A new framework for reality
When you are really deep in the DAO space and every day bring new discoveries and interesting conversations
When you do something interesting and innovating, very often you encounter issues that are not part of the mainstream consciousness.
So you go to Discord and Telegram chat to ask deeper, to ask genuine questions at the source…
Kleros (and Aragon Court)
Kleros protocol is legit.
For those who are not familiar here is the explanation.
For those who don’t want to click, the simple explanation is:
- majority decision wins
- anyone can appeal and there are more jurors involved
- consensus eventually emerges
So far, 400 cases later, there was not a single obviously wrong decision.
There were some controversial cases that left some room for interpretation.
There were many rounds of appeal, many discussions, many new pieces of evidence, and eventually, consensus settled.
Omen Verified Market rules clearly indicate that no specific data source is required at the time of market creation, and the market in question was in fact accepted as “Valid” by the Omen Verified Markets TCR. Because Stat is a reputable data source, and because no data source was specified by the market, reporting by StatNews fulfills the criteria for a “Yes” resolution. Furthermore, the Omen market asks us not how many deaths there were, but rather how many were “reported”. Thus, any fair and impartial interpretation of this question resolves to an answer of Yes.
GridPlus: https://heliast.io/82-grid-plus-badge-challenge
The jurors thus set a precedent in the case law of the Kleros Token Listing Court by considering that an audit carried out by a company related to the project could not be qualified as an audit carried out by a third person.
Personally I was going to fund the GridPlus appeal as the audit from the Consensus team was sufficient. The intention of the rules was “legit token, contract audited”, as opposed to “independent 3rd party”…
Some people were disappointed, I was disappointed too, maybe if there was yet another round of voting (and some convincing meme storytelling) the consensus would shift again.
There was not a single obviously wrong decision
There were some clever experiments: https://blog.kleros.io/cryptoeconomic-deep-dive-doges-on-trial/
There were some actual attempts: hack the system, we will pay you a handsome sum of money if you do it… TODO: increase the bounty, test the system to the limits 😎
Asked at the source: what are the barriers for adoption?
Source: https://t.me/kleros/102817
MARS: Kleros is popular in the legal circles…
What is the biggest obstacle for adoption in real life?
I’ve been working on a new model of government, new countries, new special economic zones… People are familiar with Kleros but say that it won’t work. Do you know why?
What difficulties have you encountered, what objections have you heard already?
FEDERICO: Kleros, while still an experimental technology, is currently working. Nearly 400 cases have been solved.
Obstacles:
- Still the use of crypto is not that widespread.
- Innovative mechanism design needs to be understood.New special economic zones can be excellent places for adoption.
When I first started working in matters of decentralized justice, one of the jurisdictions where I imagined this to work were the ZEDEs in Honduras.
STUART: I’d pretty much agree with this.
There’s also the hurdle of developing a very set in stone mechanism (legacy justice in general) into something that’s understood as a viable alternative. As Fede said, mechanism design needs to be understood and moreso, seen as a trusted option not just some ‘moon math magic’.
FEDERICO: A good thing that we have now is evidence that the mechanism design basically works. It solved lots of disputes in a satisfactory way.
There are many opportunities for improvement that we have largely debated here such as hidden votes, etc.
I also think that, generally speaking, all mechanism designs in law are going to change in the coming time. And Kleros is only a small part of it.
MARS: In my opinion a potential objection could “jurors are not professional lawyers” but in real life they are not professionals either.
FEDERICO: Lots of people working on dispute resolution in a large number of cases are not “professional lawyers” either.
Some have training in mediation, negotiation and other things.
So that objection would apply to a large part of the existing mainstrean dispute resolution industry too.
SOPHIE: It is not so much the ‘professional lawyer’ label that worries users I think. Especially for disputes that have little to do with the law
I think the worry stems more from the lack of certainty of the alignment between a majority decision and a fair decision
I know that on average the kleros history shows that fairness and consensus converge
However your numbers are still small and your disputes still binary. So the jury is still out on this one :)
FEDERICO: In our experience of discussing Kleros with lots of corporations, regulators, bar associations, etc., the friction for mainstream applications typically doesn’t come from “Kleros jurors are not lawyers”.
I was going to write exactly this.
Objections come more often from the “majority and fairness” issue.
About the fairness, I tried to define it here: https://forum.kleros.io/t/philosophical-discussion-about-code-is-the-law-vs-best-interest-of-the-justice-and-humanity/244/3
MARS: So now we are in a definition of fairness discussion. I suggest: “best interest of the humanity, society, justice”
SOPHIE: Thank you for this great discussion. Worth remembering that any discussion about what is fairness must factor in cultural differences. Different cultures = different values about what is « good » for society = different views of what is fair.
If we start from the premise that jurors aim for consensus, then fairness may get in the way of consensus because different jurors will have different views of what is fair in a given situation.
MARS: Fair, reasonable, predictable, acceptable verdicts are in the best interest of the justice.
Read more, listen more
Enforceability
Immutable laws of security:
“If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it’s not your computer anymore.”
Tesla is a computer with a giant battery attached to it.
If a bad guy decides to hack it, who will enforce the smart contract in real-life?
Will see, will see…
Wyoming
MARS: I know Wyoming has some forward-thinking blockchain laws.
I tried reading more but I’m still struggling to ELI5 (explain like I’m five)
I am a guy knowledgeable in blockchains and interwebz… Why Wyoming?
What makes them special?
Below is the answer coming from:
This is Han writing below. Source: https://t.me/TheRoadToOtoco/1442
Let me try to have stab at this
1) First, in contrast with most jurisdictions around the world, WY and most other US States Comoany Registries don’t need ot know who you are to incorporate a company there.
Think about this for a second especially if you come from a civil law background like me where in most countries in Europe there’s a notary involved (and paid up capital!) to setup an entity;
But even in common law places like England and what we call the “children of Queen Victoria” jurisdictions (most former Colonies and the still existing “Crown Colonies” such as the British Virgin Islands, Cayman etc) you still need to reveal who you are to form a company (at the very least to the agent who helps you incorporate, and if you do not want your identity to appear at the point of formation you use Nominees but now there’s new disclosure requrements for “Persons of Significant Interest” which are kept at Registries and which oblige Ultimate Beneficial Owners to reveal themselves);
Not so in Wyoming (and Delaware, and Nevada, etc.)
I can form a WY LLC declaring to be “Mickey Mouse” or “Vitalik Buterin”
But even if i disclose my real ID to the agent who forms my company (eg Otonomos!), that ID does not HAVE to be shared with Registry (it can if you so wish);
This is for a stand-alone LLC which gets formed when we file with WY State;
A *Series* LLC such as the one users spin up on blockchain using Otonomos’ otoco.io engine doesn’t even require filing: it is a pre contractual agreement between the Master (us as OtoCo WY LLC) and the Series. So when you sign with the wallet you want to use to control your OtoCo LLC you basically enter into an agreememt with the LLC’s Master and we made this Agreement public for everybody to see and built in strong wording to make sure Assets and Liabilities of the Series are 100% firewalled both horizontally (between Series) and vertically (between Series and Master).
We as OtoCo WY LLC do not even know the real-world identites of who spins up these Series: we only see (and so does everybody else) the public address of the First Member and this address is shown on your Series Operating Agreement (if you created one you can just download it from OtoCo’s dash).
Hence, ONLY when you decide to reveal who you are (who controls the wallet that controls the LLC as its First Member) will you come out of anonymity This is typically required when you want to do stuff in the real world e.g open a bank account.
So in summary a first attraction of WY (and it shares this with most other US States) is its anonymity at setup.
2) WY adapted laws that recognize “digital ledgers” (this is not ONLY blockchains it can also be spreadsheets on AWS but it most posivitively includes blockchains) a sthe LEDGER OF TRUTH in what happens in a company in WY.
Again, let’s pause here for a second to think carefully about what this means: instead of some ledger maintained by a State or Government-owned Central Registry (UK Companies House, Singapore’s ACRA, etc), blockchains are the registry.
So back to reason 2 why WY: coz in addition to not needing the Registry when getting a limited liability shield via otoco.io, you don’t need the file or sync with registry when you change Members, appoint Managers, change your operating agreement, etc.
Blockchains by their nature are superior ledgers for this sort of use case AND in WY they are recognized as such. Whilst other jurisdictions may recogize blockchains as ledgers, they still want you to synch your ledger with their Gov’t Registries, so all blockchains can ever do is DUPLICATE what’s held on a central registry, instead of REPLACE such Registries.
3) Thirdly, and we blogged about this, when you’re not from the US or based in the US, owning an LLC there is the ultimate offshore.
This is an article @torsten1 did on LLCs in Delaware but the same goes for WY: https://otonomos.com/2019/11/delaware-deep-dive-the-worlds-biggest-offshore-jurisdiction/
In contrast with any other banking centre in the world the US does not automatically report back to non-US bank (and crypto) account holders’ home authorities that they have a bank account there.
Which explains this https://financialservicesinc.ubs.com/branch/renokj/
Hope this helps @marsxr these 3 factors combined and the low setup costs make WY attractive and they are also chartering a new type of mutual bank
Limited liability DAO
Also from the same Telegram group: https://t.me/TheRoadToOtoco/1458
JOANNA: Why not create a company in a digital jurisdiction?…
In the space, without land, without territory, just digital.HAN: Coz unfor so far no digital jurisdiction can give a company Limited Liabilkity and this goes back to the concept of sovereignty.
Until we see a first digital realm recognized as having sovereignty (something we hope will happen and we have a sideproject working on this see etherland.crypto!) companies will have an umbilical cord with some earthy jurisdiction ia.w there’s no “Immaculate Conception” for legal entities of they want to have separate persona
See our blog re sovereignty here https://medium.com/@Otonomos/sovereignty-on-blockchain-towards-escape-velocity-from-the-nation-state-a511af9769fe
Even the $150m hack did not trigger legal action.
I think we are yet to see the first legal cases as DAO adoption becomes more widespread.
Limited liability by default?
In order to comply with United States law, membership interests of the LAO will be limited and only available to parties that meet the definition of an accredited investor
Some more interesting conversations in the past week…
Nation state DAO
Passports
3DRBP
Would it be amazing if a DAO could own a Twitter / Medium account directly?
Maersk
One more with the largest shipping and logistics company, trying to understand what is the standard for accounting for CO2 emissions.
Nuhanse
Another one with https://www.nuhanse.network/ that prompted me to dig deeper into why Kleros might not be suitable?
We were talking about legal standards too
A lot of resources refer to legal information coming from the United States. The question I’ve raised — is that desirable?
Not so hypothetical example
- Me = Polish guy living in the UK.
- Been to Latitude59 conference in Estonia, meet some guy from Germany.
- He has a software house, employing developers from Ukraine.
- The end product is on the App Store, code on Github.
- We communicate via Gmail and Skype.
- We pay via PayPal (or crypto)
Which law is applicable?
It would be a shame if a potentially good deal falls over a dispute about the choice of the arbitrator in case of a dispute.
Then we put into the contract the phrase “need to comply with accessibility standards” but what would be the default?
- https://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/accessibility
- https://www.section508.gov/
- https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirements-for-public-sector-websites-and-apps
- https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/web-accessibility
- https://www.a11yproject.com/
Standardizing defaults
I genuinely believe that specifying the defaults is beneficial. Otherwise, it creates yet another not so hypothetical situation:
- UK company.
- Office in the UK.
- Hiring a UK resident (me)
- Employment contract: “law of the UK applies” — that should be by default?
- End of employment: “law of the UK applies” — genuine WTF 🤷♀️
BIG VISION: legal standard designed from the ground up for the digital economy.
In many instances, the law remains arbitrary
Robots, apes, nature, or silly items such as chewing gum:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing_gum_ban_in_Singapore
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rights_of_Nature_in_Ecuador_-_Sumak_Kawsay
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_personhood
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_(robot)
Some historical examples
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_equality
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage
The same thing, depending on jurisdiction is completely legal or the death penalty. I used to work for a multinational company, in London diversity is celebrated, in some other places it is big “no no”… We used to have drinks on Thursday, in many places alcohol is illegal.
2020 post-COVID New World Order upgrade
A new framework for reality
If you think that the internet + blockchain+ AI + VR + singularity (technology advancement in general) and COVID are changing the world we live and we need to adjust the operating system for humanity then share this article, clap, thumbs up 👍
HELL YEAH, the SEZ started on the BaseX
