In the (ongoing) aftermath of the DAO hack, a few ideas sprang to mind for future DAOs, should there ever be any. These are just ideas that could be used in various circumstances, but aren’t intended to be internally consistent or all used in one DAO.

1. Crowdfund it Kickstarter style: A future DAO could be structured so that people can send ETH to support a specific proposal, meaning you vote with your wallet. If a funding threshold is reached, then funders receive tokens and the funds can be dispersed to a contractor according to an agreed-upon protocol (monthly, quarterly, if specific milestones are met, etc.). If the threshold is not reached within a certain time, then the ETH is returned to the addresses it was sent from. No splitting required.

2. Burnable tokens instead of child DAOs: Don’t like where your DAO is going? Send your tokens to it and have some appropriate ratio of ETH sent back to the address you sent from. This would work with individual accounts, and perhaps exchanges would be willing to support this kind of functionality in the future.

3. Voting should not prevent transfer of value: this could mean having separate voting tokens and trading tokens. The voting tokens could be locked, but the trading tokens not.

4. Delegated voting: besides splits, not one proposal to The DAO got more than about 10% of the 20% quorum needed to pass. My belief is that partly, voting required some technical savvy, and partly, many people were investing in the DAO hoping for returns but not really intending to vote. This stance paradoxically lowers the probability of returns, if few or no proposals get passed.

For those who don’t intend to vote, it would be beneficial to delegate your voting rights to a person who could evaluate proposals and vote intelligently on your behalf. This would go a long way towards reaching quorum, and it could always be possible rescind the delegation as desired. If being a delegate became a paid position, this would create a market for intelligent decision-makers. (This idea *may* be more than 200 years old :-)).

5. Man-traps: Out of luck rather than design, The DAO had a built-in ‘man-trap‘, in that any child DAO needed to go through the built-in 27-day creation period before funds from a split could be accessed. For future DAO’s, deliberately building in waiting periods before funds can be accessed might be desirable (although I imagine in the future the Ethereum developers and miners will not come riding to the rescue of errant smart contracts).

6. Shut-down protocol: Not simple to implement, but if a smart contract holding ETH comes under attack, it would be useful to have means of safeguarding the funds. This could be as simple as:

Have a procedure for halting all withdrawals, reversibly or irreversibly, either through a vote or using multiple signatures (multi-sig).

A burn-and-refund protocol for tokens (see Burnable tokens above). It might work well if this could only be halted separately from other withdrawals, or not at all.

Some may complain that a couple of these ideas result in a degree of centralization of control. In my view, pure de-centralization may not be practical in the real world. The Curators of The DAO had some small centralized role to play, and probably where large amounts of funds are concerned, the protective oversight of a few individuals is desirable. As I see it, Winston Churchill’s words cut both ways: “Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” DAOs have to be safe to work.