Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World

by Don Tapscott

How would you go about designing a distributed autonomous enterprise? Such an entity could have rich functionality—agents executing ranges of tasks or more broadly business functions all based on a preapproved charter. Individuals, organizations, or collectives of potential shareholders or users will design them by defining the following: 1. Conviction: a belief about the world and what needs to be done to create value or change things. 2. Purpose: its reason for existence. Why are we creating this enterprise in the first place? 3. Constitution: outlines the overall objectives of the enterprise and the rules by which it will create value. 4. Modus operandi: for example, how it will go about creating this value. How it will fund itself—through crowdfunding, traditional early-stage investment, or using revenue. How it will acquire resources. 5. Division of labor between humans and technology: for the foreseeable future, perhaps humans should be in charge. 6. Application functions: how the enterprise will sense and respond to changing conditions. 7. Moral guidelines: Google’s promise to “Do No Evil” is not going to be good enough. The DAE needs some clear guidelines about what is and isn’t acceptable behavior.