Long time Ethereum fan here. Still am absolutely bullish on Ether. I like what EOS has to say. I ran their code works from what I can see. Any reason not to buy it on a technical level. I do not really care about the team. Let's talk just about the tech.

The Vega Project – Disrupting The Hierarchical Governance Paradigm

For those looking for a deep technical dive into a new voting structure we are looking for feedback:

Paper https://github.com/VegaProject/wiki/wiki/overview

Do we need to generalize systems?

The recent news of the SEC ruling that The DAO is a security, I think this topic raises both important legal and philosophical questions as to what it means for an organization to be truly decentralized. After I read the paper issued by the SEC yesterday, the three areas of concern that jumped out to me were:

• Voters in The DAO effectively had little control, since curators were responsible for allowing projects to make proposals.
• Advertising returns in the form of dividends are clearly an investment product.
• If a large amount of the funds is taken off-chain and held by individuals, it means that some centralized entity is taking custody of funds at one point or another.

It looks like a large reason that The DAO, specifically, was a security was that it did not give investors many rights as a token holder. I would argue that the main thing that makes The DAO a security is the fact that curators would create investment-specific proposals with the intention of making a return. But what if The DAO basically coded itself as a non-specific voting mechanism? At first, you might think, of course, a voting machine is not a security, but then you have to think about the kinds of decisions that are being made. What if those decisions concern investments? Or how about if those decisions are for funding charities? A vote could decide the question of what block should be included next in a blockchain.

My question is, could we take the idea of The DAO, where decisions are decentralized, but generalize the code enough to say that tokens are used as a method to make decisions? The kinds of decisions that are made may be related to investment, or may not. You could think of this as a kind of network-managed, autonomous decision-making agent.

I'm posting this to hopefully start a discussion around what defines a company (with centralized managers), vs. a public utility that is made up of a bunch of different actors.

Why I find this an interesting topic:

After seeing the rise and fall of The DAO, I fell in love with the idea of a completely decentralized organization that funded projects. However, the largest disappointment, in my mind, was that hardly anyone actually voted for any proposals. The highest voter turnout for any given DAO proposal was for proposal 17, which received only ~9.8% of the total tokens. This made me think how we could use better voting structures for decentralized organizations. Six months later, I realized that implementing a modified version of a Futarchy governance model could be the perfect way to achieve a commonly desired outcome.

So a little intro to the project:

The Vega Project (“Vega”) is an effort to create a generalizable system which enables coordinated action for a group of participants based on the decentralized decisions of the individual participants who make up the group.

Using smart contracts, the Vega Project can:

(a) Enable any participant to introduce proposals to the group.

(b) Enable any participant to support and vote on proposals that have been made by other participants.

(c) Track the impact of active participants’ decisions on the achievement of the group’s objectives over time.

Through implementation of consensus rules and a carefully designed incentive structure, Vega enables individuals to apply swarm intelligence in the pursuit of their shared objectives, harnessing the wisdom of the crowd to make group decisions for the purpose of maximizing the benefits to the individual participants.

Essentially a system for effective digital democracy, Vega enables any group to manage itself strictly through the consensus of individual actors, provided only that the group is able to establish shared objectives which are clearly and unambiguously defined; precise metrics for assessing the group’s performance in achieving its objectives; and effective incentive structures which properly align the interests of individual participants with the shared interests of the group, all without any centralized control.

Perhaps this question could be answered by "expert" lawyers, but in the spirit of crowd intelligence and transparency, we think it's important to get an understanding of what the community thinks.

As a community, do we think that creating a generalizable system that incentivizes decision-making is a security or not, according to the SEC?

When I say 'impact', I mean something like this:
A project is trying to raise $10,000,000. They have no minimum contribution limit, as is typically the case with an Ethereum crowd-sale. So, in the grand scheme of things, any contribution <$10,000 or so will be next to meaningless for the project. The issue here is that most people don't have $10,000+ that they can just put into some project - but even with this limited capital, people still genuinely desire to help the project succeed. A fix to this on a single scenario basis would be for people with limited capital to band together and invest in the project with their pooled funds, on a continuous basis the solution would be something like a decentralized fund.

The centralization of the market's funding base is a good thing because it helps unify the standards of the community. As it stands now, everyone has their own individual standards and does their own due diligence on projects. A consequence of this is a higher prevalence of scams, because there is no agreed upon minimum standards for a project to meet before people invest.

Traditional markets largely solve this problem by setting a super high bar for companies to meet before they can go public. And, as a result, being listed on something like the S&P 500 provides a big stamp of legitimacy. Ideally, a large funding entity in this space, i.e. Vega Fund, could do the same thing by having some unified standards that, once the fund is big enough, projects in the market genuinely desire to meet because they want to be held by Vega, both for the money and the stamp of legitimacy.

As someone who is deeply interested by both new fintech on blockchain and traditional finance, I can understand why you don't see it as advantageous to band together in this scenario. I had the same feeling at first, but after coming to interact with the community both in person and on forums, I think people really like the idea of pooling their money and funding projects as a community.

As for the voting, yes, it will be able to be seen as it's happening.

Nowhere in my post did I mention fees.

You seem to be mistaking diversification of risk with fees. The point of the fund is to eliminate the situation that potential Ethereum-based-project investors face when they don't have large amounts of capital to work with - that is, having to choose between making a meaningful contribution to a project seeking funds and taking responsible amounts of risk, i.e. diversification of risk.

Also, like my post above states, we're not anonymous. It would be unethical, in my view, to run any business without disclosing your personal identity and having exposure to the downside of the project yourself.

I agree that the community has had enough of scammers, but I take issue with your post.

I didn't come here to try and pitch my product or raise money - as you already know, I'm new to this forum, but I thought this was a place where knowledgable people could discuss certain concepts (both technical and broader business). I made this thread with the sole intention of getting insight on a concept, so I didn't even link my project's website, since I thought my intentions might be viewed as disingenuous if I did.

So I didn't post my project's website - where you would find all of the team's identities, which we've put out to the public to the full extent of what we deem to be relevant, and as we try to grow only more will come out.

I understand your hesitation when dealing with a new account on this forum because you have no idea who's behind it, but your post makes it seem like myself and my team are deliberately trying to hide our identities which is both not true and (originally) not relevant to this thread. 

I think that I've answered most of your questions thus far, but let me elaborate on a few points:

The project is all about providing a consistent funding base for projects and individual developers on the Ethereum platform. Eventually, we may go beyond the Ethereum platform, but we think it's a good place to begin because of the relatively widespread adoption of it. The innovation is the ability for many people to come together and provide a venture capital-esque service without being hammered by fees or (for now) burdensome regulations.

As for a competent and experienced team, I've already touched on our advisors, who are all above and beyond in terms of competence and experience. For the main team, the founders (of which I myself am one) are solid in their respective roles. The founders themselves (of which I am one, so I may be biased) are competent in their respective roles, i.e. development/programming/business. It helps that we not only have experience in doing these types of projects before, but we've mostly done them together, creating a great team dynamic through shared experience.

The purpose of the fund has already been described, but as for what it will bring possible investors I'll reiterate: the biggest value it adds for possible investors is that it eliminates the unnecessary forced choice between impact investing and diversification of risk. We've done surveys of the Ethereum and broad cryptocurrency/[Suspicious link removed]munity and found that while people are certainly out to make money, they also genuinely desire to help the growth of these technologies.

While at this point our project is not very big, matured, or well-known, our current standing with those we are in contact with is good and
we view solid community relations as paramount to our success.
 

1. There are two main purposes for the fund:
          a) To allow individual investors the opportunity to have an impact in the ICO market without having to sacrifice diversity of risk. To expand on this, often times investors in this market don't have enough money to both make a significant impact on the project they're trying to help fund and also diversify their holdings, forcing a choice between impact and diversification.
          b) To provide a single large funding base for projects and individual developers in this space.
2. The holdings of the fund, initially, will be wholly comprised of tokens issued through pre-ICO sale or ICO of Ethereum-based products. In the future, the fund may expand to provide funding for things in the broader cryptocurrency/blockchain markets.
3. This will be up to the clients of the fund, but ideally clients would vote to fund projects at an early stage with the intention of either realizing a return at some point down the road or creating a sustained funding relationship with a certain project.

When you say 'Newbie account' or say that I'm a 'Newbie' here, I assume you mean on this forum. Neither myself or my team working on this project are new to this space. We've been interested and involved in these markets for a long time. As for trust, we understand that trust is something that needs to be built over time. Reputation takes years to create and a second to destroy, and we will take all necessary steps to ensure trust. What we've done on this front so far is give people as wide open of access to our personal identities as founders that we feel necessary to create a solid relationship with the community.

When it comes to experience managing investor's money, because the fund's investment decisions will be client-directed, the product we're trying to create and sell isn't so much our reputation as money managers as it is a platform for people to make their own decisions with.

That being said, to ensure that the way we set up the fund and its general trading/investment operations are solid we've brought on a former equity derivatives trader as an official advisor, and we also have the help of some unofficial advisors who come from similar backgrounds such as Mortgage Backed Security, currency, and commodity trading. These advisors provide invaluable insights into the way business and investing should be conducted in this space.

The biggest risk we see is security, which, in this context, obviously has historical precedence as an issue. We plan on minimizing security risks by providing a funding base for individual developers through our main platform that operates in the same fashion as our larger project-funding platform. The DAO was warned long before it was exploited of the vulnerability, but the team failed to act. With this system, which is crowd-directed like the rest of the fund, users can propose and fund a solution to security problems as they’re identified. This will allow solutions to be implemented as soon as possible.

We are absolutely open to having experts peer review our code before we release it. We are willing to take any steps necessary to ensure potential users of the legitimacy of the project.

As for your previous post, we’ve chosen Ethereum because of the higher level of adoption and familiarity among a much larger group of people than NXT and XEM. Also, we believe that because of the way the fund as well as the token will operate, Ethereum is the most logical platform. Like stated previously in this thread, the historical issue with this idea on the Ethereum platform wasn’t inherently an Ethereum issue, but an issue in the execution of the idea itself.

We acknowledge that there are certain vulnerabilities in the platform, however many of those risks can be minimized, we are focused on making a platform that individuals could opt to change as a part of a plan to minimize risk.

Like stated above, this post wasn’t meant to be a coin/ICO promotion.

As far as Ethereum as a platform for this sort of thing goes - what bugs are you concerned about that are inherent to the platform? Also, why do you think ICO’s are a mess right now?
Part of the reason we’ve chosen to use the Ethereum platform because of its relatively widespread adoption and user base, but we certainly don’t think it’s perfect on a technical level. 

This thread was not intended to be a promotion for any token, coin, ICO, or anything of the sort. We’re purely looking for feedback on our concept and are seeking to get the communities opinion on our planned solutions to what we see as the causes of failure of similar projects in the past.

Since you say there’s too much decentralized shit in this day, can you elaborate on why you don’t like decentralization in this context?

Like someone else in this thread has already mentioned, the Ethereum fund blowup in July wasn’t Ethereum’s fault as a platform, it was the fund itself that had major security issues.
That being said, yes it’s risky in the sense that there will always be security issues, but ideally we can take advantage of the failure of those before us and learn + build from their experience.

Hi my name is George, I’m developing a decentralized fund on Ethereum called Vega Fund. We are new and are looking for people that may be interested in early involvement. We are looking for community feedback and would like this to be an area for people to ask questions. If your interested in talking directly or joining our conversation on slack, please just give me a message and we can talk.