Eris: A Decentralized Autonomous Organization Framework(eris.projectdouglas.org) |
Eris: A Decentralized Autonomous Organization Framework(eris.projectdouglas.org) |
Who cares, you ask? This is someone who understands the importance of the rule of law -- having seen life without it as a soldier and as a lawyer -- and what it means to live in a country where promises can't be enforced. The rest of the team is just as impressive (and modest). That experience appears to inform the philosophy behind the project:
"Given that the aim of Project Ðouglas is to demonstrate the utility of ÐAOs in everyday applications and to advance the state of the art, it is our view that compliance functionality is not only an added feature - it is a prerequisite. Public, corporate, institutional and government buy-in will require it."
It'll be exciting to see what's next.
Congratulations Dennis, Casey & Preston.
> an adaptable software package which is designed to be modular, easily copied, and easily modified - and therefore used in many different applications. We intend to use Eris as the relevant platform when we incorporate the Association at a later date, but we will not be limiting future development of the platform to that single application.
the proliferation of ÐAOs in user-friendly applications has the potential to allow the public to claim back control over their data and over their privacy on the internet.
I'm not sure it's entirely designed for that purpose, though that does seem both an obvious and relatively easy application of this concept. Instead, I think they purposefully made it a little more generalized so it could be applied to a lot of different spaces. For example, I can see how this framework, or at least the concepts that it implements, could be used in a decentralized social networking application...as some of these same concepts we implemented a long time ago in DIASPORA* and Tent.
Is this some deliberate attempt at anti-SEO?
The interesting thing about these guys is they're a team of both developers and lawyers... part of this project is the packaging of the technology on top of Ethereum, but part of it is figuring out the legal frameworks needed to grant legal authority to a distributed crypto consensus network.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIVjAo4vres&feature=youtu.be is a good 10 min background interview with Preston Byrne, one of the members.
If you wanted to create an organization represented by a DAO in this system, then you would still need to register a legal entity with your government to represent your organization (for tax and regulatory reasons). But that organization could have exactly one bylaw saying, essentially, "this organization shall operate according to the DAO uniquely identified as ABCXYZ123". Then you do all further work in the DAO.
If you wanted to create a contract of some kind, you wouldn't need to do even that. A "contract" in law is fairly general: it's an agreement, entered into voluntarily, between multiple partners for their mutual benefit. It's often done on paper, but not necessarily: they can be created orally, or via email. There's no reason I know of that a DAO couldn't create a contract, as long as you could show to a court that it fits all the normal criteria for a valid contract.
The main complication in all this is that it's unusual and, at least at first, judges wouldn't know how it works and would want proof that it creates a legal contract.
Has anyone more knowledgable than me (that is, anyone) looked at this in detail?
My favorite book on this is Binding Chaos [0] - most of the material in it clarifies problems with existing governance structures and their inevitable tendency towards power inequality. The remainder suggests that a better system would contain two major concepts: stigmergy - essentially, "space-making" instead of our existing "leadership" model, where environmental changes can automatically direct the next action of the group - and epistemic user groups: Communities that are focused on a particular form of expert knowledge and its study.
We already have some models for this in open source projects, Wikipedia, etc. but the book is light on specific implementation ideas. What is really needed is software innovations on these concepts, and blockchain hacking is one way to go about it.
[0] https://georgiebc.wordpress.com/2013/05/24/binding-chaos/
edit: forgot this isn't reddit
It's described as being under MIT but the only repos I find under the Project Douglas Github account are Jekyll-based websites (and forks of Ethereum projects). When I click on the link to the Eris license, I only get a 404.
Is it private now?
Edit: To be clear, I don't blame them if they've made it private. They may have feared a third-party trying to take credit for their project and going after the cash bounty. I'm just interested in looking at the source code, if it's available to the public.
Edit 2: In a reddit post about Eris, the (presumed) developer writes "Repo goes public shortly. Should have a unified method for test driving sometime this week hopefully. (Maybe as early as tomorrow)".
It will help us kickstart some projects we have in mind... I'm beyond stoked.. Thanks for your contribution
[0]https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/1009/the-people-s-repu...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system
weighted voting. proxy. random.
Indeed, you are correct we were a bit worried about that. We about 3-P theft. Also, we are not natural coders so we've been furiously trying to clean up the code so it is somewhat presentable to people who do code for a living. That process should more or less be finished and we will open the repos very shortly. To be honest, we were a bit amazed at such a response to our small proposal and did not bargain on the reception we have received today. In any event the repo will be available at GH:project-douglas/eris before midnight tonight GMT.
Edit: Its now open. https://github.com/project-douglas/eris was going to be in two hours but we saw no reason not to do it early.
They've evidently deleted or made private the https://github.com/project-douglas/eris repo whose license is referred to the in white paper.
Presumably, that's the repo they refer to when they describe this accomplishment in the white paper:
"...Eris, a platform which allows developers and users to deploy consensus driven applications which rely on decentralized architecture and a consensus driven blockchain database backend."
There was a neat talk from the silicon valley ethereum meetup a few months ago where a lawyer dives into the technical definition of a legal 'contract' and what parts of that Ethereum code does and does not satisfy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSLK3lbENRc
(One of the key insights there is although Ethereum uses the term 'contract' to describe its autonomous code, Ethereum contracts do not by themselves satisfy the criteria for a legal contract in common jurisdictions... 'autonomous agent' would be a better term for Ethereum to use)
All of these links I got from people on a discussion on r/ethereum the other week: http://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/27gdhc/are_you_all...