It's nothing but an investment medium on the blockchain (Ethereum specifically). The Ethereum community is very interested in seeing great things being built on its platform, so someone came up with this idea to create a blockchain app which allows it's members to direct funds towards building of other blockchain apps.

Interestingly, that someone is the company being funded (slock.it).

nop, there is no certainty that any company (including slock.it) will get any money from the DAO. Slock.it (like everyone else) can submit a proposal for a well defined project to the DAO and the DAO Token holder (people who put the money in the DAO) will vote on that proposal. If the don't see any benefit for the DAO/them-self in a proposal they will not vote for it and it won't get funded.

It may sound a cruel thing to say, but I would not have funded a Slock.It-only crowdsale. I am sure there are quite a few people who think similarly.

I'd rather the talented team behind slock.it work on the DAO full time than on slock.it.

I got a couple pages in and gave up.

It feels like the Dharma Initiative or whatever the made up company on Lost was called. The web pages are crazily confused. My first thought was this is Spectre :-)

I think what it is supposed to be is a way to make investments in a kind of non-centralized VC fund, and you buy money by transferring bitcoins or ether into dao token. Then a central committee figures out a list of ventures to fund. The members get proportional votes based on the size of their investments.

If you search on youtube, you find some people discussing that part of the aims were to allow people to make pre-ipo investments without being accredited investors. In the US, you can't buy certain speculative investments without have a million bucks net worth (= an acc. inv.). So it's all these things together. Plus those crazy, no info web pages.

Could they really have so many millions of investments? I've had this idea (not exactly original :-) that at some point technology really would accelerate out of the control of central authorities, whether you call it Ray Kurzweil's Singularity or ultimate cyber freedom.

If we ever did get autonomous companies or foundations, controlled by computer code, could we allow them to exist without govt control? Suppose you had a company lead by say a Viv type AI which had 10 million in bitcoins and it was running in a 3rd world country, outside the US, and it's goal was to file lawsuits to stop the federal govt, or the EU or something?

Huh? Laws operate within countries. You can't file (or even defend against) lawsuits in a country without being "present" in that country.

So open a fako office in a country (like they do for filing patent claims in west Texas) and then file the lawsuit. It's not like big companies can't make this work. And lawyers can make it work.

Makes you wonder who is contributing the 100MM and how they know what they know.

I contributed, and I know what I know by virtue of playing with the technology, keeping up with the news in r/ethereum, etc. The usual kind of thing one does in smaller tech communities.

Same here. For those who have been keeping up with Ethereum developments, the DAO has been in the works for a long time, and people already have a general idea of what it is. There's been a lot of previous discussion about it dating back years[1].

I think the problem with the website is the people who created it are so deep into this stuff that they think it does a sufficiently decent job of explaining it. They've forgotten just how much of a learning curve there is for someone outside of the Ethereum community, much less anyone unfamiliar with blockchain technology. They may have not even planned for the website to explain it to such people, thinking they would be uninterested or unable to figure out how to participate anyway.

[1] https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/05/06/daos-dacs-das-and-more-...