gm gm! Thank you for putting forth Law of Chains v0.1 to the Collective.
FYI, I’m submitting this response on behalf of DAOstewards.
For some context: DAOstewards is a BanklessDAO-affiliated meta-governance group carrying Bankless values into the greater web3 ecosystem. Bankless is a movement stewarded by BanklessDAO, whose mission is to help people learn about and use decentralized, permissionless, and censorship-resistant technology to achieve financial self-sovereignty, security, and prosperity.
It’s on behalf of the BanklessDAO community that DAOstewards provides this feedback. Integrity is a guiding principle of the Bankless Nation, which means we operate transparently and build trust through radically public discourse. To this end we want to advocate for greater clarity about the Law of Chains so that we can have a fruitful public discourse.
We’d like to present a few considerations for future drafts:
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One core member of DAOstewards’ Optimism workstream is a former attorney who knows the effort and care taken in crafting this initial framework. However, while the dense legalese may be comprehensible to a trained attorney, it’s very difficult for most people to really understand what is being proposed.
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Core principles are shared and this is evident from introduction but the language following this is challenging for the non-technical user. While extremely thorough and clearly well considered, the text is dense and relies on the user’s prior knowledge of blockchain architecture, which reduces the impact of the principled language throughout.
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Bankless Publishing asked a practicing crypto lawyer @lawpanda to review the Forum post and provide his comments, which you can find here. As he highlights, the Law of Chains is a social contract and not a binding legal document, and one of the challenges / opportunities will be to create non-legally-binding ‘teeth’ to enforce the social norms captured within the document. As a social contract that defines the minimum standards for Superchain participants, the boundaries of this contract must be clearly understood by ecosystem participants regardless of their level of legal and technical expertise.
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Combine the dense language with the very human fear of seeming ill-informed, and this hard-to-parse proposal gets very little Forum action, as evidenced by the silence in what should be an active hall, in some way analogous to what we see in the Working Constitutional Forum post.
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Finally, an Executive Summary at the top of this Forum post and other official communique from the Collective or the Foundation summarizing the proposal in clear, simple language would be an immeasurable benefit.
Many members of BanklessDAO have been working to share the Optimistic Vision through our decentralized media nodes so it would be very helpful if documentation as important as this could be produced in plain English. This would greatly assist our team of international translators and would also be more welcoming for people new to the space no matter what their first language. And we’re certain this effort would not be helpful to the Bankless Nation alone. As we build radically new financial systems, let’s also use language to describe what we are attempting to build in ways that enable the many diverse members of the Collective to give their energy and input into these important discussions to help us all flourish.
Respectfully,
-DAOstewards