Few understood bitcoin early on.
Few understand the importance of DACs and DAOs now.
Decentralized Autonomous Companies/Corporations/Communities/Organizations will become the standard for non-profits, HOAs, startups, and, eventually, corporations and governments.
It's a group of people with a shared goal that come together to coordinate resources using blockchain technology to accomplish that goal. The basic rules for who gets to be a member of the group and who gets to make decisions for the group are built into transparent smart contracts. This means there's no way to fraud the system or corrupt the votes.
In a DAC there's a group, there are members, and there are admins. The admins are elected among the members, and they are on a "multisig" which means they are part of a smart contract which gives them shared control over blockchain assets the group controls. This control can be represented in many ways like a "3 of 5" multisig which means at least 3 of the 5 admins have to sign a cryptographic message of agreement before anything can be done to that asset (such as transfer tokens to pay for something the group wants).
A while back I had an idea to bring together the work I'm doing now with the FIO Protocol along with the work I've been doing for a couple years now in the DAC/DAO space. I did a write up here:
https://fioprotocol.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FC/pages/62423205/FIO+Groups
Recently I realized much of this doesn't have to be onchain but can be off chain, so I started building a simple prototype in PHP which you can see here: https://github.com/lukestokes/fiogroups
This morning I got a basic working model going complete with backend tests and a simple frontend test (shown in the video).
This may not look like much (no sound in the recording, it's just a simple screen grab), but when it's connected into the blockchain to enable the easy creation of DACs using the FIO Domain and FIO Address blockchain NFT assets as the mechanism for group identity and membership... well, I think it could be something really important in the future.
Imagine if the groups you're a part of (your family, your church, your company, your HOA, your social clubs, your gaming guilds, your city, your country) could efficiently and effectively coordinate together to accomplish things that can't easily be done alone. What if there was high accountability and very little room for fraud and those who attempted it lost their skin in the game?
The previous work in DACs I've been a part of are overly complicated and include a lot of additional functionality such as job boards and worker proposals. This approach is minimalistic with just a group identifier (FIO Domain), member identifier (FIO Address at the group domain), and voting to adjust the multisignature permissions on the account which owns the domain, manages the group treasury, and controls who can be part of the group.
I might be wrong about the significance of DACs/DAOs, but I don't think so. It might be one of the most significant use-cases for blockchain technology and some of the most important things for humans to be working on right now. For more on that crazy line of thought, see @lukestokes/the-path-to-cryptocurrency-mass-adoption-know-thyself
What I find most interesting about building a DAC/DAO using FIO is that it sits on a layer on top of any existing blockchain or token. This means, in theory, it will work with and be accessible by any blockchain community. Also, membership in the group immediately gets you something of use: a FIO Address, which you can use in over a dozen FIO-enabled wallets and exchanges.
I'm showing this idea early, because I'm enjoying the process of tinkering with it on my own time and I always like to get feedback about the process along the way.
