LG: OK. I’m going to step back a little bit. So you …
GE: I sound insane right now, right?
LG: No, no. Yes.
GE: This is the most normal thing in the world.
LG: So I thought that one of the features of the blockchain is that people who are participating, making transactions, are anonymous, but it sounds like you were able to access this list of people at the conference who had wallets and then invite them to your DAO.
GE: Yeah. This is all of blockchain. It’s all supposedly anonymous, but it’s really pseudonymous because you’re identified by some …
MC: Your transaction.
LG: By some element of the community too. I joined your Discord server as me, and so I would attach a wallet to that, right? And the wallet would in theory, be not identifiable, but I’m saying this is me.
GE: Yeah. We’ve identified. Yes. Your wallet, it’s a series of letters and numbers, this is your wallet address. And now that I have that information, I can absolutely monitor everything you do with that wallet, so be careful.
LG: Be careful, he tells me.
MC: So the purpose of your DAO is to create captions that you then enter into The New Yorker cartoon caption contest.
GE: Right.
MC: So what are the mechanics of it? How does it work?
GE: Right. So far, we’ve just been talking about how do people get in.
MC: Get in the DAO.
LG: Which is an important part of it, by the way, because this barrier does still exist to this. So you’re doing this as a proof of concept for a DAO. The New Yorker caption contest is just a fun incentive to put out there.
MC: So we’ve covered how DAO. I’m asking why DAO?
GE: Why DAO? No, it’s still how. Right. So by far, the most popular platform for doing DAO activities is Discord, the chat and discussion app. A lot of DAOs, including mine, are basically just a Discord group where you need a certain token to enter. Especially with mine, because there’s no actual money involved, because I’m not out here trying to scam people. The token really is just like that secret handshake. So the way it works is you join this Discord server, there’s an integration in Discord that can scan your wallet, essentially, and verify that you have the lmao coins. And once you do that, you have access to the locked channels. And then, so what we do is, every week, there’s an internal contest where people submit within the Discord, and then the submissions that get the most, we made a custom laughing emoji.
It’s very cool actually. We take the top three or a Discord bot takes the top three vote getters and then we put those up to the official vote “on this platform called Snapshot,” which again, integrates with your wallet. Just back to your point, Lauren, about this being a proof of concept, it’s kind of a disproof of concept, because what I suspected was that a lot of DAOs are not really decentralized or autonomous. And that’s definitely the case for this one; it’s very much my friends and me, we’re the Discord admins. We literally have the New Yorker subscription necessary to submit the captions, that’s all done manually. So it’s really not decentralized in the sense of everybody having equal power. And what has been striking to me is that no one cares. The reaction I’ve gotten both in person when I was at the conference, explaining the project to people, and then subsequently is people just think it’s fun, they think it’s cool. And I think that’s telling to me that I don’t have people in the Web3 world coming up and saying, “Hey, this isn’t a real DAO.”
