code
         | written in solidity as an example
         | https://github.com/blockchainsllc/DAO/blob/develop/DAO.sol
         | 
         | This can be called a decentralized application or a smart
         | contract. It defines an Interface which can be used to
         | instantiate a DAO contract. The first few constants define the
         | regulatory parameters. The most interesting part is the
         | proposal array. It holds all the proposals submitted by the
         | proposal creator that specifies an amount which is to be paid
         | to the proposal recipient if it gets approved. Approval is done
         | by DAO stakeholder by casting votes.
         | 
         | From a freelancer's perspective this can be a bidding platform
         | where gig workers can place their proposals and get paid once
         | the work is done. A very transparent and seamless experience as
         | compared to existing freelance marketplaces.
        
           | aeolian wrote:
           | As a member of a DAO, this is almost-right.
           | 
           | A DAO isn't necessarily an "application"; it's more of a
           | concept, an idea.
           | 
           | There are a bunch of tools/applications that facilitate the
           | operation of a DAO. I wrote a blog post about this:
           | https://blog.juicebox.money/dao-tooling-101/
           | 
           | In the case of the JuiceboxDAO, I contributed funds (ETH) to
           | the DAO treasury (bank account), and in return I got $JBX (a
           | token that lives on Ethereum). I have about 40,000 JBX
           | tokens. With these token, I can: - use it to vote on
           | proposals. - "burn it" in exchange for some ETH back (but
           | probably not get my original investment - sell it somewhere
           | else (an automated market maker like Uniswap)
        
             | corobo wrote:
             | I think I'm very close to beginning to understand this
             | whole thing haha thanks for the post
             | 
             | Oddly enough I've already been wanting to set something
             | like this up -- my equivalent is running a regular business
             | but with a pretty intense profit share scheme
             | 
             | Honestly it sounds perfect except these gas fees. Can
             | someone clarify am I right in thinking it's prohibitively
             | expensive to create any of these
             | tokens/shares/votes/whatever because of fees? Assuming
             | you're broke as hell and missed the original crypto train
        
               | addandsubtract wrote:
               | If you set it up on Ethereum, then yes, it probably will
               | be too expensive in your case. However, there are several
               | other chains where you could set up a DAO with close to
               | zero gas fees. For example Polygon or Fantom, among
               | others. The major hurdle atm is "bridging" assets onto
               | these newer chains. Most exchanges currently only support
               | the big players, but as these grow and mature, adoption
               | and UX/DX should improve as well.
        
               | corobo wrote:
               | Feels a bit too Wild West (and expensive as fuck) for me
               | right now, I'll just use a database and later regular old
               | shares I think haha
               | 
               | Maybe I'll pop back when it's web3.1
        
             | ranuzz wrote:
             | >> it's more of a concept, an idea.
             | 
             | Thanks for stating it this way, makes a lot more sense now.
             | Your example and blog post cleared a lot of doubts !
        
       | wlesieutre wrote:
       | For context, Patron member is at EUR120K+ per year, and this puts
       | them as the 7th one. Other patron members are GPU manufacturers
       | (Nvidia/AMD), game engines (Epic/Unity), Facebook (pre-Meta, but
       | presumably for VR reasons), and AWS (no idea, publicity move to
       | promote AWS use by game studios?). Decentraland fits in there
       | alongside Meta.
        
         | pen2l wrote:
         | AWS is easy to understand, it provides cloud-rendering:
         | https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/solutions/cloud-rendering-farm/
         | 
         | Thinkbox/deadline is pretty mature and as I understand it is
         | actually already being used by a handful of big shops.
        
         | AndreasHae wrote:
         | AWS might be because of Lumberyard, their fork of CryEngine
        
           | wlesieutre wrote:
           | Right, that makes sense. It's now evolved into O3DE, but last
           | year when they joined the BDF Lumberyard's license required
           | games to use AWS for servers.
           | 
           | https://o3de.org/
        
       | marmada wrote:
       | Can someone w/ more crypto experience explain how a DAO
       | actualizes its decisions?
       | 
       | For example: Here, there was a vote. Now what? Will Blender setup
       | a wallet that can accept ETH? Will the DAO then vote on a
       | transaction that sends money from the DAO to Blender's ETH
       | wallet??
        
         | aeolian wrote:
         | I'm not sure about Decentraland specifically, but typically
         | there will be a subset of the DAO members who actually control
         | the DAO treasury in a "multisig wallet". Say they have 10
         | signatories, they might have a requirement that 8 of the 10
         | signatories approve a transaction to either send ETH to
         | Blender, or do the necessary swaps to give Blender USD. The
         | signatories have committed to execute the will of the DAO.
         | 
         | Voting happens "off chain" using a tool called Snapshot
         | (https://snapshot.org/#/snapshot.dcl.eth). If people hold some
         | Decentraland tokens/assets, they can vote, and their vote is
         | weighted in proportion to their holdings. This isn't without
         | its problems:
         | https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html
         | 
         | If you want to learn more, I wrote a blog post on DAO tooling
         | 101: https://blog.juicebox.money/dao-tooling-101/
        
           | nightpool wrote:
           | That's pretty funny, that's basically identical to how
           | standard corporations work, except instead of "signatories"
           | you have "corporate officers" and instead of "off chain
           | voting" you have (very thoroughly-regulated!) "shareholder
           | proxy statements".
        
             | vvpan wrote:
             | Well that's the point actually. It is a lot like
             | shareholder/board of directors voting. Except that the DAO
             | requires virtually no bureaucracy to get up and running. So
             | if, say, you and your local community wanted to start an
             | organization to fund some common-goods project you can do
             | it in a few minutes, provided you have people who are
             | onboard with the vision and have a little money to put in.
             | After that all voting and movement of funds is transparent.
             | The code replaces corporate structure. There are unsolved
             | problems like vote-buying and all that, but then other
             | mechanisms would kick like "rage-quitting" (a term used
             | officially by some DAO systems) by which DAOs can dissolve
             | and funds be withdrawn by contributors. Plenty of research
             | projects on the table, but benefits are already being
             | reaped, as in this Blender case.
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | 22c wrote:
         | The most common way it works is that a snapshot of all holders
         | of the governance token is taken at a certain point in time and
         | a proposal is made, which all holders in the snapshot are able
         | to vote on by signing their response.
         | 
         | Blender already accepts donations on Ethereum mainnet at
         | 0x9De8991C56F622175274fb358f981AF6F903a799. The proposal which
         | passed was to send a "one-time" donation to Blender, but it's
         | not clear if they're going to be sending MANA (which is the
         | currency in use on Decentraland) or if they're going to send a
         | USD equivalent stablecoin. Unless the Blender devs are willing
         | to be paid in MANA, it will need to be converted to fiat at
         | some point.
        
       | endisneigh wrote:
       | "Create, explore and trade in the first-ever virtual world owned
       | by its users."
       | 
       | > "Join our Discord"
       | 
       | In all seriousness, congrats to Blender for getting some more
       | money.
        
       | beepbooptheory wrote:
       | Take the money and run!
        
       | dmix wrote:
       | Anyone tried decentraland? Any good?
        
         | monkeydust wrote:
         | Yes and No. Reminded me of Second Life but worse.
         | 
         | Good video overview here
         | 
         | https://youtu.be/z5-QaCq9mh8
        
         | TigeriusKirk wrote:
         | I take regular tours around it to see what's going on. And the
         | general answer is not a lot.
         | 
         | Largest percentage of developed plots are NFT showrooms, some
         | for sale, some just showing off (which is totally valid in my
         | mind). Some trying to sell wearables for your in-world avatar.
         | 
         | There's some casino operations, the largest being a poker room
         | which seems to where the most people congregate.
         | 
         | There's a crafting game where you have to collect materials
         | that are doled out slowly enough that it takes days to make
         | anything.
         | 
         | A couple of very mildly interactive "rides" for lack of a
         | better term.
         | 
         | A number of largely abandoned...I don't know...architectural
         | phantasies? Places where someone built weird/interesting things
         | because they could.
         | 
         | There's a lot of hype around trading the virtual land, but the
         | prices are all out of whack with the utility. Far, far too
         | little land at far, far too high prices. People are dreaming of
         | being virtual landlords, but it's hard for me to see that
         | playing out well for them.
         | 
         | The software development is glacial compared to the rest of the
         | crypto world.
         | 
         | My opinion is that the project as a whole on a dead end path,
         | but I check in once or twice a week to see if anyone is doing
         | anything interesting with their little piece of it.
        
       | mangecoeur wrote:
       | Always glad to see funds go to a great and well managed Open
       | source project like Blender!
       | 
       | That said, looking up what the hell is 'Decentraland' and how it
       | works is to dive into a dystopian nightmare. Cutesy illustrations
       | tell you: 'Decentraland: it's like a second rate RPG, except
       | instead of in game currency you have to use your actual cash to
       | participate in a tech-bro pyramid scheme where each coin has the
       | climate impact equivalent to burning down a substantial area of
       | rainforest'.
       | 
       | Blender foundation should insist on getting cash up front ;)
        
         | choward wrote:
         | I just find it funny that people are using this to escape all
         | the problems of the real world by implementing all the problems
         | the real world has in a virtual world.
         | 
         | I do have to give people credit for coming up with one of the
         | most elaborate pump and dump schemes of all time.
        
         | dkersten wrote:
         | I looked into Decentraland about a month ago (because someone I
         | know was going on about it) and to me it looked like what I
         | remember Cybertown [1] was circa 2000, except with NFT's. I
         | wasn't very impressed, even visually, it looked quite dated.
         | 
         | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberTown
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | vvpan wrote:
         | You will only see a dystopian nightmare when that's what they
         | are looking to see.
         | 
         | * A DAO is a lot of people who are looking to create common
         | good via small donations and common participation. This was the
         | goal and ideology of Ethereum from the moment it was conceived.
         | And here the DAO is helping out a beautiful open source project
         | that has benefited many people, so Ethereum is delivering on
         | its ideological promise quiet literally and objectively. Very
         | dystopian, right.
         | 
         | * What Decentraland is is beyond the point. If you don't like
         | Second Life and all that (I have zero interest personally) it
         | has nothing to do with your argument. People enjoy it and here
         | they are supporting to keep it free (as in freedom).
         | 
         | * I do not see how "use your actual cash" is a negative
         | argument here. Having all platforms be absolutely free made the
         | user the product and lead to an actual dystopian nightmare
         | which is the current control of all user data by like two
         | corporations. New methods of governance, monetization and user-
         | owned data are what's needed to prevent a dystopian nightmare.
         | Decentraland is making progress on all of those. All of those,
         | btw, are part of the ideological vision of Ethereum that I
         | mentioned above, so once again - it is doing the intended job.
         | 
         | * Climate impact is an old argument, we can argue about it for
         | hours and not get anywhere. But Ethereum is switching off PoW
         | within the next few months and many projects have already moved
         | to L2 which does not rely on PoW consensus for every
         | transactions.
         | 
         | Again, you see only the things you are looking for. People
         | coordinating major funding for a large open source project
         | while having democratic say over the platform they are using to
         | you seems like an accidental byproduct but it was the primary
         | goal all these years.
        
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