Donuts & Dao’s

Utterance: The story and some of the science here is fiction but blockchain tech is real and moving into your life rapidly.When parts of the story have been based on reality, a link for your deep-diving pleasure is included in the references. This story attempts to begin your deep dive which starts with the “WHY” you must care about crypto right now...and when you do, where you should be focused,

If you are a freedom-loving intellectual being.

Your name is Jack. The year is 2025.

You are buying a donut to ease into the first day of summer class.

“18,532 sats, please” an adorable creature requests, looking you in the eyes with a carefree flirt. You blush and swipe your finger on the bio reader, subtracting the funds from your digital wallet. The attractive cashier blushes back as they hand you the luscious blessing of sugarcane-based bliss.

Your watch flash displays a receipt as you grab your sweet morsel. You turn and look down at your watch to see if you have time to make it to class if you turn around and appease the pitter-patter in your chest with a little creature-tocreature conversation. But it’s 9:50 already. You leave the cafe, but look back and capture a mental picture at the warmth-inducing profile of the lovely human who brightened your day. Minutes later, almost to class, you realize you’ve been so distracted you have almost forgotten to move the transaction from your history so your fitness goals don’t record it and minimize any chance at not meeting the physical requirements for your career position track. In a quickened pace, you try to get the best seat in the classroom by the window while you hold your watch close to your mouth.

“mv /home/jack/transaction Jun 23 9:48

[to] /home/jack/junk~”

BY LILLIAN KENNEDY

(Translation: “Move the transaction for 18,532 sats on June 23 @ 9:48pm into file title ‘junk~’ )

That should do it, you think. Tonight after class you can obfuscate the transaction further. It’s just a small price to pay for a huge morsel of yum. As your arm moves away from your face to open the classroom door, and your eyes confirm your window seat is claimed. You find the second best seat, sit down, and pull out the donut. Your silent notifications on your watch are only about the DAO’s you are a member of...nothing about the transaction...which tells you the commands you gave were executed because there are no error messages. The blinking, everwelcoming cursor maintains your cortisol like a hydrogen nuclei lying dormant at the center of existence awaiting a force acting upon it.

You stare at the cursor on your linux watch while slowly savoring the yummy donut and trying not to let the low hum of human movement settling into their seats mesmerize you in the minor blood sugar crash.

Class begins. “Welcome to DAO policy. I’m Dr. Kelly. What makes one DAO better than the other? “ [1]

(scene freezes as narrator shares...)

What part of this story is fiction and what part is not?

While you, Jack, are fiction, as well as the linux watch,(so far), so is the muting of your transaction, in regards to how blockchain works, which is append-only.) As dismal as this sounds there is a lot of hope...and a lot of questions. DAO’s are protocol specific and, according to Vitalik Buterin, leaky [2]. They provide each protocol community with a framework to make decentralized governance work, however. Will DAO’s be able to protect decentralized networks, nodes and protocols? THAT IS UP TO GOOD INTELLECTUAL INVOLVEMENT.

The need for Jack to obfuscate, however, is where the current moment stands at the crux of our data governance question. With last month’s MICA[3] passing the EU [4], we see the beginning of centralized and decentralized solutions being released and adopted in tandem. (Check out: Project Helvetia and Kilt Protocol, for example)

What we do know is that decentralized developers have been trying[5] to write software that accepts the future of the nature of the blockchain being append-only while in addition attempting to regain what we lost with the privacy exploitation of our data in web 2 (the internet soon to be replaced by a privacy-protected one).

[Append-only is a property of computer data storage such that new data can be appended to the storage, but where existing data is immutable.][6]

(scene UNfreezes...)

Dr. Kelly continues, “...you can use the size of their treasury as a metric, but it’s also important that an autonomous organization is also decentralized, something one may crudely measure by determining the number of token holders.”[7]

You start to jot down some notes, and then, your watch flashes in your lap, “The vote passed with unanimous support.” Your DAO just voted to give its developers $15M in retroactive pay for their work.[8]

“Yes!” you silently celebrate.

(scene to be continued...)

Good luck, Jack.

Coming next in “Donuts and Crypto”...

Jack learns he and the cashier both have crypto investing, DAO’s and NFT interests in common; they find some differing views, try to come to consensus, and the author defines more deep diving.

About the writer and series:

Lillian Kennedy (she/they) is a pre-law social science major doing research in comparative technology governance.

RE: fiction/creative nonfiction fusion WITH DEEP DIVE LINKS

Sugar and Crypto is an indefinite ‘tech review’ series disguised as creative nonfiction covering the gamut of crypto behind the scenes. (regulation implications, decentralization philosophy, DAO’s/politics/governance, development progress, ecosystems, etc. Any future discussion of nft’s and tokens more legal/tech/finance focused.

Disclaimer:

Nothing in this article series should be misconstrued as financial or legal advice. The author is not liable for any perceived or misperceived claims.

References:

1. decrypt.co/124551/all-centralizedfirms-are-alike-every-dao-decentralizedown-way

2. Proof of Stake, The Making of Ethereum and the Philosophy of Blockchains, By Vitalik Buterin · 2022

3. decrypt.co/138713/what-is-mica-eucrypto-regulation-explained

4. decrypt.co/125943/mica-what-europenew-crypto-rules-mean-industry

5. gavwood.com/paper.pdf

6. Append-only, https://en.wikipedia. org/w/index.php?title=Appendonly&oldid=1135822439

7./8. from one of many DAO analysis links : thedefiant.io/aave-v3compensation