The (silk) road to perdition.

The timing has never been better to elaborate on the vehement DAO distaste we espoused above. My old ELP classmate Jonah Erlich — who, as we recently mentioned, was a core catalyst in the ConstitutionDAO excitement a few weeks back — landed an extensive interview with The Verge this morning to discuss his role in the DAO and thoughts on the real world implications and bottlenecks that stem from blockchain’s use cases. I was excited to find that he seemed as clear eyed as me regarding the discrepancy between the promise of crypto and the current realities of so-called trustless, decentralized technologies. 

The reported goal of the ConstitutionDAO (aside from the National Treasure of it all) was to maximize the decentralization of any individual process — even if it means centralizing other aspects to achieve it. This distinction became relevant as the DAO fielded requests from contributors that the leadership holding the keys to the treasury identify themselves to the public. 

While I believe strongly in the individual right to privacy, that right is guaranteed only by sharing and maintaining a few critical pieces of information publicly — namely, your identity. I contend that there will always be a need for points of centralization like this, in order for the trustless computer protocol utopia favored by the most optimistic degens among us to ultimately work. No one states this obvious, because it means addressing the giant elephant in the room: verifiable identity, online. 

We’ve long seen the havoc that click farms, anon trolls, and bot swarms have wrought on economies, governments, and individuals, but the thought of introducing any sort of identity program, beyond our existing Social Security, blurs the line between libertarian-utopia and crypto-fascist state. Why? Because we don’t trust large public entities (read: corporations, governments) to manage such sensitive information without abusing it. 

At the same time, because fairness is important for the trustless infrastructure to operate, we also need safeguards against individuals being able to amass more than one identity and corrupting the processes we’re fighting to decentralize in the first place. So, the question becomes: how do we create a decentralized governance structure that also simultaneously enables individuals to conduct non-public lives?

This is the fundamental problem we HORs have been grappling with internally, being somewhat of an organization ourselves. DAOs in their current iteration — Discord servers designed to raise capital insanely fast and deploy it equally inanely — mark little improvement over the pay-to-play state of most large institutions. And the first few attempts at Proof of Identity have fallen remarkably flat. But centralization is clearly also broken, and the decentralization of individual processes seems like a cause worth fighting for. Luckily, there’s a whole Internet full of Nic Cage cosplayers out there, ready to do just that.