Synereo CTO talks about lessons from DAOs: how to avoid trust abuse

Synereo is working on figuring out how DAOs should work properly

When a system is not fully automated but requires people to have roles defined in smart contracts, the human element needs to be taken into account. They will be involved in the management of a decentralized system, as opposed to a fully automated system like Ethereum.

Who to believe?

This follows the recent hack of the DAO — or Decentralized Anonymous Organization — on the Ethereum platform, which led to a hard fork to recover the stolen funds. It also led to the separation of ETH and ETC — Ethereum Classic.

In an interview on the 75th episode of the Bitcoin Podcast titled Focus on Economics, Synereo CTO Greg Meredith — considered an expert in computing with numerous academic publications — firmly believed that making computer programs fully autonomous is a risk.

Meredith said:

"You can't visually inspect and investigate a program and say what's going on. Even if you investigate other kinds of automation, it becomes very difficult to really understand all the twists and turns that a program can do. Computer programs are mysterious. But they don't have those human qualities that connect us to each other. At this point, handing over the keys of the kingdom to this new automated agent without any reflection is not a good proposition. I think that's where we are."

What can be done with hundreds of millions of interconnected contracts?

According to Meredith, computer languages ​​and programs are based on mathematics that operate within a certain range of functions. What they can do and the range of what they can do are not fully known.

Meredith explained:

"First of all, you can't know that with a single program. It gets more complicated when we imagine millions of contracts and instances of those contracts. The second million is instances of those contracts that are running. So we're talking about literally hundreds of millions of interconnected contracts. Just thinking about that, we can understand the dynamics of that scale - we really can't know."

Earlier in the interview, the podcast host said that Synereo’s formally verified smart contract language, Rholang, could have prevented the DAO attack.

They also said they received positive responses from many of the conversations they had about sharing Synereo’s “DAO-proof” code. Interest in working with the platform and leveraging their smart contract framework has increased.

Synereo and its social model

Synereo offers a social model - one that integrates the measurement of empathy into its code. Their reputation mechanism ensures that people still need to trust each other, locking the controls assigned to them into formally verified smart contracts - making trust more difficult to abuse.

The technology behind it had been in development for more than four years before they wanted to use it to create a sustainable model for decentralized social networks to make money.

By September, its Alpha version will begin as a testnet-style program. This will allow its team to work with users on issues, listen to ideas, gain progress, and validate approaches before bringing smart contracts, funding DAOs or DCOs, etc.