I'm so very excited for you guys! You are two of my most favorite, intelligent, capable, productive people on STEEM, and it's awesome to think you'll be teamed up together doing cool stuff for EOS as a BP and more. I really am so excited to hear this.
I definitely want to know more about your inductive proof. I did a video a couple weeks ago discussing if the eosDAC airdrop could be considered a form of vote buying. It's one of my biggest concerns, and the main thing I spent weeks thinking about before joining the eosDAC launch team.
For me, it ultimately came down to how much I prefer decentralization over centralization. Instead of just a few fat cats or centralized corporations making decisions that impact everyone else, I prefer to see decentralized governance, tokenomics to incentivize participation by a wide range of people, and rewards being used for what's best for a broad community. I think DACs are the future, and I'm willing to take some risks to support that future and give DACs a voice in the governance process for EOSIO, even if they don't have a ton of money to buy up enough EOS to have a voice in influencing a block producer. My hope is, with our 12 custodians voted in by eosDAC holders, anyone holding eosDAC can have their voice heard.
Anyway, back to your post.
We intend to use our funds to directly innovate and enrich the EOS platform.
I think this is important for all BPs. They have to demonstrate they are providing value. I'm hopeful creating tools for DACs will be how we do that as well.
a system where voters choose their votes solely based upon receipt of dividends
I agree, this will fail every time, and it's the reason we're working so hard on our constitution and custodian voting system to ensure we make it prefectly clear what our priorities are as a DAC. My biggest concern is we, as the launch team, create something fantastic for the EOS community and for those who want to build DACs, but we don't properly protect it, and it gets taken away from us. I think we have plenty of things in place to prevent that, just as STEEM, EOS, and many other cryptocurrency projects do via incentives that protect a collaborative commons instead of destroying it because that's ultimately the most profitable approach. By being the first, we get to set the bar high for any DACs or DAC BPs the follow us. We get to lead in technical excellent as Rob and Micheal have already done with the launch of the very first superhero testnet.
I'm really excited for you guys and look forward to working together as fellow block producers to continue improving both STEEM and EOS.
Aww shucks, thanks @lukestokes.
Agreed. I'm excited to see how DACs evolve and how they can be used for the greater good. While I have my doubts and see it as a yet unsolved problem (as we've discussed), it's exciting to see research being done.
While @greymass won't be focusing on the same aspects as eosDAC (from what I understand - governance, it's structure/tooling, and related smart contracts?), we hope the value proposition we offer will still be as coveted. I hope we have a more clear vision and statement about exactly that topic soon, but a few critical pieces I plan on proposing for the organization are more along the lines of "the application of blockchain technology" and "it's infrastructure in how it relates to the greater internet".
I'm a big believer at this point that it's possible to create value that extends outside the ecosystem of a single blockchain - much like as a web developer, you can contribute to the larger good of the internet by contributing to open-source software. We really don't see this trend yet today in blockchain, and although the software is technically open source, it's not modular and each ecosystem does things it's own way.
My personal goals recently (which will hopefully bleed into this new organization) are to attempt to do just that. I need to write a blog post here soon about all this. It is my intention that most of the open source software I create from here on out will provide value to not only one ecosystem of developers, but many, granting the developers who embrace blockchain technology a bit of mobility. This mobility will allow developers to choose what platform is best for the app they're building, and not be restricted by "what will be the easiest" or "what circle hole can I smash this square peg through". I see that a lot right now.