RE: Is The DAO going to be DOA?
I agree completely, but the incentive to vote must be tied to providing new information to the system. Otherwise, everyone will vote for the money rather than vote for the result.
With Steem we set out to reward voting, especially voting by large stakeholders. But the voting rewards are tied to how much new information is provided (relative increase in total votes) as well as to the final outcome (total paid on a post).
A DAO attempting to fund projects needs to tie voting rewards to the outcome achieved. Those who vote for something should have more exposure than those who are neutral. Those who vote against something (assuming negative voting is supported) should be hedged against the failure by those who vote for it. A prediction market is superior to voting assuming there exists an objective means of settling the outcome.
Can we adopt this incentive voting (or variant) back to bitshares? I am not the developer, but there should be something to do to save Bitshares.
I suppose one metric of deciding this is the following: positive votes must be leveraged (short USD) and negative votes must be hedged (long USD). Votes can be weighted by their dollar value. Votes must also be "locked in" for a minimum period of time.
The only problem with such an approach is that it is impossible to prove someone is really "short".