What is the difference between a Guild and a DAO?

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Great post. I was looking for more posts like this as I am newer to the forums. I made one recently Scalability of a Society to Realize the NEAR Creator Economy Vision

  1. I believe is goes back to how it formed. If a community came together and build a system to sustain it’s culture, values, objectives AND the community has the ability to change those objectives as it sees fit then that is a Guild or what I argue is a Decentralized State(DS). As this is a human first system it can be exploited or have issues based on human elements such as emotion. You cant instill fear into a DAO unless a DAO is somehow coded to act with fear. You can instill fear in a Guild/DS and influence it’s actions

If the the system was designed for a specific purpose and operates out of technical protocol then it’s a DAO. Protocols can’t deviate as they are logic based system. Elements within the system may fail which is where a DAO gets the “bug” patched through updating the code or changing the protocol and keeps going. A DAO is protocol first system.

This difference is important because in a DAO the limitations are technical limitations. In a Guild/DS its sociological limitations. We spend a ton of time and money looking at technical fixes but I don’t see the same investment into understanding how people operate within the decentralized space.

  1. A Guild/DS can operate as many DAOs as it wants. The Guild/DS is what sustains the human elements and communities. The larger you can scale it the more DAOs it can support. Ultimately as a DAO requires human capital it needs sources of people to pull from and incentivize so you cant scale a DAO without a sufficient pool of required human capital. This is why you need to invest in both DAO and Guild/DS Scalability because they both need each other for us to make a decentralized society work.

  2. At the concept level no but we need to more concretely define what each are. That said there are likely some Guilds that are truly DAOs and some DAOs that are truly Guilds.

  3. My view is a DAO cant make the first DAO. A DAO needs to be designed by someone either a community or another DAO. As such top level is always a community.

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