They said the DAO is an improvement, but it looks like the 11 core stakeholders effectively control the DAO. A contentious proposal could probably pass with only 6 votes. Over time those tokens may get spread among more holders.

Are you referring to vote delegation? ENS holders 'delegate' their votes towards a person or entity, which then votes on their behalf, and this delegation can be changed at any time if the delegates are malicious.

This might not feel as democratic as direct one vote-per-token, but that scheme tends to have much lower turnout (as seen with compound.finance and curve.fi voting).

I'm looking at the pie chart. If 75% of the tokens don't vote and 11 people own ~18% out of the voting 25% then those 11 effectively control the DAO.

It looks like the top 11 delegates control around 40% of the vote[1], so nearly effective control. That does seem like a small group, but if a delegate was acting maliciously, I'd expect a number of their holders to change delegation.

[1] https://sybil.org/#/delegates/ens

Until there's a viable solution to 1-person, 1-vote for DAOs, this is going to be the case everywhere.

Detailed in the "Who Watches the Watchmen" paper:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbloc.2020.5901...

Nothing is forcing a DAO to give half the voting shares to insiders.

You don't ever want one person, one vote. The amount of power someone has in an organization should be proportional to the amount of skin they have in the game.

If I borrow 51% of the outstanding supply, how much skin do I have in the game? What if I buy $100 million worth of ENS, while simultaneously shorting it on DeFi?

What if I tell people that if they vote for my proposal, I'll raid the Community Treasury and bribe them with the money I get from that? Do they have skin in the game? And if so, which game?

If you try to borrow 51% of the supply, you'll find the cost to borrow goes up the more you get (until you're paying 10,000%+ apr.)

If you successfully pass a proposal to raid the treasury, all the $ENS tokens in there would likely crash in value as the market reacts to the news. Those who already have skin-in-the-game (by holding ENS and voting) would likely be worse off overall, so they wouldn't agree.

These are great questions! DAOs are essentially a big experiment in game theory and new forms of organization. I think you'd genuinely enjoy Vitalik's discussion about DAOs: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html

I can flash loan 0.4% of the supply from Uniswap right now. I need 1% for quorum. Is my math off?

That certainly is spooky. Perhaps the quorum should be increased. (I imagine it would, if you tried to do something like this.)

Either way, there are some barriers. Each vote is subject to a 7-day period, so other delegates have time to react; votes must first reach some level of interest through Snapshot off-chain voting before moving on to the on-chain vote.

We found the anti-democrat!

Ideally power should go to the best ideas but since each of us is limited in knowledge, the wisdom of the crowd is the next best option.

Is being a read-only user of ENS, zero skin in the game?

Why does this need a DAO? Why does someone have to "own" it? They could just have it be run by the smart contract without human intervention.

I think that's ultimately what everyone wants. However, I think we need more research because once you throw away the keys they're gone forever. This is something that needs time to get right.

Bitcoin doesn't have any keys to throw away. How is Bitcoin doing?

Because Bitcoin has "no governance" they have to use kludgey "soft forks" to upgrade the protocol.

It may very well be better in relative terms. After all, arsenic is clearly better for your health than strychnine. But neither is especially good, now is it?