DAC Economy Manifesto
When blockchain revolution swept the world more than a decade ago, people hailed it as the savior of the world then in financial turmoil. A decade later, the world is no closer to be saved from the same financial apparatus that set to torture and terrorize us periodically. Blockchain is thought to be able to overhaul the Internet and bring it back to its decentralized roots, yet today’s Internet becomes even more centralized and increasingly dominated by just a few mega corporations. Should we despair? Not just yet.
Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as an expanding cohort of crypto innovations fundamentally changed our lives. They brought to us not just new applications but also fresh, revolutionary new ideas that were once obscure and only reserved for ivory academics, such as decentralized consensus, permissionless security, and censorship resistant functionality. People engage in transactions using decentralized applications bearing the above features on a day-to-day basis, unimaginable just a few years back. We’ve made great strides of progress in promoting and elevating blockchain to the mainstream economy. But it is still not enough.
The near-death memory of the last financial crisis, once prompted the rise of Bitcoin, had already felt to fade away. Yet the ramification of that crisis only started to show in recent years its nefarious fangs, gnawing at the foundation of our societal and economic regime established since the stabilization of our modern, globalized industrial world. We’ve seen economic divide festered into political strife and antagonism. We see the world cleaved deeply into two halves, the haves and have-nots, and the promise of modernization, prosperity and equal opportunities withered away. Bitcoin, Ethereum and cryptos at large struggled to bring down the middleman of financial access, intending to give opportunities back to the underprivileged, the unbanked. But it is still not enough.
Thus it is time for a second blockchain revolution. It is time for blockchain not trying to be the next version of money, but surpassing money to be the manifestation of real value. It is time for blockchain not trying to be the next web (web 3) or Internet of dopamine exploitation, but becoming the true internet of connected individual minds. To achieve such hefty goals, we need to break away from thinkings that confined us not just since the recent past but maybe the beginning of our civilization — of value, economy and the human mind — as well as the role of blockchain in the center of all those conceptualizations.
At the center of this new thinking is the entity called DAC (Decentralized Autonomous Company) and centering around DAC, DAC Economy. Why the entity of DAC? Why DAC Economy? What is the difference between DAC Economy and traditional economy?
Initially DAC is just a specialization of DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), a popular entity enabled by blockchain technology, especially Ethereum. However, the practice of DAO in reality has been quite limited compared to its supposed meaning and potential. DAC pushed the envelop of the idea of DAO to be more decentralized, egalitarian and universal — with the formation of DAC Economy. DAC Economy is itself in turn part of an even broader economic paradigm called SSDE (Self Sustainable Decentralized Economy), which we leave for future divulgence.
To understand the necessity of head-splitting rebellious alterations that DAC Economy must entail in dealing with familiar concepts such as money, value, volition of mind, we must examine some fundamentals. Our human world, it seems at first, gravitates toward a power law eventuality (gravity itself is a power law relationship). Such is the rationale some used to justify inequality and centralization of power. However, this notion of inequality and centralization being inevitable due to power law is a flawed argument. Centralization of power is a unique human phenomenon. In nature, no individuals of a species could accumulate centralized power like humans do. In fact, individual boundaries are quite well preserved across diverse species.
The reason human species could break through biologically based individual boundary to accumulate centralized, seemingly unbounded power, is due to the greatest innovation of all history, money, a tool that simultaneously harnesses communal value and breaks communal harmony. Money appears to have singlehandedly propelled the human race to great achievement of civilization, as well as great exploitation and enslavement within the human race. Even the blockchain as we know cannot escape the confines of money and its variants — crypto-tokens are forms of money. If this is the case, then we have a conundrum — if money, or crypto-tokens, are tools facilitating the centralization of power, how can blockchain be truly decentralized? How can blockchain be the tool to save us from the very evil that set us on the path toward inescapable trap of centralization, ruin and suffering?
The answer is DAC Economy ignited second blockchain revolution. At its core, DAC Economy has DAC to preserve the boundary of human mind’s individual volition — the last defense against centralized power — because DAC is individual-centric, unlike its DAO cousin. The naively conceived traditional DAO is not individual-centric, because it usually takes away individual volition by voting and consolidating toward a partial group of members’ interests. The boundary of traditional DAO is NOT set at the individual, whereas the boundary of DAC is. Most DAO formations in reality resemble board of directors of a corporation and function as such. No one regards those (board of directors) as either truly decentralized or democratic.
By preserving individual volition within and around individual-centric DAC, DAC Economy promotes and proliferates a totally different dynamics of economy from its centralized counterpart — our traditional economy. Contrary to our traditional economy’s massive energy consumption and wastefulness, DAC Economy enables a self sustainable form of economy, where decentralized small cycles of vibrant economic activities naturally occur within and around DAC, much like what happens in nature and life.
To facilitate DAC cycles, DAC Economy formulates and employs mechanisms with new conceptualization of value. To break away from traditional economy’s wasteful dynamics, DAC Economy must break away from the grips of money. This is not to abandon money, but expand beyond it. DAC Economy’s new conceptualization of value has two types — the zero-sum type, which encompasses all money forms (including crypto-tokens), and the generative type, which has different mechanisms and dynamics from money. This new value conceptualization is called real value. Real value can be viewed as a form of mind’s communal energy.
We can’t just abandon money yet — but within and around DAC cycles the corruptive tendency of money can at least have a chance to be tamed and contained, to a certain point. The mechanisms that contain the ill side effetcs of zero-sum value, money, and facilitate the live and vibrant generative value, are managed and executed by DAC smart contracts.
Why DAC Economy now? Because it has already started. Aside from saving our civilization from the ruinous death spiral of centralization, buds of hope have germinated and grew. We’ve already seen forms of real value entites sprung up from the fields of blockchain innovation. Oracles? That’s a form of generative type real value. Bridges can be a composite real value (with both zero-sum and generative type value components). NFT is zero-sum type value, but who said we can’t create super NFTs that also contain generative components? Reputation is obviously a generative type value, but we can also create (program) a composite real value version of it.
DAC Economy sees the reality from different dimensions. With this superpower it can see beyond where our reality confines and restricts us to see more. A whole new multidimensional world is open to blockchain innovaiton now. We have to leave the comfort of complacency and make the jump.
Long live blockchain revolution! DAC Economy is the way.
