How users of DAOs can gain access without ether

VladVlad Member Posts: 3
It's not really clear how one can say that a DAO is autonomous if its users must pay for its operating expenses. The DAO could refund the user's gas, but still in that case the user would require sufficient ether funds for the computations they induce the DAO to make. We observe that a decentralized system of routers can route user messages to DAOs in return for a gas refund with additional incentives, and that a standardized routing protocol makes this system viable.

Additionally, it's not really clear how one can say that a DAO is autonomous if it is unable to raise its own revenues in order to cover its operating expenses. We hypothesize that the most general way for a DAO to raise revenue is to issue tokens and sell them for ether. However, during early stages a DAO will not be able to fund expenses with their newly issued tokens, therefore investors are required to subsidize operating expenses until hopefully the DAO becomes profitable enough to repay them with dividends. Of course, the more liquid the exchange that DAOs use sell tokens are raise capital, the better for the ecosystem. We also notice that the possibilities of DAOs who buy each other's services is facilitated by a common exchange for DAOcoins. Therefore, we think there's an opportunity to standardize the routing protocol and a common exchange into a single protocol, which we'd like to call "the DAOist protocol".

Here's the google doc of the still-in-progress whitepaper
http://tiny.cc/qsxtex

Please leave feedback here on in the google docs as a comment!
This project needs more brains working on it

Comments

  • StephanTualStephanTual London, EnglandMember, Moderator Posts: 1,282 mod
    This is brilliant Vlad & team - keep up the good work!
  • BluefinBluefin Member Posts: 47
    edited May 2014
    @Vlad, granted it is a show stopper to have users of DAO or any application for that matter to pump gas into the system to run a contract. I personally am not in favor of that. But still you need to keep ethereum running somehow and I guess that is the only solution for now.

    If I did not have the benefit of what you are trying to do, this is how I would have implemented the DAO with probably less than 200 lines of codes :

    Run another contract (let's call this feeder contract or FC) to automatically feed gas into the DAO actual contract. Let anyone who wants to feed ethers into this FC be rewarded with some DAO coins that you proposed.

    The FC manages the amount of ethers that should go into the DAO contract. If there are more than enough, the FC will not accept more ethers. Otherwise it will open up again to accept ethers to fuel the DAO contract.

    Another DAO coin contract (sub-currency by Gavin could be used) could be run to issue DAO coins in return as reward for feeding ethers into the FC.

    Although we would love to call it DAO, like it or not, there still has to be some ownership in the DAO. The creator of the DAO shall have to take responsibility still, although most work would have been "decentralized" in a way. For example, who is going to manage the DAO coins?

    Hope my 2 cents are worth something. As I have mentioned in another topic elsewhere, the very concept of Ethereum is so flexible, dynamic and powerful that my only concern is, it may fall over by the amount of transactions and data it can handle. Otherwise, as more and more people understand ethereum, this thing is going to change the way we do things in the future. At least it has changed me for sure as I have not programmed for more than 25 years and now I am going back to flex the little skills that I have acquired as a young C programmer. I am born again!

    If you have an underlying intention to introduce a new DAOcoin, I am sorry to have thrown a spanner in the works as I am still not convinced about cryptocoins but certainly the technology behind its use which is what ethereum is trying to do.
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