What would you give to be looking over the shoulders of Oppenheimer & his buddies in the early 1940's?
You now have that same opportunity, because software for Distributed Autonomous Organisations is about to go nuclear.
https://eris.projectdouglas.org/This is a response to a $100,000 bounty set out here:
http://www.reddit.co...e_platform_that_can/Here are a few quotes from the Eris page:
A. OBJECTIVES: WHAT A ÐAO IS
A ÐAO is an algorithmically-governed programme that, in using trustless decentralised computing, can serve as a way to formalise multilateral relationships or transactions outside of traditional legal architecture (see the essay Formalising and Securing Relationships on Public Networks by Nick Szabo to learn more on the subject).
B. PRIMARY USE-CASE
At Project Ðouglas, it is our belief that the proliferation of ÐAOs in user-friendly applications has the potential to allow the public to claim back control over their data and over their privacy on the internet. Current free-to-use internet services, from search to e-mail to social networking, are dependent on advertising revenue to fund their operations. As a result, companies offering these services must - to paraphrase Satoshi Nakamoto - ‘hassle their users for considerably more information than they would otherwise need.’ This necessity has skewed the internet toward a more centralized infrastructure and usability system than it was intended.
Where Bitcoin was designed to solve this problem in relation to point-of-sale and banking transactions, Project Ðouglas is working on solving this issue for internet-based communications, social networking and community governance -- bearing in mind that for free internet services such as e-mail, social networking, search and "open data," intrusion into users' private lives and the accumulation and centralisation of vast quantities of personal information in centralised silos is not some minor and ancillary nuisance -- this is a design imperative for everything that Project Ðouglas is engaged in. As such, Eris is not another web service; Eris is significantly different because it has been designed and implemented specifically to not use servers.
E. DECENTRALISE ALL THE THINGS
It is our firm intention to eventually decentralise entirely the Association’s representative function, and indeed the Association itself, once the AÐAO or the Community’s ability to manage it is sufficiently advanced. To this end we will incorporate code into the AÐAO to procure the release of the AÐAO from the Association’s ownership and control in the event that the users elect a Basic Terms Modification to that effect. We will also ensure that the Association legally binds itself to release any residual control it might have over the AÐAO upon the exercise of Waterbucket (specifically, by way of a declaration of trust constituted in a deed, the material content of which will be made public (the Trust)).
Take over Earth
The project will run off of the Ethereum platform for Turing completeness.
Whether or not this particular project does go nuclear is beside the point - the arms race for DAOs has begun. Traditional institutions would be wise to closely monitor the developments here, because this is going to make many of them obsolete very quickly.
tl;dr - Software just got very, very real.
