DAO: Protocols or Organizations?
Tom Ding
162

I think that there is a meaningful difference between a “protocol” and an “organization”, one that I pointed out in my article back in 2014: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/05/06/daos-dacs-das-and-more-an-incomplete-terminology-guide/

Basically, I view an organization as something that has its own internal capital, and you can also view this more broadly as having internal global state. Decentralized Uber is not an organization, because the best way to architect it is as representing a collection of separate interactions between drivers, passengers, reputation systems, search engines, etc, which should be as modular as possible. There is no central pool of capital or central state that needs to be held by dUber itself, at least in its most basic form (a more complex implementation might try to fund public goods relevant to the protocol and find some way to monetize them; this would make it an organization). Other DA*s, like Maker, are heavily reliant on internal capital.