Decentralized Organization (DO)

From Vitalik’s terminology guide:

"The idea of a decentralized organization takes the same concept of an organization, and decentralizes it. Instead of a hierarchical structure managed by a set of humans interacting in person and controlling property via the legal system, a decentralized organization involves a set of humans interacting with each other according to a protocol specified in code, and enforced on the blockchain. A DO may or may not make use of the legal system for some protection of its physical property, but even there such usage is secondary. For example, one can take the shareholder-owned corporation above, and transplant it entirely on the blockchain; a long-running blockchain-based contract maintains a record of each individual’s holdings of their shares, and on-blockchain voting would allow the shareholders to select the positions of the board of directors and the employees. Smart property systems can also be integrated into the blockchain directly, potentially allowing DOs to control vehicles, safety deposit boxes and buildings."

On the difference with a DAO:

"The obvious difference between a DO and a DAO, and the one inherent in the language, is the word “autonomous”; that is, in a DO the humans are the ones making the decisions, and a DAO is something that, in some fashion, makes decisions for itself. This is a surprisingly tricky distinction to define because, as dictatorships are always keen to point out, there is really no difference between a certain set of actors making decisions directly and that set of actors controlling all of the information through which decisions are made. In Bitcoin, a 51% attack between a small number of mining pools can make the blockchain reverse transactions, and in a hypothetical decentralized autonomous corporation the providers of the data inputs can all collude to make the DAC think that sending all of its money to1FxkfJQLJTXpW6QmxGT6oF43ZH959ns8Cq constitutes paying for a million nodes’ worth of computing power for ten years. However, there is obviously a meaningful distinction between the two, and so we do need to define it.

My own effort at defining the difference is as follows. DOs and DAOs are both vulnerable to collusion attacks, where (in the best case) a majority or (in worse cases) a significant percentage of a certain type of members collude to specifically direct the D*O’s activity. However, the difference is this: in a DAO collusion attacks are treated as a bug, whereas in a DO they are a feature. In a democracy, for example, the whole point is that a plurality of members choose what they like best and that solution gets executed; in Bitcoin’s on the other hand, the “default” behavior that happens when everyone acts according to individual interest without any desire for a specific outcome is the intent, and a 51% attack to favor a specific blockchain is an aberration. This appeal to social consensus is similar to the definition of a government: if a local gang starts charging a property tax to all shopowners, it may even get away with it in certain parts of the world, but no significant portion of the population will treat it as legitimate, whereas if a government starts doing the same the public response will be tilted in the other direction."