well what a time to be alive, while you might think that you are born in the wrong era and you're too ahead of your time or "we need to go back to the good 'ol days", hate to break it to you but dread the day if we ever go back to the "good" old days.

Mortality rate has gone down, slavery has been abolished in most parts of the world, disposable income has gone up, healthcare has been improved tremendously and that is all just the tip of the iceberg, all of this was possible because of technology

but the world is far from being perfect, we need to work on things related to employment, renewable energy, carbon emissions, public transport, research, affordable healthcare and privacy.

but again how do we do it exactly?, we aren't billionaires with enough capital to fund this stuff, and the few people with that capital will only make decisions that will benefit them instead of society as a whole.

DAO's

despite what some people might suggest, most large organisations aren't exactly evil, in fact they make so much revenue because they are able to add something of value, but the consumer doesn't get a say in the decision making, so it isn't necessary that the organisations would always make a decision that is best for the consumer, and what's best for the company and what's best for the consumers might be two different things. And if the organisation is sort of a monopoly, the consumer would have no choice but to continue to use the organisations service.

Imagine a world where it is possible for the consumer to have a say in the decision making of the organisation, well it is possible with DAO's

want to know something crazy?? DAO's were "invented" way back before Ethereum was even a thing, India's amul and K.M.F are great examples of it, they were created because farmers were being exploited, DAO's are the practical aspect of ideologies like socialism, communism and libertarianism.

The problem with the governance of DAO's now

the problem is that most dao's use a governance token, so the dude with most capital has more voting power, it is basically giving away voting power to a rich guy, so the rich will probably make the choice that benefits them instead of the community(see the problem??), but it is done under the assumption that the person who has the most tokens is most involved in the growth of the community and "trusts" that they will make the choice that is best for the community, unfortunately we know that the world doesn't work that way, after all one of the hot buzzwords in web3/blockchain is "trust-less".

should everyone have equal voting power?

Despite the fact that it sounds good and fair, it is not the best method either

watch:

1)Why socrates hated democracy

2) why plato loathed democracy

tldr: people aren't equipped enough to always make the best choices.

but again they should still have a say in the functioning of the organisation, shouldn't they?

so what if we are able to divide the voting power into "slabs"?

A New Way for the new world

what if we divide the voting power into 3 levels

in level 1 we have all the participants, and lets say that their voting power is 1 unit

in level 2 we'll have the experts, top contributors, top members of the community, some will be chosen by level 1 folks and some by the creators/founders of the organisation.

they get to have more voting power than the level one folks, say 4 units

level 3: Creator/founders, as they came up with the idea and have been involved since day one, their votes are 16 units

in this way the voting power won't be given away to the rich, and the level 2 and level 3 folks need to be held accountable by the community.

Important stuff for a DAO

1)coordination: coordination is what made us survive the ice age, win against the nazis, abolish diseases like leprosy, cowpox and polio, so obviously it is very powerful and it is very important for a DAO.

2)Accountability: failures in healthcare, governance , etc arise due to lack of accountability, the level 2 folks need to be held accountable and should be replaced if they fail to deliver or make a mistake.

3)not breaking the bank: DAO's need to figure out the voting process such that it doesn't break the bank to vote, a good approach that I would recommend is to use rollups

4)sustainable: All DAO's should figure out a way to be self-sustainable

Note: There is a very small line thats separates people like Juan Benet and Vitalik Buterin from the guy who created the silk road on the darkweb, build something to make the world a better, more fair place.

Public Goods

so where does the concept of public goods fall in?

remember the issues to be worked on we talked about in the beginning?, public goods are good for the public(well, no shit!), we as a community need to build things that solve real world issues instead of creating another meme-coin or NFT collection, we need to build things that are net-positive for web3 and the world as a whole.

I really recommend reading: GREENPILLED and IMPACTDAO

This is probably the best time to be alive, with so many opportunities to solve real world problems.

On a side note: to make sure that individual creators aren't being ripped off the data an AI model is being trained on should be on the blockchain, and there should be a marketplace for data and compute power, so that's a cool idea to work on and develop.

Bridging the gap:

you might be thinking that this public goods/dao stuff sounds pretty great, why hasn't it taken off yet?

well it's because of these reasons:

1)web3 isn't super simple: well right now, it is super complex to do web3 stuff, simply put it should be simple enough to the extent that even your grandma should be able to participate in it

2)The general perspective people have about web3: The general public believe that crypto/web3 is a fly-by-night ponzi scheme, or a get rich quick scheme and it is full of scams, unfortunately that is true to an extent, we need to find better solutions to battle scams, and ponzi schemes.

3)consensus: ahh and the hardest part, consensus. We need blockchain tech to be super-duper scalable and we are getting there, checkout : interplanetary consensus, validium

Conclusion: lastly DAO's and public goods have the potential to shape a better and beautiful future and smart contracts will make it possible to "ensure fairness", and the ecosystem needs to develop better tooling and find ways to make crypto mass adoption possible, keep buidling.

P.S: consider sharing this and following me on twitter if you liked the article, Peace ✌️.