Treasury

Why We Should Not Use The Treasury

Below are 4 reasons why CD’s shouldn’t use the treasury:

• Why We Should Not Use The Treasury
• Social Cohesion of the Eden Community
• Elegance of original system
• Slippery slopes
• Legal Status of DAOs

Social Cohesion of the Eden Community

• How much democratic legitimacy do we have to make a decision like this?
• We want to be much closer to a ‘99.9% democracy’ than a ‘51% democracy’
• Currently Eden is much more democratic than legacy systems, but not designed with tight enough feedback loops to be super representative of the community with a limited capacity for expressing the will of the community.
• Each of us passed two rounds in random election over the course of 2 hours
• What percent of community members would approve of such a change? Perhaps some polling would be helpful
• My intuition is that this change wouldn’t be anywhere close to a 99.9% democratically agreed upon decision.
• Eden overall may be thought of as something like a 60% democracy, maybe much more or less. Difficult to say with the randomization dynamics.
• Would people like Dario, Felix, Andrew Ware, Dan Larimer, and myself be onboard with this?
• I don’t feel particularly comfortable imposing will on Eden community members that don’t like it. I’m willing to take bold and unpopular decisions when necessary but want to avoid doing so when it’s not necessary.
• Instead of centralizing power in chief delegates and setting precedent for all powerful chief delegates, what about decentralizing power to delegates?
• We’ve been talking about MSIG as a service… if we want to do that then we should lead by example and do a better msig arrangement for Eden first
• All Eden members & especially Eden delegates are trusted already and we have the incredibly helpful EOSIO permission technology and the principles understanding that decentralization is good… so we should use larger MSIGs
• I think we should decentralize the Eden MSIG to include delegates before our next term. Technical considerations are needed first and we would need to design it sufficiently well enough with the right balance between ease and security. CDs could perhaps have 2x or 4x more votes. It needs to be sufficiently not restrictive so that we don’t get stuck. CDs should still have considerable power, but for the best of the community I don’t think that we should allow just 4 CDs to suddenly make any decision on behalf of the community. That does not instill trust and security.

Elegance of original system

Slippery slopes

• Josh made a good point about slippery slope
• If we set precedent for using treasury, how else might this ‘inspire’ future CDs to use the treasury?
• With CDs changing every 3 months and so much precedented power for CDs, this seems that it increases risk and vulnerability of Eden
• Because of the rapid turnover and absolute power of delegates, In many ways this system would seem more vulnerable to corruption and centralization the legacy ‘democracies’
• Instead of centralizing power in chief delegates and setting precedent for all powerful chief delegates, what about decentralizing power to delegates?
• The most important thing is empowering the community, not the technology. We don’t need to ensure the continuity of all the technology. We need to ensure the continuity of the community. It’s vitally need to protect the community and brand of Eden… and give everyone great experiences without any PR disasters or total sudden use of funds… the community can sustain cheaply indefinitely and there are many exciting initiatives that will bloom to create value in the coming months, such as the Eden fractal, nft group, town halls, etc. We are in a position of power and growth. We should not take catastrophic risks.

Legal Status of DAOs

• General partnership and liability for all?
• Potential solution: Transaction from BPs like Fractally did for the active permission

Thank you Luka, these are good points.

I understand our legal standing whereby we are temporary maintainers of the account and block producer are owners, so Eden on EOS is a essentially Sub-DAO acting on behalf of BPs. This is basically how the ƒractally team explained their role as active permission holders before switching the permissions to the past CDs and it is why they required that the BPs to signal approval for the transaction to change permissions.

If we make a transaction directly from the account, then this could potentially increase legal risk for all Eden members by making us seem like more like owners of the account.

I agree that there is no black & white line and there are already some elements that misguided governments could claim classify Eden as a partnership, such as membership fees. However, using money directly from the treasury would certainly increase the risk of this and we should be careful to avoid unnecessarily increasing liability if the ROI isn’t worth it….

The treasury is BP controlled.

Lots of interesting discussions on July 8th

For reference, here is Dan Larimer’s article about The Legal Standing of DAOs. I haven’t had time to thoroughly engage with all of it yet but it all seems logically coherent, I generally trust Dan’s legal insights, and I think it’s best to be cautious about this for the safety of the Eden community. I recommend reading it closely.

By the way, Dan Larimer is also planning to release a new contributor agreement document on August 6th to protect ƒractally contributors from legal liability and we may want to consider implementing something similar to protect Eden community members

conversation highlights in eden members chat