Edition 8: Roko’s Basilisk and a DAO Onslaught

• 🔥 The New Stuff: Roko and no more Desoco.

• 🏛 The 101 Stuff: Quadratic. Just say it. It feels good.

• 🌎 The IRL Stuff: DAO Explosion.

Anyone remember Roko’s Basilisk? The full version probably belongs in Deep Stuff, given it’s a thought-experiment where a malicious AI punishes our downloaded consciousness in the future if we don’t summon it into existence now. The kicker is that if an AI learns from all the content on the internet, then Roko, the contributor who played this out, gave the evil algorithm the idea when he proposed it on LessWrong (cheers, Roko), adding anyone who read it (yes, you too now) who hasn’t been busy summoning T-101, to Skynet’s shitlist. Welcome to the infinite time-loop. 

While its laughably ‘Web2 chatroom’ to believe that your sub-reddit has altered space-time, this stuff was influential, for a time. And before we all fill our future pants, nothing that terrifying seems to be happening. However, in a story reminiscent of Spielberg’s movie, an AI has given a Google engineer enough feels to go public with his belief that the programme he’s working on is sentient. Instantly sparking mass soul-searching across the globe (and earning himself a suspension from the ‘do no evil’ company) in the process, the engineer is surely being courted for a Netflix right now. He may be considering a spring for his robot friend in Free Willy fashion. 

And as unnerving as this may be, perhaps we all missed the point. Why are we so obsessed with dystopia when problems we face now *only* require coordination and willpower? And what narratives underpin all this? It’s a strange paradox. But we think Phoebe Tickell - one of our Regen All Stars – gave us all something to think about here with a quote from Monica Byrne:

We will not mention the DeSoc debate again. We will not mention the DeSoc debate again. We will not mention the DeSoc debate again. But Glen Weyl and Vitalik both weighed into this one? Ok then.   

DAO mechanics: Quadratic Funding

Most of our readers hodl some coins or NFTs but are yet to participate in a DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation). Some may even be asking wtf a DAO is anyway. 

Here’s what you need to know: the regen space is powered by governance of complex groupings which in practice means ‘solving problems of coordination’. DAOs are the most visible of these solutions in Web3 right now

So much of what we digest for our readers comes from platforms like Twitter, Discord and Mirror. We find interesting takes and ideas, themselves a composite of other inspiration, and we condense that all down into summaries (which we hope are funny or insightful). Depending on your point of view, the ideas are somewhere between ‘impossibly complex’ or ‘over simplified’. We’re trying, with our 101s, to try and make the concepts comprehensible for most people who stumble across them.

But often we unearth a brilliant 101 explanation of a complex idea from a Tweet that we simply cannot better. And we found another one this week. 

Chun Rapeepat (@chunza2542 on Twitter), a developer and contributor to Gitcoin (and a few other DAOs) has created a simple and insightful resource for understanding what Gitcoin’s new DPoPP (Decentralised Proof of Personhood Passport) process means for grant funders (we’ll look at passports next week). But in so doing, he’s also managed to create one of the best 101 explanations of quadratic funding (QF) we’ve seen. 

Quadratics are a little strange at first, especially for those of us used to score-based, or one-person-one-vote competition for funding; we featured the concept briefly on Glen Weyl’s contribution to crypto (he originated quadratic funding.

In tweets #5, #6, and #7 Chun lays out a concise explanation of why QF is an effective (yet vulnerable) mechanic in decentralised governance systems for allocating funding. We can’t sketch it better than Chun, so here you go: 

So, it’s a system that rewards a broad-base of support behind a project. It uses a match-funding system to unlock the largest share of the match-funding pool for the most widely supported projects, as opposed to those attracting the highest volume of money (from a smaller number of funders). 

But this quest for plurality leaves QF vulnerable too. Users can use something called a Sybil attack, where fake contributors are created and used to back a project, creating the appearance of plurality (and therefore unfairly accessing a larger portion of match-funding available). This is the problem Gitcoin intends to use DPoPP to solve. 

Let’s get into that next week, because to go deep into Sybil and passports here we’re going to have to mention SBTs and we already promised above that ‘We will not mention the DeSoc debate again’. Until next week anyway. 

A couple of weeks back we talked about ‘Build the Dip’. Meanwhile all you busy DAO bees needed no encouragement. DAO creation and activity is exploding. Seemingly x8 and more in just one year.

Here’s what we pulled from this. 

• DAO activity (in the form of proposing and voting) is still concentrated in just a few projects. Constitution DAO and the other top 10% of projects account for 65% of all proposals. 

• Although the number of DAOs are growing fast, they are also diversifying. For example there’s over 320 different DAO governance/voting templates on snapshot (between 7,000 DAOs). 

• The diversity in DAO structure is positive and negative: + we get lots of experimentation and iteration; - how well those learnings are utilised depends on how composable and decomposable DAOs are. 

• Complexity in the DAOverse is already reminiscent of some of the densest social science. Its fast-moving and we all need to keep up.

We are keen to improve this newsletter and a core part of that is listening to the readers.... you! So if you have some feedback of what we could improve or even what you love DM us on twitter

Thanks for reading!