By the end of this blog post,
I'm pretty sure that you would be able to convince anyone that DAOs could potentially end world poverty
but first what are DAOs???
DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
and the best way to explain DAOs would be on elaborating the individual terms
Decentralized AO:
You know how democracy is defined as by the people, for the people, of the people but then it rarely does much about the people.
We'd imagine on just listening to that definition that the people would make decisions and hence govern themselves... that my friend is a decentralized government i.e. there is no central authoritative, it's the locals/individuals that make the decisions
Now here in DAOs, that is done using blockchain... you know that ledger system that every member of the network has access to and on verifying new transactions gets money(mining lol).
D Autonomous O:
I don't know about you, but when I hear the term "Autonomous", I get a picture of Arnold Swazenblahblahger as the terminator.
This term means that something that is carried out without human intervention...
and in DAOs that is done using smart contracts basically just contracts that are recorded on a blockchain.
You do know that a contract is essentially a paper that records a promise of payment upon completion of the job right
So smart contracts can be made for pre-agreed upon terms
eg) every time the company makes a sale... 5% of the profit go to that NGO we're supporting
DA Organizations:
we'll do I really have to break this term down lmao...
basically any group of people doing anything... be it a business or a club or a charity
So how the actual f would DAOs end world poverty ffs
lol If you could determine how DAOs could end world poverty just be reading that... you're probably Einstein level genius
So let's say a hypothetical country "A" has a DAO based government.
a government like any other organization requires income to function...
how does a government earn money?
through taxes of course
let's say this government has adopted etherium/cardano/polygon/(any crypto that supports smart contracts)
Every time a citizen in this country makes a purchase, he pays some sort of Goods and Service Tax.
There could be a smart contract that says "whenever citizen makes a payment to a business, transfer 5% to military, 5% to the infrastructure fund, 5% to bank account etherium addresses of people living below the poverty line"
This need not be just on GST, or to the military/infrastructure/NPL fund. We could apply it to any tax paid inside the country and the money being transferred based on the proposed annual budget of the nation... all automatically autonomously
You get the point right...
in a DAO based government
the money goes directly to people who need money from people who have surplus
instead of
the money goes to the government, out of which some who knows and finally a negligible amount to the ones in need
But
Ok, so you might ask me how would the DAO know that a person is actually BPL and not someone who no longer is BPL
well, the entire transaction history of every citizen of the country is recorded on the blockchain... we could have another smart contract that adds/removes people from the BPL list based on the gross income every month
Fun Fact
The above scenario is kinda implemented except it was implemented to help the refugees that flocked to the country of Ethiopia
A company called Atala Prism developed a smart contract-based system in Ethiopia to fund the student refugee and the system was pretty much what we discussed in this blog post.
Link:
Summary
- DAOs are basically a collection of pre-agreed upon smart contracts that control the finances of an organization
- any organization that adopts a DAO approach can get rid of corruption
- the benefits of adapting DAO will make blockchain more mainstream
Homework
Try to see how a local business you know would be if it were a DAO. What would the smart contracts controlling the finances of the business look like?
Connect???
I'm pretty active on twitter and that's where you could reach out and we DM/PM talking about random tech stuff
@lucidmach
Top comments (1)
This was so cool to read and comprehend