93 - Psuedonymity & DAO's
Pseudonymous Teams & DAOs: Perhaps inspired by Bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto, there is a trend among some project teams in Web3 to be pseudonymous and known only by their online handles.
-
One reason for this could be to avoid any potential legal implications in future, given the regulatory uncertainty in this space. This makes it harder to associate any social reputation as it pertains to perceived security trustworthiness of the product or the processes behind its development. It also makes it tricky to hold anyone legally/socially liable or accountable.
-
“Trust software not wetware” (i.e. people) is the mantra here. While this may be an extreme view, there are still social processes around rollout and governance of projects which affect security posture.
-
To minimise the role and influence of a few privileged individuals in the lifecycle of projects, there is an increasing trend towards governance by token-holding community members — a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) of pseudonymous token-holding blockchain addresses making voting-based decisions on project treasury spending and protocol changes. While this reduces centralized points of wetware failure, it potentially slows down decision-making on security-critical aspects and may even lead to project forks.
- Regularity Uncertainty & Legal Implications
- Reputation & Trustworthiness
- Legal/Social Accountability
- Wetware vs Software
- DAO -> Decentralized Autonomous Organization
- Trade-off centralization can have faster decision making