What can we do with a DAO that cannot be done with other organizational forms?

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are something new enabled by crypto and blockchain technologies. We are only at the beginning of understanding what they can do and what not.

So I asked my social network: “What can we do with a DAO that cannot be done with other organizational forms?”

Here is a selected set of responses, mostly from this Twitter thread and this Facebook thread. They are both public, so I’m attributing:

• Kurt Laitner: “They enable dynamic equity and dynamic governance”

• Vittorio Bertocci: “Be robbed without any form of recourse, appeal or protection? 😛 I kid, I kid 🙂”

• Dan Lyke: “…they create a gameable system that has less recourse to the law than a traditional system … [but] the immutable public ledger of all transactions may provide a better audit trail”

• David Mason: “Lock yourself into a bad place without human sensibility to bail you out.”

• Adam Lake: “We already have cooperatives, what is the value add?”

• Phill Hallam-Baker: “Rob people who don’t understand that the person who creates them controls them absolutely.”

• Jean Russell: “Act like you have a bank account as a group regardless of the jurisdictions of the members.”

• David Berlind: “For now (things are changing), a DAO can fill a gap in international business law.”

Follow the links above, there are more details in the discussions.

I conclude: there is no consensus whatsoever :-) That may be because there such a large range of setups under that term today.