Sunday 1 May 2016

The Rise of the DAO

The ÐΑΩ is Live!!! - The official address is: - 0xBB9bc244D798123fDe783fCc1C72d3Bb8C189413

We stand here at the birth of the DAO - for all of us participating; the creators, the coders, the contributors, the curators, the thousands on the Slack channel and on the DAOHub, all the participants on Github, Stackexchange, Reddit, hundreds of bloggers and commentators - the long hours of building and testing are at an end.

  • like the first email in the 1960's
  • like the first mobile call in the 1970's
  • like the Tim Berners-Lee paper in the 1980's
  • like the release of WWW software by CERN in the 1990's
The birth of The DAO is a key event that will be followed by an array of amazing developments. The pace of change will be dramatic and driven by the imagination of literally millions of people. This will upset the status quo in ways we are only beginning to imagine.

Looking back how could one have ever predicted; Wikipedia, Linux, the beginning of online purchases, of online auctions, of search engines and bookstores, streaming video, machine translation, Wifi, the list goes on and on.

In this decade a wave on ongoing development (just when we thought there were no more really big ideas); Uber, AirBnB, crowd funding and most importantly, the beginning of the democratisation of capital via the blockchain, the distributed ledger and Ethereum.

  • Like everything the human race produces there is good and bad and an ongoing technological struggle against the scammers and spammers and trolls / the evil and the greedy. The naysayers pointing only to the negative aspects and the legacy media hyena feeding on misery - many outlets simply producing disinformation / soft propaganda for their governments or distorting truth at the behest of vested interests.
  • Citizens pushing back with messaging in repressive regimes, the hard reality of "democracy" as revealed by Wikileaks, the Sopa/Pipa blackouts - this next wave driven by the march of the smartphone - finally at long last a method for the citizen to engage with their fellow citizens unencumbered by government.
  • We are already seeing the emergence of sensors and connected devices; for pollution control, personal safety, for medical use, for remote communities, mobile payments, the sending of micro payments in under-developed regions, in response to natural disaster; the growth of community - of people doing it for themselves. Small agricultural producers reaching out directly to large consumer markets.
  • The sharing economy is in its infancy, (but perhaps) with an unsustainable level of commissions in the hands of the first movers. It will ultimately deliver unprecedented change in how business and community and government are constructed and funded.
There can be no doubt that the technological advances brought about by the internet create freedom vectors, from the ability to simply express oneself to whistle blowing, to the reduction of protectionism and artificial duties and the breaking down of trade barriers - all edifices existing at the expense of the citizen.

At long last the markets and structures and controls put in place by the old empires marauding across the globe are coming to an end. This change will not happen tomorrow or next year but like all things technological the early adopters are working tirelessly towards this goal, often without pay or without tangible reward. Most importantly the early majority are waiting in the wings.

Welcome to the next (r)evolutionary step - the Rise of the DAO

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