Decentralized autonomous organization. It’s a collaboration mechanism for forming an organization wherein you can define the compensation and governance structure as open source code. Moloch DAO is one of the better known and simple to understand instances of a DAO, though it’s scope is limited to managing membership and voting on projects to fund [0].
I don't understand why you'd prefer to work in a structure governed by contract-written-as-code compared to contract-written-as-anything-else. Seems like you could put any arbitrary set of rules in a regular contract too.
Because it can be enforced without being tied to a specific jurisdiction, expensive lawyers and army of accountants.
Imagine a company the size of Google/Alphabet organized in a similar way to something like https://dxdao.eth.link/#/, where employees have more say in what they work on and don't have layers of expensive management.
Or a Y Combinator or a DAO of indie hacker businesses working as a cooperative, investing in new products, sharing resources, etc.
Or an open source alternative to Uber / Seamless / Instacart where users can vote and bid on features and reward contributors who implement them. I'm sure a product driven by customers and makers would look a lot different than the exploitative middleman businesses that dominate tech at the moment.
There's the enforcement aspect that other commenters mention, but what's maybe more relevant to the OP is that every member's contract is open source. You know exactly what everyone is making and the mechanism for making decisions at the governance level is totally transparent by design.
But we're not talking about scams here, as far as I can tell. Contracts aren't being thrown aside and blatantly ignored. Just misunderstood, possibly even exploitative, rules. Or in the case of "go forward" comp like in the article, it's really just a negotiation thing, more than a contract thing.
Exploitative, deceptive, or otherwise malicious contract rules are still possible, here, no? I have a hard time imagining an automated code checker that is smart enough to figure out "this is a more risky investment based on how the rules are set up!" in a way that a paper contract couldn't be similarly analyzed.
After all, a public company is about as decentralized as it gets - decentralized enough that most of the owners have basically zero individual power compared to the people appointed to run it - and there have been plenty of shenanigans in those over the years (which is why they now have a lot of regulation as a result).
Is this effectively just "corporations, now with less regulations because we haven't yet seen the ways this particular form can be used maliciously?"
Consider "hollywood accounting" - if the smart contract says "profit is split 60% to 40% between the two of us" but I'm in a position to choose to classify expenses and various other costs in a way that means "profit" gets computed in the system as X instead of 5X, what happens?
[0]: https://github.com/MolochVentures/moloch/blob/minimal-revenu...