The DAO has given the world a glimpse into the promise of general purpose blockchains. A headless investment fund worth hundreds of millions of dollars sounds crazy to most people and wasn’t even possible a year ago. Despite the catastrophic flaw in The DAO, which eventually led to a hard fork, it was still an impressive achievement. Not the millions of dollars raised, but the organization itself: a few thousand database entries gave scattered strangers a shared purpose.



There are so many aspects of our economy and society that are bizarre when you break them down, and this is one of them. Our society operates on useful shared delusions that work as long as other people believe in them. The ether locked up in The DAO was worth hundreds of millions of dollars because lots of people believed it was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. When The DAO approved a proposal, the contractor and DAO token holders would have perceived a transfer of value, but there’s not a single person who is required to acknowledge that Ethereum transaction. There are just enough people who share the idea that Ethereum transactions are meaningful.



The DAO has proven that Ethereum gives us the toolkit to create brand new, useful shared ideas that can help us accomplish goals together. This ability has been diminished by the huge barriers that The DAO had to overcome, which few can probably repeat: well-respected members of a wealthy community promoted an investment opportunity where the deposit could easily be withdrawn (in theory). Any new attempt to create a DAO will face incredible scrutiny before anyone will be willing to put their money in a complex contract. Those of us who are unlikely to be able to grow another large DAO might understandably not notice the opportunities that have been opened.