Once a DAC is created, how will people find out about it? For most DACs, it won't be enough to rely on the "if you build it, they will come" strategy. So why not leverage the religious community cryptos tend to create and transform them into an army of affiliate marketers?
A referral program (otherwise known as an affiliate program) is a performance based commission system that allows anyone to promote a product and make money proportional to their ability to continuously generate new business.
Since running a DPoS blockchain is extremely cheap, income generated by the DAC can be reinvested in referral payouts, as opposed to burning it. A decentralized autonomous marketing scheme for a decentralized autonomous company, allowing a DAC to autonomously perpetuate itself virally.
If the DAC is selling goods for BitUSD (i.e. decentralized marketplace like Open Bazaar), this would allow for a completely traditional referral program to be implemented. If the user makes a purchase within X number of blocks, the referrer gets a percentage of the fees incurred from the sale.
From a technical perspective, this would be no different than how any other referral program is implemented. I can't think of any way this could be abused other than users buying goods through their own affiliate link, which is easy to prevent and has never been a problem in real world use cases.
The point of PoW mining is to distribute tokens fairly and buy security for the blockchain. Since DPoS solves the security problem, that allows us to think of creative ways to distribute tokens and possibly use inflation to buy things other than security.
For example, inflation could be used to buy marketing. The better you are at generating sales for the DAC, the more shares you'll receive; analogous to block rewards for providing security. This makes for a much better value proposition than mining with useless hashing power. Inflation is, of course, optional. Income generated in the form of fees could be used exclusively.
Not all DACs will be as lucky as BitShares X. They won't have as strong an incentive to use them as BitAssets and BitYield allow for. When viewing a DAC as a company and not a coin, it makes perfect sense to incentivize and automate the marketing process. Generating new business is an essential part of any company, DAC or otherwise.
The importance of referral marketing on the Internet cannot be understated. Ads and referral programs are the incentive structures that make for sustainable online businesses. If a DAC is ever expected to compete with traditional online companies, it needs an autonomous mechanism to spread itself virally. At the very least, this is an idea worth putting more thought into.
If you're a developer and wish to speak privately, contact me @ methodx[at]gmail[dot]com