Criticisms of the DGF project

This page collects arguments against the goals and the implementation of the DAO Governance Framework project and their responses.

The goal of the DGF project is to make a general system for building DAOs. Given the obvious historical failures of crypto projects, and especially the potential for larger, more dangerous failures in the future, we wish to make the many valid criticisms of the project paramount, in the hopes that designers will be conscious of as many pitfalls as is possible.

General Criticisms

Fundamental Criticisms

• Nothing is perfect
• Law of Unintended Consequences
• Chesterton's Fence
• Financialization is bad: It degrades the fundamental human impulse to help without expectation of reward. Under this system, everything is tied to a measured value, then accounted for and rewarded according to whatever system is currently in place, even though that system is necessarily flawed.

Technical Criticisms

• Blockchain tech is bad
  • Environment
    • Bitcoin's PoW uses the amount of energy of Czechoslovakia and it's entirely wasted except for the minor benefit of decentralized consensus of a mostly useless currency.
  • Redundancy of decentralized systems is orders of magnitude less efficient than centralized databases, independent of PoW.
    • Slower than centralized databases
    • More expensive
    • Scalability sacrifices security
  • Centralized interfaces with blockchain are unregulated and untrustworthy (e.g., Mount Gox, FTX)
• P2P tech is for criminals
  • File sharing is theft: e.g., music and movies
  • Bitcoin has only ever been practically used for money laundering, internet drug sales, and sex trafficking in the last 14 years.

Downsides of meritocracy

Meritocracy without cultivating gratitude and humility is corrosive over time. Though we want somewhat of a class structure, we don't want the gap to be large enough for the the top and bottom to dissociate. This is built in computationally with hyper-inflationary reputation, but this must also be managed emotionally.

Downsides to transparency

• Threat to privacy

Downsides of globalism

• Threat to local community

SGF Criticisms

• Greater communication between scientists can lead to bad outcomes. Science needs independent validations of a theory to prevent bias. So a platform where they can communicate immediately, without careful consideration beforehand can ultimately harm science. Kevin Zollman, e.g., in discussing the social epistemology of science argues that before a scientist's colleagues' results are validated, the scientist being aware of their claims is likely to prejudice the scientist. Related is how scientific results have a statistical problem, that many measurements historical record converge to the most accurate current result from a biased direction (e.g., because the scientists are probably self-censoring themselves, and not reporting results that are too far at variance with the other results).