DAOs, DACs, DAs and More: An Incomplete Terminology Guide | Ethereum Foundation Blog

The idea of a decentralized organization takes the same concept of an organization, and decentralizes it. Instead of a hierarchical structure managed by a set of humans interacting in person and controlling property via the legal system, a decentralized organization involves a set of humans interacting with each other according to a protocol specif... See more

Generally, decentralized applications fall into two classes, likely with a substantial gray area between the two. The first class is a fully anonymous decentralized application. Here, it does not matter who the nodes are; every participant is essentially anonymous and the system is made up of a series of instant atomic interactions. BitTorrent and ... See more

A decentralized application is similar to a smart contract, but different in two key ways. First of all, a decentralized application has an unbounded number of participants on all sides of the market. Second, a decentralized application need not be necessarily financial. Because of this second requirement, decentralized applications are actually so... See more

Autonomous agents are on the other side of the automation spectrum; in an autonomous agent, there is no necessary specific human involvement at all; that is to say, while some degree of human effort might be necessary to build the hardware that the agent runs on, there is no need for any humans to exist that are aware of the agent’s existence. ... See more

All in all, it is safe to say that “DAOism” is well on its way to becoming a quasi-cyber-religion. However, one of the hidden problems lurking beneath the space is a rather blatant one: no one even knows what all of these invididual terms mean. What exactly is a decentralized organization, what is the difference between an organization and an appli... See more