What is a DAC

[bytemaster]

A DAC is self-perpetuating in the market and can be owned by shareholders. 

A DAC has a transaction ledger that tracks ownership in a irreversible, counterfeit proof, manner.

A DAC cannot change its rules... new DACs can fork off, but the the rules of the DAC are constant.
     - the rules may allow certain rules to be changed with defined procedures... but in reality this is still within the rules.

A DAC should produce more value than it consumes.

A DAC may 'inflate' to raise capital without harming existing shareholders.   

A DAC fundamentally respects the property rights of those who hold the private key.

[barwizi]

I'll add some soup to this mix. 2500 NRS  / 0.25 BTC for full Technical and Non Technical Specifications of a DAC, 1000 more if you add a specification for Decentralized Corp, like Noir Investment Group.

[santaclause102]

Man I just tried, this stuff is hard...

Points for non-technical:

* Earns profits for shareholders
* Exists" as a collection of computers running software
* Interacts with humans and businesses
* Solves problems that humans or traditional businesses cannot because of trust issues

We should not manufacture the scientific / categorial definition of a DAC to narrow around TaPOS/Bitshares. That would be like creating a category for advertising and is not very universal.

*Earn profits for shareholders
...is a big step ahead and can serve as a quality for a DAC subcategory we could call "for profit dacs" or something but it is not essential to constitute the dac relolution introduced by bitcoin. Bitcoin may be a bad dac and bitshares may be a good one but they are both dacs.

* Interacts with humans and businesses
What exactly is a business here?

* Solves problems that humans or traditional businesses cannot because of trust issues
Up to now there is no DAC and no DAC proposal that solved something trad. businesses could not do as well, although maybe not as eficient and not as trustless.

Form toast's other topic on the same questions:

For BTS X: It is *more profitable* to participate in the market peg than to fight it.

For Bitcoin: It is *more profitable* to be an honest miner than a dishonest miner.

The market peg enabled through a prediction market is something different from a block generation and reward game. What they have in common is that you are best of when you do what the majority does (in the future). Differences are: Prediction markets can judge qualitativ issues having more possible outcomes than 1 or 0 and which are a lot harder to evaluate. Predicitons markets are run by humans.
BM combined those two mechanisms!

[santaclause102]

Maybe we should close one topic (this or toast's one) to keep track of things... Toast, you could copy your op to barwizi's topic...

Does someone have a link to BM's Dac vs vending machine article? Can't find it.

Sofar my definition of a DAC is: Has a public ledger and the ownership/truth publicly visible in this ledger is determined by a game open to everyone which rewards those confirming the truth and is costly to those doing the opposite. Therefore the current DAC technology is only applicable to truths that are easy to determine. An additional requirement could be that the truth finding mechanism can run as a automated routine (on a computer). 


Does someone have examples when a non-dac would be decentralized but not autonomous and when a non dac would be autonomous but not decentralized?

[Troglodactyl]

This may be too abstract for your purposes, but the most useful non-technical teaching aid I've found for DACs is languages.  A language is just a consensus on grammatical structure and word definitions.  When enough people share a sufficient consensus on those things, they're part of the same network, and receive utility from being able to communicate with the rest of the network.  Once you get people thinking about their native language as an abstract decentralized entity with an apparent life of its own that provides value to its users, it makes more sense that other classes of such entities could be made.

[toast]

Man I just tried, this stuff is hard...

Points for non-technical:

* Earns profits for shareholders
* "Exists" as a collection of computers running software
* Interacts with humans and businesses
* Solves problems that humans or traditional businesses cannot because of trust issues

Points for technical:

* The stuff from "DAC vs vending machine" thread

[rysgc]

Great minds think alike:P
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=3488.msg43790;topicseen#msg43790 , maybe expand the thread in there.

[barwizi]

seems people are confusing the concept. Lets have a technical, then a non technical description.