If DAOs proliferate as legal entities, they will need their own justice department because laws in code are different from laws on paper.

For one, the world of code evolves too damn fast.

Otherwise, traditional legalities will always err towards overreach (e.g., with crypto bans and lifts).

Making gross generalizations where technical nuance is required destroys real wealth potential and encourages the scammer mindset.

Introduction

Smart contracts on the blockchain upend the current legal system by allowing individuals to make contracts with code and not papers.

And with global open-source entities like Github, the speed of pushing and pulling outpaces that of lawyers and MPs meeting in one big house. No matter how fast and loud their V8 cars.

When smart contracts allow a group of more than two individuals to effectively manage their blockchain financial affairs, they form an autonomous system for managing them. What is called a Decentralized Autonomous Organisation (DAO).

To some extent, centralized systems like Wikipedia and Wikileaks run architecture we could consider DAO-like.

You can go right now and edit any Wikipedia page, without waiting for anybody (not the Wikipedia BoG, the previous writers of that page, and not the OG Wikipedians), to approve.

There is some autonomous functionality to deter you from making and publishing credibility errors.

On the other hand, corporate websites, newspapers, and news sites are vertical hierarchies.

To write for them, they have to hire you. Because they want your credibility to speak for itself. Otherwise, they will fire too many people too fast and lose credibility.

Social media sites like Twitter, Reddit, and Stack Exchange, plus Citizen journalers like Hackernoon, have special combinations of vertical and horizontal hierarchy.

To manage thousands to millions of posts per day without dialing up the constitution every time, smart code run alongside AI is a must-have for the editorial team.

It allows companies today to run pretty lean editorial teams, and that is why Elon Musk fired everybody when he took over.

Can't wait to battle a centralized AI overlord.

The difference between a DAO and Wikipedia

A DAO manages people in a horizontal hierarchy, while Wikipedia/Twitter manages people’s content.

That’s why I called the later DAO-like. Because they are not DAOs.

Each one is a company website—a big, smart one.

A DAO is more like a limited liability company, except fully online, and there is no CEO. In fact, everybody can be a CEO.

In a real LLC, that would be a disaster. It wouldn’t get off the ground, to be honest.

As technological evolution would have it, the only way to have a decentralized hierarchy of people online where code is in charge and not the people with titles (manager, supervisor, CEO, admin, intern …) is if the code is running on a blockchain.

Thus, effectively, the community of the first Bitcoin developers and their Bitcoin nodes was like the first DAO in existence.

Except, not quite.

On Bitcoin nodes and the origin of the DAO

Before we get our definitions in a twist, who started this DAO sense?

It was the Ethereum Foundation back in 2016 that wanted to recreate the decentralized autonomy enjoyed by Bitcoin node holders. But without anybody running nodes, only simplistic pieces of code are held in quasi-tangible cryptographic protocols called DAO tokens.

Well, until their tokens were hacked.

In a way, the DAO idea is brilliant. A Bitcoin node is simply a big chunk of code housed in a computer, which gives an individual as much right as other people having personal nodes.

If I hold 2 nodes, I own 2x the rights (as per the probabilistic voting dynamics towards a 51%+ consensus).

If I hold 10 nodes, 10x the rights.

The more the nodes, the more decentralized the blockchain network.

But nodes are damn heavy. Why not replace nodes with simpler code pieces called DAO tokens?

The consensus algorithm is a smart contract. But so is a DAO token.

Voila, the DAO was born.

The Big DAO

Just like the Federal Reserve outsources banking autonomy to America’s Central Banks, the DoJ, the SEC, and the CFTC could stop tripping over each other and outsource Bitcoin legal cases to a Bitcoin Department of Justice.

BDoJ.

This will be the biggest DAO yet.

It will take headaches such as these from the hands of the fiat camp:

1. If coinjoins are illegal criminal activity or another form of multisig.
2. If all P2P transactions dodge taxes, or if capital gains above X dollars should be in place first before business status is demanded.
3. If shilling of NFTs is ok for artists need to eat, or if the creators are laundering money for some (drug? miner? rarity-collector?) lord.
4. Scammers, Scammers, Scammers.

Of course, in every country, the BDoJ will be a branch of that nation's Justice Department. Aligning its digital laws with the laws of the handwritten constitution.

Plus a few details tie them nicely to the Bitcoin community, making BDoJ the DAO.

1. BDoJ lawyers and judges must hold BTC. Skin in the game.
2. BDoJ lawyers and judges should understand Bitcoin smart contracts, Ethereum smart contracts, name them. They should be writing next gen University books on financial fraud. Money printing on a whim by anybody should be added as financial fraud.

BDoJ must be good enough at their jobs to recover 50% + of lost / stolen crypto funds. (or whatever percentage Bitcoiners pay for).

Joe Grand should be on their payroll.

To get a BDoJ we need to orange-pill more Governments

To feed a village, hunt the big fish.

You either govern, or you're governed.

The Bitcoin Legend Eric Voorhees has a blog at https://moneyandstate.com/ where he discusses Bitcoin and the separation of money and state.

I have an idea. Thankfully, the Bitcoin community is open to new ideas.

We have RBF, Runes, BitVM, and we can add one more.

Now, in a recent post - https://moneyandstate.com/blog/the-separation-of-mind-and-state - Eric writes;

…The avoidance of imagined harm causes actual harm. The tribes that feared fire froze in the darkness, and we will never know them.

Well, I believe in the long run that once the Millenials and GenZ take on the mantle of state leadership and governance, we should not block more government involvement with Bitcoin if that is what their governments of the time want.

The current crop of Boomers believe debt printing is good. They own houses and farmland, and their value has gone up!

Wow!

They do not know any better.

They do not know that that value is because many millennials and Gen Z are working all day, walking alone to work and back.

Renting forever while feeding on scrappy, non-organic food.

If phones became more expensive and not cheaper, nobody would own phones today.

Housing and Land should have remained affordable, given the technology of skyscrapers.

Alas, debt printing. So they got more expensive.

Life getting more expensive is no good.

So, as the above quote warns, the avoidance of imagined harm from governments learning about BTC causes actual harm.

An ignorant populace might be bad, but an ignorant government is a disaster.

The Bitcoin tribe that fears the fire of politics will freeze in the darkness. And whatever crypto takes over the world thereafter will check the logs and know them as weak and ball-less.

President Donald J. Trump spoke in Nashville yesterday at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference. Senator Cynthia Lummis was also there.

I believe this, the welcoming of pro-Bitcoin politics, is the start of something really big for the Bitcoin community.

It should go on.

Bitcoin may be a powerful monetary system, but political systems have shaped the world way more powerfully and dramatically than monetary systems. I mean, kingdoms, empires, imperialism, colonialism, and world wars were all politics. Money, Guns, and Goods just go for the ride.

Not because the monetary systems are/were weak. People just get more excited with politics than markets.

After you feed them, men and women are firstly political animals. Then, they can become trading animals.

The Road to More Freedom - DAO startup incubator

To eventualize a Bitcoin Department of Justice will require an upsurge in the creation of DAOs that hope to solve community-centric problems.

As luck will have it, a few companies are working to supercharge the next stage of human interaction.

Āut Labs is committed to building a suite of DAO-native tools to expand decentralized communities. That is blockchain DAOs.

However, even little-known traditional approaches like Community Exchange Systems could benefit.

(I created one called WACE back in 2017, where the thing to trade was "teachings".

I teach you, and I give you a tradable token called a teach.

And vice versa.

Think it could be handy now for sharing cryptocurrency recovery skills.

Might make it a DAO).

Some of the tools by the Āut Labs team include tracking the participation of the members of a DAO with a Participation Score (PS). This is coded to be mathematically tuned by a member's own activities, including their commitment (tracked by a time-logged Commitment Level), contribution points (tracked by the DAO activities one has completed in their Hub), etc.

The Participation Score is then used to calculate an individual member's Global Reputation (GR) within the blockchain ecosystem.

I cannot figure out how the Āut Labs team hopes to make this GR track activities across all blockchains and cryptocurrencies as diverse in technology and functionality as they are, but if pulled off, it will be a Satoshi Nakamoto moment.

Perhaps it will run like a big crypto exchange, except no cryptocurrencies will be exchanged for traditional currencies. Only a leaderboard matching various cryptocurrency DAOs with the reputations attained by who and who.

A crypto matchmaker!

Imagine something like that with tens of thousands of pseudonymous individuals ranked on activities as diverse as feature programming, story writing, UI/UX designing, DAO managing, token marketing, name it.

Basically, if a freelancer platform and a crypto exchange had a baby.

Hope to be a part of the ĀutDAO.