DO’s or Decentralized Organizations, according to Vitalik’s white paper, are organizations that don’t have the typical hierarchical structure. Instead, there are a core few humans operating under a set of rules that make decisions based on a specified set of rules, operating on a blockchain. 

DAO’s or Decentralized autonomous organizations take this a step further. They are defined as a group organized around a mission that coordinates through a shared set of rules enforced on a blockchain, run using smart contracts.

DAO’s are often referred to as internet native organizations and this is how we were always supposed to collaborate in a world on the internet. But surely we had DAO’s that were not so internet native because the idea of a DAO seems intuitive and convenient. That being said, we would assume a system evolved into a DAO in the past because that’s just the direction efficient and lean systems evolve towards. Most of these are not formally labeled as DAO’s possibly because the decentralization is not as evident without the blockchain.

I want to go down a rabbit hole. Most of this is just me thinking out loud and wild speculation supported by some level of logic and math, and I am hoping I’ll learn something while I am at it.

There are several introductory pieces on what DAO’s are and how they are different to traditional organizations but that’s not what I want to dive deep into. I want to talk about a DAO that is not native to the Internet. Maybe not an organization in a true sense of the word, but a lot of moving parts operating in a decentralized way under a set of rules, towards a common goal. I want to talk about the atom. 

Atoms operate under a theory called the standard model. It is a set of rules that define the behavior of (almost) all fundamental particles that make up everything in the universe. 

How do elementary particles operate and what are the sets of rules they follow to define and make up our universe. Before talking about how the particles follow a decentralized autonomous system, let's meet each particle first.

Electron: floating all around the atom and at any position the electron is observed, that’s where we find it.

Up Quark: one of the two main quarks that makes up a proton carrying a fractional charge +2/3 

Down Quark: the second main quark with a charge of -1/3

Neutrinos: unlike the others, these are extremely light and barely interact with anything. These peculiar particles travel millions of years uninterrupted and not reacting with anything otw.

These are the 4 matter particles that, combining in different ways, make up everything we know of but each one of these particles, the electron, up quark, down quark, and the neutrino, have different generations. These are the exact same type of particles but with different masses. And each type has exactly 3.

We never come across these heavier generations of particles in daily life because they are super unstable and quickly turn into their more stable, lighter versions. These are the names of each of the 3 generations of the particles with their masses.

We talked about the particles that make up all matter, the fermions, but there’s another category of particles in the standard model. The particles that carry the forces: the bosons. The three fundamental forces in nature each carried by a different type of boson.

In one way of thinking, we can think of bosons as constantly being exchanged between fermions (our matter particles) while influencing their motion.

Photons: These bosons carry the fundamental force, electromagnetism and they interact with only the charged particles. The electrons, the up and the down quark. 

Gluons: This particle lives up to its name because it sticks quarks together. The fundamental force carried by this particle is the strong nuclear force.

W and Z bosons: These particles are carriers of the weak force. The only force that reacts with every other type of particle on the standard model including the neutrinos. 

Higgs Boson: One particle that acts as the decentralization entity and ties the standard model together. None of the fundamental particles have mass on their own. The Higgs gives them mass.

** **The Higgs boson was discovered in 2012 and was predicted to have existed 48 years prior. Because it is essential to the completeness of the standard model theory. It is the one particle that gives mass to every other particle in the standard model.

Let's take a step back and think about mass. What is mass anyway and why is it one of the most important properties of elementary particles? Mass is the only thing that is keeping every particle from traveling at the speed of light. Every massive particle can travel at any speed, as long as it is less than the speed of light and every massless particle can and will travel at the speed of light. 

When talking about anything at the quantum scale, the framework used is the quantum field theory (QFT) framework. Which means particles are not behaving like small marbles but instead each particle is behaving like a tiny wave or disturbance. Diving deep into QFT will be a newsletter on its own. 

For now we just need to know that since each of these particles is accompanied by a field, the Higgs particle is also accompanied by the Higgs field and this Higgs field exists everywhere. The stronger the interaction with the Higgs field, the more massive the particle. One analogy describing the Higgs field interacting with elementary particles uses the Higgs field as a crowd and particles as famous people. If you are a famous person, you will interact with numerous people in the crowd and move slowly. If you don’t know anyone, you will move through the crowd quickly and not interact with the Higgs field. Of course this person is analogous to a particle with less mass. But these are just analogies describing the interaction with the Higgs field and gaining mass. Why do particles interact with the Higgs field in the first place? The short answer, according to this publication from the symmetry magazine is: we don’t know. 

I am marveling at the decentralization here so I want to keep talking about the Higgs field for a minute. In 1967, Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam and American physicist Steven Weinberg independently took the idea of W Bosons and Photons respectively, and concluded how one could have mass and one could be massless while using the same theoretical framework of the Higgs mechanism. They laid the basis of the what we know today as the electroweak theory which they received the 1979 Nobel prize for.

The Higgs mechanism, can be understood in a simplified way, look a the Higgs potential and its interactions. The Higgs potential at all energies above 160 GeV, is flat and does not interact with anything. This means the particles below this energy level will not interact with the Higgs field, and will remain massless, like photons. But at energies below 160 GeV, the Higgs potential looks a lot different and since the Higgs field has a non zero vacuum potential at this energy, the W bosons will interact. 

The more I study about the Higgs Boson, the deeper my conviction that this is a truly decentralized system. Calculations show that if the mass of the Higgs boson were just a few times heavier and everything else stayed the same, protons could no longer assemble into atoms, and there would be no complex structures — no stars or living beings. So the Higgs mechanism of providing mass only works because it is fine tuned to carry out this specific task. Any tiny fraction value deviation in mass breaks the system apart and particles do not get their mass in the way we understand and atoms don't exist.

** **

We are still learning about the Higgs. Just last week, a new mode of the Higgs was discovered and furthered our understanding of the standard model and raised more questions at the same time. 

If the autonomous part of a DAO is the underlying code that is executed on the blockchain then the code for the standard model, the underlying set of rules that define every single interaction that occurs in the standard model is the standard model equation. 

The full equation governing the standard model is is about a complete A4 page in length containing over 200 terms take a look here

Luckily we have a condensed version. If you are a curious reader and just want to understand what the governing rules of the standard model are. This 6 term equation is a good start. 

The equation is represented in the Lagrangian form. The entire universe can be represented by the mathematics that account for energy and that is what the Lagrangian is. 

The first term holds information on all the different ways in which the Bosons, the force carrying particles, interact with each other in all the different directions of space, and the one direction of time. 

Second term is about fermions, the matter particles and their interaction with gauge fields. It describes how matter interacts with forces. How quarks interact with the fundamental forces and sums it over all the different quarks being considered in the system. 

The third and fourth term describe how the bosons interact with the Higgs Field and how the Higgs field reacts with itself respectively. And the 5th term describes how the fermions react with the Higgs fields. 

Finally the last term, h.c. is the hermitian conjugate that describes the interaction of the Higgs field with antimatter. 

Laying out out like this, every interaction in the standard model falls under the 6 categories that I describe above and using this code, nature is running almost anything we can think of, autonomously. 

Although the standard model is not a complete equation involving all forces in nature, it's the closest thing we have to a complete theory until we develop one that includes gravity or dark matter.

 I think DAO’s are super cool and they are disrupting our current understanding of corporate structure but they are not a new way of doing things. The answer to building the most efficient operation has always been building a decentralized autonomous mechanism and we see it in science taking place in different forms. 

I am keeping an open mind to any feedback or suggestions I get on this newsletter.

Have a good day, 

Rahim