Author Topic: DAC vs Mastercoin's Distributed Applications (DA)  (Read 2046 times)

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Offline coolspeed

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Agreed. The DAC metaphor is too cool to be abandoned. It's necessary.
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Offline HackFisher

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Such a good post! I'm the first one to comment?

If there is an AP DAC, I'll choose to pay with APShares to submit this article to it and buy in without delay.

Thanks~

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Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract between myself and anyone else.   These are merely my opinions and I reserve the right to change them at any time.

Offline bytemaster

The people behind Mastercoin have recently published a paper on Decentralized Applications: https://github.com/DavidJohnstonCEO/DecentralizedApplications/blob/master/README.md

My response is included below:

  I have just read through your white paper and think I can agree with the usage of words as important and that your classification structure is also good.

   I would like to try a metaphor to explain the value of using a DAC metaphor vs DAA metaphor as both fundamentally describe the same thing.

   Imagine you just discovered electricity and all of the amazing things that it could do.   There are electrons that flow around, wave forms, and other fundamental building blocks.   People want to start using this amazing electricity concept to build useful and productive circuits, but they lack a mental framework that helps them intuitively understand and predict the outcome of a particular circuit structure and even advanced mathematics can only approximate it due to noise in the environment and imperfect measurements of the components.   Relying on math alone to simulate the expected results is time consuming.  To design systems you need intuition and abstraction.

   So someone comes along and says, wow, electricity works just like plumbing!  It flows like water, there is a 'pressure' the circuit. Resistors are like narrow pipes etc.  If you think of an electrical circuit like plumbing then you can apply everything you intuitively know about what works in plumbing systems to help design and understand this new fancy electricity we just discovered without having to resort to math until after a high-level design is in place.  You quickly discover that teaching students about electricity is an order of magnitude easier using this metaphor and as a result they quickly pick up the concept and are able to apply it in useful ways.

  Now imagine that the plumbing industry is highly regulated and requires licenses.  Any thing that is moving a fluid through a pipe, storing a fluid in a tank, or utilizing a pressurized system is subject to fees, regulations, and potentially illegal to operate.    The plumbing industry hears of this new metaphor for describing electricity and wants to regulate electricity with the same laws the apply to water and plumbing. 

  From this it is clear that there exists a distinction between what something *is* and the metaphor used to teach how it operates.  For those using electricity, they don't care about how it works or how it is classified they just want the lights to come on.   For this group you simply call it 'power' and nothing else is required.   But when you are trying to TEACH people how to USE power to do things now you need a metaphor.   

  In conclusion, DAC is the metaphor that holds the key to designing Distributed Applications.    Bitcoin is a Distributed Application that is most easily understood using a currency metaphor.   BitShares is a Distributed Application most easily understood via a Bank, Corporation, Exchange metaphor.   

  If we are afraid to use metaphors due to fear of regulators then we will harm the ability of users to understand how and why Distributed Applications work in an intuitive level and also hinder how they are designed.   

   I have seen many people come up with DAC ideas, but it is clear that the first principles behind creating Distributed Autonomous Applications are not yet well understood.    In my opinion, the DAC metaphor is the key framework that helps to design and implement Distributed Autonomous Applications.
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Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract between myself and anyone else.   These are merely my opinions and I reserve the right to change them at any time.