[HN Gopher] Court Ruling Could Affect the Future Direction of DAOs
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Court Ruling Could Affect the Future Direction of DAOs
        
       Author : wallflower
       Score  : 84 points
       Date   : 2023-04-06 13:33 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.jdsupra.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.jdsupra.com)
        
       | a1371 wrote:
       | > The plaintiffs alleged they lost $1.7 million in the
       | cyberattack and that the repayment plan would take thousands of
       | years to make them whole
       | 
       | Creative repayment plan.
       | 
       | > the court focused on statements by the bZx Protocol developers
       | that creation of a DAO would insulate the Protocol "from
       | regulatory oversight and accountability for compliance with U.S.
       | law
       | 
       | Looks like they attempted the "citizen of the earth" card.
        
       | poof131 wrote:
       | Regulatory arbitrage in Web3 seems to be coming to and end. My
       | assumption is
       | 
       | 1) If your contract is upgradeable it isn't decentralized. Might
       | as well be hosting on EC2.
       | 
       | 2) If a multi-sig runs your governance contract or treasury it
       | isn't decentralized. Might as well form an LLC or C corp.
       | 
       | 3) From a more NatSec perspective, if a SEAL team or the FBI can
       | reach a few people in your DAO and your project would shut down,
       | you aren't decentralized.
       | 
       | Which all seems good and as it should be, to stop people LARPing
       | as decentralized to avoid regulations.
        
       | sharemywin wrote:
       | Seems to me to make sense. if you don't file any paper work with
       | the state and agree to start a money making enterprise with more
       | than one person your a general partnership. Whether your an
       | active or passive investor or not would probably depend on how
       | much "work" you put into the partnership(not related to the
       | article just my thought). Not a Lawyer so take anything I say as
       | anything more than uneducated internet speculation.
       | 
       | Other than the risk of all your assets getting hacked and stolen
       | to doesn't seem like a bad way to "enforce" a contract.
       | 
       | Maybe would be better if things were split up into different
       | accounts with different people holding different keys so you
       | don't have a single point of failure.
       | 
       | Just like with SVB there should be some kind of insurance for
       | large accounts. with various audit and other processes to keep
       | things "safer"
        
         | JumpCrisscross wrote:
         | > _your an active or passive investor or not would probably
         | depend on how much "work" you put into the partnership_
         | 
         | Legally, it requires paperwork filed _ex ante_. As the article
         | notes, several states have DAO LLC constructs. DAOs that don 't
         | incorporate do, and should, expose their holders to unlimited
         | liability. That is the default. (If you and I start an
         | unincorporated car-washing business, and it destroys someone's
         | car, we will be jointly sued and liable, though I may
         | separately have individual claims against you if you made all
         | the wrong decisions.)
         | 
         | The situation all this seeks to avoid is profit-seeking
         | enterprise having everyone who stood to gain when things went
         | well standing up saying "not it" when things don't. If a DAO-or
         | any other business or person-causes you injury, it shouldn't be
         | your job to figure out who contributed to what degree.
        
       | zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
       | Wyoming has a DAO LLC
       | 
       | https://sos.wyo.gov/Business/Docs/DAOs_FAQs.pdf
        
         | pavlov wrote:
         | Interesting law. It seems that this kind of DAO is a Wyoming
         | LLC with all the existing obligations and the extra requirement
         | that you have to file Wyoming paperwork if your smart contracts
         | are modified:                 Articles of organization shall be
         | amended when:       (i) There is a change in the name of the
         | decentralized autonomous organization;       (ii) There is a
         | false or erroneous statement in the articles of organization;
         | or       (iii) The decentralized autonomous organization's
         | smart contracts have been updated or changed.
         | 
         | A DAO may not be "foreign", but it's not defined what exactly
         | that means: _" The secretary of state shall not issue a
         | certificate of authority for a foreign decentralized autonomous
         | organization."_
         | 
         | I'm guessing that most DAOs don't want the legal liability of
         | an American LLC, so there may not be a lot of takers.
        
           | wsh wrote:
           | In context, "foreign" means an entity registered in another
           | state or country. See the FAQ:                 Can I register
           | my out-of-state DAO?         No. A certificate of authority
           | for a foreign DAO cannot be filed         pursuant to W.S.
           | 17-31-116.
        
             | rtkwe wrote:
             | What does that even mean for a DAO to be out of state? Is
             | it based on people with voting power in the DAO?
        
               | houston_Euler wrote:
               | IANAL, but I believe it means that the company can't be
               | headquartered somewhere else.
        
               | WorldMaker wrote:
               | I think the more interesting question is what does it
               | mean for a DAO to be considered _in state_ to qualify for
               | this type of LLC? Do they need to keep at least a PO Box
               | as presence in the state? Some amount of real estate?
               | Some number of state-resident members with voting power?
               | Do the other usual LLC requirements apply?
        
               | JumpCrisscross wrote:
               | > _What does that even mean for a DAO to be out of
               | state?_
               | 
               | A Delaware corporation doing business in California must
               | file as a foreign corporation in the latter. It sounds
               | like Wyoming is saying a DAO can't incorporate out of
               | state and take advantage of the Wyoming DAO LLC, but this
               | doesn't appear to have been fleshed out.
        
           | davidjfelix wrote:
           | I think that clarification makes sense though. You'd normally
           | (this may vary from state to state) need to amend an Articles
           | of Organization if your LLC Operating Agreement changed,
           | which usually outlines the nature of a joint-ownership model.
           | Since that's handled via smart contracts, you'd want those to
           | be legally binding, which would imply that you need to follow
           | the normal meatspace government lawyer process of updating
           | your articles of organization.
        
       | naikrovek wrote:
       | dear Lord,
       | 
       | I've been very good, mom said that she is thankful I helped her
       | with housework and that my room has stayed very clean. as always,
       | I donate all of my income to charity and volunteer for 40 hours
       | every week. can I have one thing? just one thing? my one wish is
       | to never have my day cluttered with f*king blockchain BS again.
       | 
       | thank you
        
         | tiku wrote:
         | Nah Blockchain is here to stay.
        
       | Canada wrote:
       | What would happen in the case of a general partnership where 5
       | people put some money together to buy a house for $1M:
       | 
       | Partner 1: $500,000
       | 
       | Partner 2: $250,000
       | 
       | Partner 3: $249,000
       | 
       | Partner 4: $999
       | 
       | Partner 5: $1
       | 
       | They issued paper receipts representing these proportions. All
       | agreed that any rent collected would be paid to the paper holders
       | Pro rata. All parties have to show up to review/approve/reject a
       | tenant, and all have to show up to collect the rent on the due
       | day. Each person writes their own receipts and signs all the
       | others, so no one party is more in charge than any other. Partner
       | 3 sells 100,000 receipts to someone else, we'll call Person A,
       | for $101,000. Then the house burns down and is lost, so there's
       | not going to be any rental income now and nobody is interested in
       | buying the receipts anymore. None of the parties did anything to
       | cause the fire.
       | 
       | Now who can sue successfully?
       | 
       | (Not saying the facts of the case in the article match my
       | hypothetical exactly.)
        
         | vkou wrote:
         | > Now who can sue successfully?
         | 
         | Nobody? All I see is six morons that have joint ownership in a
         | house that were all too cheap to pay for insurance. And since
         | nobody's at fault for the fire, tough cheese.
         | 
         | Person A might be able to sue whomever sold him the receipts,
         | but only if he was lied to about how the organization
         | functions.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | gamblor956 wrote:
         | This is a pretty standard partnership issue.
         | 
         | In your scenario, nobody's at fault for anything, so nobody can
         | sue anybody.
         | 
         | But what if Partner 2 set fire to the house? Then the other
         | Partners (now including Person A but not Partner 3) could sue
         | Partner 2 for losses.
         | 
         | Or what if Person B, a tenant, suffered harm due to negligent
         | maintenance of the house? Person B could sue _any or all_ of
         | the Partners (now including Person A but not Partner 3) for
         | damages. And each partner would be  "jointly and severally"
         | liable for all of Person B's damages (so if Partner 5, owning a
         | tiny portion of the partnership ended up getting sued and owing
         | damages to Person B, they would need to sue the other partners
         | for reimbursement).
         | 
         | But note that Partner 3 selling his partnership interest to
         | Person A would, in many states, trigger the dissolution of the
         | original partnership. In this case, it doesn't matter since
         | they never bothered to form any custom organization documents
         | or financial allocations.
        
       | mr337 wrote:
       | I have been out of the loop of DAO and how they are organized and
       | manage changes. My first explaining of that was in Folding Ideas
       | part of Decentraland [1]. The DAO portion did not look so good.
       | 
       | So still trying to figure out if this is just a phase or there is
       | some legitimacy to a DAO.
       | 
       | 1 - https://youtu.be/EiZhdpLXZ8Q?t=4923
        
       | user3939382 wrote:
       | Oh no https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_access_object
        
       | the88doctor wrote:
       | This case just confirmed what we already knew before: DAOs are
       | just groups of people working together, and they don't get any
       | special treatment just because they coordinate their activities
       | via blockchain instead of email.
       | 
       | Enforcement will be the interesting part. If a DAO has anonymous
       | members and no LLC or corporate structure associated with it,
       | then a court can rule that the members are liable, but it could
       | be very difficult to enforce that liability.
        
         | luckylion wrote:
         | Why would it be difficult to enforce individual liability? The
         | DAO needs to interact with the outside world somehow, pay bills
         | and get paid etc, and distribute income to members, so you can
         | just follow the money, can't you?
        
           | orbz wrote:
           | Jurisdiction of the enforcing party must have overlap with
           | the individual members targeted. In practice I would expect
           | any member under that jurisdiction would bear full
           | responsibility of the actions of any of the collective
           | members.
        
           | WorldMaker wrote:
           | If you assume a DAO is de facto a corporation/partnership (as
           | this court decision suggests), most US States (including
           | California, which is relevant to this specific case) and many
           | countries start from an unlimited, collective liability
           | default for corporations/partnerships and limited liability
           | is the properly registered (and taxed!) opt-in. (The article
           | also points to states that are not California that realize
           | this and have started to offer easy LLC opt-in for DAOs.
           | Presumably in part because it is a potential tax revenue
           | source.) [IANAL, but this is fascinating.]
        
             | olliej wrote:
             | It is an organization, there is no question there.
             | 
             | The question is whether it is a general partnership or not,
             | and by the rules listed it would appear to be.
             | 
             | Collective ownership implying collective liability is not
             | novel or new, and existed long before LLCs and LLPs did.
             | Legislation allowing those is relatively recent because it
             | has obvious benefits, but comes at the cost of some degree
             | of regulation. In the true crypto spirit of "regulation ==
             | bad" this DAO took the path of not making itself an LLC or
             | LLP (and in fact explicitly terminated the LLC), which
             | means it seems fairly obvious that it's a general (e.g.
             | unlimited liability) partnership as the court appears to be
             | concluding.
        
           | _navierstokes wrote:
           | Sometimes you can't follow the money, because the DAO members
           | can use privacy tools to hide the coins, similar to what
           | Tornado Cash allowed you to do.
        
         | AlexandrB wrote:
         | Many of them don't even coordinate their activities via
         | blockchain because it's too slow and expensive[1].
         | 
         | [1] https://www.banklesstimes.com/news/2023/03/08/off-chain-
         | gove...
        
           | ceejayoz wrote:
           | For a rather hilarious example of this, PeopleDAO's
           | "autonomy" turned out to be a few guys with a Google Sheet.
           | They accidentally shared the link and someone added
           | themselves to the payout list, to the tune of $120k.
           | 
           | https://www.theblock.co/post/219214/peopledao-hacked-via-
           | goo...
        
           | zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
           | Governance activities are talked about on forums and
           | chatrooms. Governance is voted on on-chain
           | 
           | Edit: I'm posting too fast, so here's an edit for a reply
           | 
           | I don't know anything about Ethereum DAOs. Check out
           | Tendermint chains (Cosmos, Osmosis, Crescent, Stargaze,
           | EVMOS, Kava). Gas is cheap and all voting is on-chain.
           | Governance discussions happen mostly on a forum called
           | Commonwealth and then they're put on chain and voted on by
           | validators and stakers.
        
             | AlexandrB wrote:
             | Except when it's not: https://docs.decentraland.org/player/
             | general/dao/overview/ho...
             | 
             | > To circumvent the very high gas fees associated with full
             | on-chain governance, Decentraland's DAO uses a combination
             | of free, off-chain voting for the community and a multi-sig
             | wallet controlled by a "DAO Committee" to enact those off-
             | chain decisions on the Ethereum blockchain.
             | 
             | I'm not a huge follower of the crypto ecosystem and DAOs,
             | but this kind of thing seems like it's pretty common.
        
               | localplume wrote:
               | [dead]
        
               | miracle2k wrote:
               | There are all kinds of governance models, as there should
               | be.
               | 
               | > a multi-sig wallet controlled by a "DAO Committee" to
               | enact those off-chain decisions
               | 
               | DAOs may empower a multi-sig with certain allocated funds
               | to spend according to a mandate. This is ok. It's like
               | saying America is not a democracy because regulators can
               | make new rules that congress is not voting on.
               | 
               | It also possible to have off-chain voting, but still
               | enforce those results on-chain using a fraud-proof like
               | system, and some do this. Lots of design space to play
               | with.
        
               | squeaky-clean wrote:
               | How do you guarantee the off-chain votes haven't been
               | tampered with during the initial off-chain step?
        
               | rjbwork wrote:
               | >It's like saying America is not a democracy because
               | regulators can make new rules that congress is not voting
               | on.
               | 
               | That actually does appear to be the opinion of the
               | current supreme court, and you can expect further rulings
               | counter to historical precedence WRT chevron deference.
        
               | Shared404 wrote:
               | Slightly off topic, but I quite like this video over
               | Decentraland/the metaverse:
               | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiZhdpLXZ8Q
               | 
               | It's an in depth look/critique.
        
               | aww_dang wrote:
               | This is actually very common for the allegedly
               | decentralized apps. A centralized service controls the
               | actual application while some resulting data is recorded
               | to the blockchain. Decentralized in name only, but most
               | users don't know and those who understand are only happy
               | to oblige the hype.
        
           | tiku wrote:
           | Depends on the chain. Lots of "better" chains than Ethereum.
           | Some are even integrating EVM and Solidity.
        
         | rvcdbn wrote:
         | By this line of reasoning wouldn't Ethereum miners be liable
         | too? (assuming this was all implemented on ethereum)
        
           | rocqua wrote:
           | They don't cooperate for profit, they compete with eachother.
           | 
           | Everyone in a mining (or staking) pool seems more likely to
           | count as a general partnership.
        
           | latchkey wrote:
           | ETH no longer has miners since the switch to PoS. There are
           | now stakers, validators, liquid staking tokens, block
           | builders, ... it has gotten a lot more complex than it was
           | before.
        
           | olliej wrote:
           | What? Why would they be liable? The whole point is the
           | liability in a partnership is shared between the partners:
           | that is the entities that own the partnership.
           | 
           | Miners (staker?) aren't partners in the DAO: being a miner
           | doesn't make you an owner of anything, anymore than being an
           | employee or contractor to a partnership in the real world
           | would make you liable for the actions of your
           | employer/client.
        
           | houston_Euler wrote:
           | I believe miners wouldn't, because while they might
           | technically coordinate their efforts in deciding which
           | version of a cryptocurrency to mine, they aren't pooling
           | their resources and representing themselves as a single
           | entity.
           | 
           | That's partly what makes these individuals an unincorporated
           | organization.
        
         | nico wrote:
         | How would it work for non-US DAOs?
        
           | lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
           | If the DAO is very explicit about non-US residents, they
           | should also be able to show that in court, and it could be
           | determined that the US citizens who ignored that waived any
           | protections the court would otherwise offer. Alternatively,
           | it might instead be that the DAO should have done more to
           | ~spy on~ "know" their customers so they could determine that
           | they're not serving US citizens.
        
             | 8note wrote:
             | The US could still argue that there's a US nexus in that
             | the tokens are converted to US dollars
        
         | ARandumGuy wrote:
         | Whenever an organization does something, someone or something
         | has liability. If you don't go through the process to create an
         | LLC, that someone is the members of the organization. Liability
         | doesn't go away just because you organize via a blockchain.
        
           | lacy_tinpot wrote:
           | The entire purpose of an LLC is to limit personal exposure to
           | such liabilities. I don't see how this won't just extend to
           | something like DAOs.
        
             | 8note wrote:
             | I could see legal changes to bring in limited liability to
             | DAOs, but I don't think DAO users will like the rest of
             | what that entails, eg reporting and kyc requirements.
             | 
             | Thsoe will likely make daos more useful, but less
             | differentiated from existing structures
        
           | tiku wrote:
           | If the actions are done by code or an AI, who is liable?
        
             | olliej wrote:
             | The owners.
             | 
             | For example: Imagine I have a cow, and the cow escapes and
             | goes on a rampage. I didn't make the cow escape, I didn't
             | tell it to go on a rampage, and cows think for themselves
             | so are autonomous.
             | 
             | That doesn't mean I get to claim the cow is liable for the
             | damage.
        
             | yifanl wrote:
             | Whoever made the decision was it to implement them as an
             | actor, most likely?
        
               | JumpCrisscross wrote:
               | > _Whoever made the decision was it to implement them as
               | an actor, most likely?_
               | 
               | Directly, the holders of the DAO tokens. That's what this
               | case is about. Those holders may have further claims
               | against the people who implemented the code or AI. But
               | the liability begins with the general partners, _i.e._
               | holders of the governance tokens.
               | 
               | Will be interesting to see the first judgements enforced
               | against holders of a DAO.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | majormajor wrote:
               | Yeah, booby traps are the first example I can think of
               | illegal automation that comes to mind where the property
               | owner is liable. Setting up something and not pulling the
               | trigger yourself doesn't absolve you.
        
             | pjc50 wrote:
             | The last people with intent who touched it, usually, which
             | may mean the developers. Certainly that's what happened to
             | the TornadoCash developers.
             | 
             | You can't just wind up a toy with a bomb strapped to it,
             | walk away, and disclaim the consequences; nor can you do
             | that with code.
        
               | Teever wrote:
               | What if we can't tell who the last person was? Do we just
               | go down the line until we find someone to blame? What if
               | that person didn't add any of the menacing features of
               | the code?
               | 
               | What if the last 'person' was gpt4? is openai
               | responsible?
        
               | wildzzz wrote:
               | If they can't find the person solely responsible for
               | something, then they got away.
               | 
               | If you make an AI that is hooked up to the internet and
               | it does something criminal, you'd be liable. You can't
               | just let your pitbull roam the streets and not be held
               | liable when it bites someone.
        
               | Teever wrote:
               | What if I release the AI onto the internet, and then
               | tragically die in a car accident? Who is responsible for
               | the AI? What happens when the AI spawns more AI, who is
               | responsible for that?
        
               | notch898a wrote:
               | Yeah this reminds me of a thought experiment with
               | Ethereum virtual machines. If someone writes and produces
               | the code for tornado cash, publishes it on the internet
               | as free speech but never deploys it obviously they are
               | not at fault. So lets say they publish it and some
               | anonymous person from Somalia publishes it to the
               | Ethereum network and the nodes absorb the program.
               | 
               | When then is responsible for the tornado cash instance?
               | The Ethereum VM node operators who have no idea they're
               | even running it? An unknowable person from Somalia?
        
               | EdwardDiego wrote:
               | Most likely the node operators would be held to be liable
               | if they're hosting illegal content and take no steps to
               | prevent it.
        
               | notch898a wrote:
               | Right now the node operators worldwide even to this day
               | are running tornado cash on their EVM, including
               | validating transactions to sanctioned contract addresses.
        
               | ARandumGuy wrote:
               | The person responsible will be whoever the courts think
               | is responsible. Courts use case law and judicial
               | precedent to determine responsibility for a wide variety
               | of complicated legal situations.
               | 
               | Things do get murky when there isn't a lot of existing
               | precedent. That's why it's risky to engage in activities
               | that are, let's just say "legally innovative."
        
             | vkou wrote:
             | The people who own it.
             | 
             | Which, in this case, are the bag-holders. Looks like there
             | are benefits to having a real corporation, instead of
             | trying to re-invent corporate governance from scratch,
             | without any input from the courts...
        
         | jcranmer wrote:
         | > Enforcement will be the interesting part. If a DAO has
         | anonymous members and no LLC or corporate structure associated
         | with it, then a court can rule that the members are liable, but
         | it could be very difficult to enforce that liability.
         | 
         | The default form of legal structure for a cooperating group of
         | people is general partnership--unless you take specific legal
         | steps to avoid forming a general partnership, that is how the
         | courts will view the partnership. General partnerships means
         | that all partners are _jointly and severally liable_.
         | 
         | In layman's terms, that means you just have to find _one_
         | person involved in the DAO, and sue them, and then you get to
         | collect the full judgement from _that_ person (alone), and it
         | 's now _their_ problem to get cooperation from the other
         | partners for the liability.
         | 
         | (If this sounds like a terrible idea, it is. That's why there
         | exists all sorts of fancy legal structures that avoid putting
         | people in this position. But if you're not going to use any of
         | them, you get the terrible idea instead!)
        
       | wilg wrote:
       | My important and real DAO [1] is not worried about this
       | 
       | [1] https://earth.cheap/
        
         | nosequel wrote:
         | Thanks for the laugh. I really hope you reach your goal of 5.3
         | quadrillion dollars.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | saurik wrote:
       | I found another article by some lawyers that is interesting about
       | this case:
       | 
       | https://us.eversheds-sutherland.com/mobile/NewsCommentary/Le...
       | 
       | What I find most fascinating is that most "DAOs" you see are
       | entirely window dressing: at the end of the day, there are a few
       | people who actually run the assets and control the code being run
       | who are merely promising to take direction at the whim of the
       | people who hold some token, which is effectively just an illegal
       | way to build a corporation and sell stock.
       | 
       | It is possible to do something that is actually run by a truly
       | decentralized and autonomous mechanism but there are serious
       | limits; like, if you are running things on just Ethereum you can
       | write code that handles code upgrades by using an on-chain
       | vote... but it would not be trivial (I won't say quite
       | impossible) for the DAO holders to then vote to transition the
       | system to Polygon somehow, as what would that _mean_ from the
       | perspective of the code running on Ethereum? Or like, you couldn
       | 't have the DAO on Ethereum do something as simple as own a .com
       | domain name.
       | 
       | This situation is in some sense no different for this DAO. They
       | apparently had an actually-decentralized one on Ethereum, which
       | is surprising as it is so rare... but, as mentioned in this
       | article I found--and not in the article linked for this thread
       | which is concentrating on the general partnership question--they
       | cut corners when they decided to go multi-chain, and the DAO
       | supposedly owned contracts on a couple other networks, including
       | Polygon.
       | 
       | The hack then wasn't "the DAO decided to use buggy code and now
       | the DAO members are liable": it was a phishing attack against a
       | single developer sitting on a single key that allowed for control
       | of the code--and thereby the money--on Polygon, as the DAO was
       | only really able to ask that developer to take action and then
       | hope he did it.
       | 
       | That extra context to me makes this whole thing even more of a
       | fascinating case study. Like, one might then just want to say
       | "this thing was never decentralized to begin with: the owner of
       | the key was liable" and yet weirdly the case isn't brought merely
       | against that developer... it is brought against the DAO that in
       | some sense supposedly hired the developer and was negligent in
       | letting the one developer have the key for all the money on
       | another network, something they never should have done!
       | 
       | In some sense, then, this is a remarkable win for the concept of
       | a DAO. I mean, sure: some people likely wanted a DAO to be some
       | kind of "regulatory arbitrage" (as noted in complaints about them
       | here on Hacker News) and are going to be sad at the idea that the
       | DAO holders actually have some kind of liability in the actions
       | that the DAO takes...
       | 
       | ...but that was NEVER--I am serious: NEVER--an informed take on a
       | DAO. The point isn't to make it somehow impossible to sue the
       | people who own it, it is to build a new form of organization
       | wherein the ownership is liquid and people have a direct
       | democracy over the actions of the organization. If someone sued a
       | co-operative--a common form of company where the customers and/or
       | employees are the owners; I have had numerous friends who lived
       | in the local student housing co-op and I'm myself a member of the
       | local food co-op--it would not be surprising or disappointing to
       | me if all the people who were deemed owners had some potential
       | liability.
       | 
       | Now, I don't think the co-op holders (such as myself if my local
       | food co-op does something bad, even though I absolutely am
       | allowed to go to meetings and vote on their actions!) actually
       | have much liability, but only because American corporate law is
       | out of control on liability separation; like, I personally think
       | big tech shareholders should have joint and several liability
       | over the shit decisions these companies make that harm customers;
       | but that (very sadly to me and I believe incorrectly) isn't how
       | it tends to work in the United States... hell: the employees and
       | even managers of the company taking the actions often don't have
       | liability, which is just crazy-town.
       | 
       | But so, OK: when I see this argument that the DAO can actually be
       | a defendant and can actually have liability that can actually be
       | shared among its owners, to me that is an almost-incredible
       | vindication of the concept. Hell: apparently, the companies that
       | were the original developers of this mess in fact were considered
       | to NOT have liability anymore, having SUCCESSFULLY transferred
       | that to the DAO? That's hilarious!!
       | 
       | Now, does this mean it is a good idea to own "shares" in a DAO?
       | Hell no ;P. And yeah: I'd like to think this would kill a lot of
       | interest in holding a non-negligible quantity (as it can be hard
       | to not own any, which is why this article focused on non-
       | negligible) of the tokens for a DAO, in the same way I can't
       | imagine many people would own stock in Apple if they could be
       | held _joint and severely liable_ (which maybe is actually going
       | "too far"... we here in the US love our liability extremes ;P)
       | for its actions.
        
       | zeryx wrote:
       | DAOs require a legal identity, otherwise one will be provided.
       | 
       | For anyone who has been thinking about the intersections between
       | DAOs and the law, this was obvious.
       | 
       | You can still manage your membership on chain, and there are
       | plenty of great structures that are more DAO friendly - my
       | organization uses a MI LLC structure (midao.org is what we used)
        
       | throwanma wrote:
       | "... In The US"
        
       | olliej wrote:
       | Why do people think "doing the same as X but 'with blockchain'
       | instead of paper" means "legally different from X"?
       | 
       | If doing X is illegal, adding blockchain to it doesn't magically
       | mean you're not doing X.
       | 
       | If doing X means you have to pay taxes, doing X with linked lists
       | doesn't mean you don't have to pay taxes.
       | 
       | If doing X means you have a bunch of liabilities, then doing X on
       | a block chain means you have a bunch of liabilities.
       | 
       | The only thing that makes a DAO different from a partnership is
       | that decision making is arguably public on the blockchain,
       | instead of an email thread. Again, why would you think that doing
       | it on a blockchain makes it different from email, or in person,
       | or whatever.
       | 
       | Now in fairness, I certainly didn't think of DAOs as being an
       | unlimited partnership, but that's largely because I didn't think
       | about it because they seem fairly pointless. As the court seems
       | to be saying a DAO is fairly clearly a partnership, and they very
       | deliberately terminated the LLC and didn't create an LLP, so the
       | lack of liability protection follows logically from that.
        
       | UncleEntity wrote:
       | > And the question remains whether the court would reach a
       | different result if it turns out that the named plaintiffs hold
       | BZRX tokens. That could mean those plaintiffs are fatally
       | conflicted from pursuing their claims, as they would effectively
       | be both plaintiffs and defendants under their theory of the case.
       | 
       | This is the part I don't understand, if they succeed in making
       | the case all "owners" are liable wouldn't they equally be liable
       | for the money they lost?
       | 
       | And the thousand years to get paid back part -- are you a hodl or
       | not?
        
         | JumpCrisscross wrote:
         | > _wouldn't they equally be liable for the money they lost_
         | 
         | They aren't equally liable, they are jointly and severally
         | liable [1]. Equal liability implies a liability cap where there
         | isn't one.
         | 
         | [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/j/joint-and-several-
         | liabi...
        
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