Author: Preston J. Byrne Source: coindesk Translation: Shan Oppa, Golden Finance
This week, Wired magazine claimed that decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are becoming home to "dangerous groups." Preston J. Byrne said that this article misunderstood the actual function and purpose of DAO.
The well-known magazine "Wired" recently published an article claiming that decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) may become the next major gathering place for online extremism. The article reads:
“2024 may be the year when neo-Nazis, jihadists and conspiracy theorists turn their utopian visions of self-governing states into A year for reality—not in the real world, but in the form of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)."
Article The author, Julia Ebner, is an academic who studies extremism and has written books about political movements in Europe. She has also allegedly "infiltrated" several such organizations (referring to participating in publicly publicized gatherings and Discord voice chats). These include highly controversial and public groups such as "Les Identitaires" in France and "Reconquista Germanica" in Germany.
It is relatively simple to conduct academic research on this type of extremist group because most of the participants are a group of game nerds addicted to role-playing, openly posting inflammatory content and Gaining attention with little to no basic cybersecurity awareness. One indicator of whether an "extremist" group is as dangerous as Hamas or Hezbollah is whether the servers used by the group are located in the United States. In the United States, the FBI can identify users on these servers within a day with a subpoena, or even without a subpoena at all in an emergency (many companies will voluntarily disclose these records if life is endangered).
Reconquista Germanica is particularly vulnerable to this attack because the group operates through Discord groups, a San Francisco-based social media company whose namesake app The program displays all user communications in clear text (i.e., unencrypted) so they can be freely disclosed to law enforcement, and are often disclosed. Like the allegedly right-wing-coded "Redacted Club DAO" mentioned in the Wired article, most DAOs also rely on Discord for community management and promotion.
Ebner’s accusations against DAO lack evidence
Ebner claimed that DAO may become a base for extremism. But her argument has many flaws and is unconvincing.
First, she only mentioned those DAOs that make Discord group information public on Twitter, such as Les Identitaires and Reconquista Germanica. These groups operate on Discord, a US-based platform, which is certainly worth looking into, but not all DAOs. More convincing evidence would be proof that any DAO mentioned in the article uses an encrypted protocol rather than Discord to communicate.
The ideal situation is to provide direct evidence that the DAO is used for illegal purposes by such organizations. The Taliban, for example, meet two of Ebner's two criteria: They don't use Discord, but use encrypted protocols (mainly WhatsApp) to coordinate lightning attacks on major Afghan cities. However, as far as I know, even though the Taliban have full autonomy within Afghan territory and are free to choose any software tool, DAO is not used.
Ebner went on to write in Wired:
"If trolls use How dangerous is it that DAOs collaborate to launch campaigns to interfere with elections? The activities of extremist DAOs could challenge the rule of law, threaten minority groups, and undermine institutions considered fundamental pillars of democratic systems. Another risk is that DAOs could become extremist A safe haven for sports that allows users to circumvent government regulation and surveillance by security agencies."
This is ridiculous.
First of all, she studied that members of such extremist organizations already live in Western societies and work and live freely, although their views may be difficult for mainstream society to accept. But in the United States, at least, it’s not illegal to hold and express extreme views. In fact, public statements by extremists serve as early warnings to law enforcement, who closely monitor these forums. The only ones who truly view the existence of these communities, even if legitimate, as a threat to society tend to come from the extremist studies and "misinformation studies" circles of academia/journalism, and their political allies, which are free speech minded Form opponent.
The reality is that in the real world, if you are stupid enough to plot a serious crime or seriously challenge the rule of law in a public Discord, law enforcement is likely to have it. Everything you do, you end up in jail.
When we see peace-loving, crypto-savvy, non-racist “DAOs” using similar communication tools, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions Saying that this will turn the crypto community into extremists does not mean that DAO is friendly to extremists, or even means that DAO is suitable for use by extremists. This only goes to show thatThe DAO, like many other online communities using Discord, one of the most popular social media apps in the world, including even political campaigns and other organizations, values participation over secrecy. Joining the DAO will not create any "safe harbor", let alone "bypass government supervision and security services (sic) monitoring activities." In fact, quite the opposite.
What DAO actually does
I I have quite a lot of experience with DAOs. I participated in the design of the first Ethereum DAO prototype in 2014, and have since provided consulting services for several DAOs. The main function of a DAO is not to communicate, but to manage smart contracts on the chain and decide when to exercise, modify, add or remove certain administrator-level permissions on the contract (such as setting interest rates or changing feature sets).
DAO is not a "self-governing country", but a self-governing software application. Most DAOs are not yet mature, and DAO elements are often added hastily just to sell encrypted tokens to provide founders with a "runway" to develop new code and find product-market fit.
A few projects, such as MakerDAO, have achieved product-market fit upon launch, or are so close that token holders regularly participate in voting on proposals. Even in this case, voting discussions take place in public "governance portals" and are supervised by token holders, who tend not to reveal their identities and create user accounts in order to participate, although many have the ability to influence the outcome of the proposal. of large token holders will choose to disclose their information.
Typically, by the time a change proposal is finally agreed to and implemented, it has already gone through a lot of public discussion. The vast majority of these debates take place in the open and can be easily monitored by law enforcement agencies if they so choose.
Why DAO is not suitable for extremism
Ebner is worried that DAO may become a breeding ground for extremism, but There is no basis for this concern.
First of all, in terms of social media, there is nothing special about DAO, and it is no different from the communication methods of existing social media.
More importantly, the technical characteristics of DAO make it difficult to use for criminal and hidden activities:
(a) Smart contracts are open and transparent, and data on the chain can be checked
(b) The blockchain transaction data of the mainstream EVM chain (where most DAOs are located) is not encrypted and can be directly used by analysis companies such as Chainalysis to assist law enforcement agencies in monitoring
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(c) The main function of DAO is to coordinate smart contract state changes
These state changes are only committed to the chain after DAO members reach a rough consensus on the changes, often after lengthy and arduous debates about boring financial, cryptoeconomic, and computer science issues.
In contrast, the spread of extremist ideas usually uses high volume, high speed, and low interference to spread inflammatory memes and propaganda. This method is not economically feasible on the chain, because filling a block of GIF images is expensive, and updating the distributed finite state machine (i.e., the blockchain) does not require consensus. Even the email method is more suitable than DAO. such uses.
If extremists want a tool to spread toxins, DAO is definitely not their best choice. It is completely unsuitable for spreading propaganda. The DAO's job is to reach consensus on matters such as fine-tuning smart contract interest rates by 50 basis points, and to automatically execute decisions through verifiable voting records on the chain. Once voting reaches a certain threshold, the underlying L1 blockchain automatically executes.
When real extremist groups like the Taliban, instead of losers talking nonsense on Discord, start communicating with DAOs instead of WhatsApp, maybe we can Sit down and discuss this topic. But the chances of this happening are slim to none for the reasons mentioned earlier. Currently,anyone who knows anything about DAOs knows that they are not at all a tool used by terrorists or extremists, nor do they serve them in any way. Real journalism, like what our fathers and their forefathers did before them, should not be reduced to fabricating baseless and defamatory conjectures out of thin air, as this Wired article did, smearing a group of people. Great technologists trying to make the world a better place.
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