I'm currently investigating The DAO and it looks incredible. It seems like a great model to build businesses like-minded people can support based on their own beliefs and goals, however, I have some worries about the current offering from daohub.org.
I get that you can vote on whether or not a proposal goes through.
My understanding is that if you vote NO, you can withdraw your ETH before the proposal goes through.
This all leads to a perception that you have absolute control of your investment but I believe that's true up to a point.
We all know that in order to have more say in a DAO, all you need to do is buy more DAO - which is fair enough. If you have a larger stake, you should have a larger say and this is where my doubts begin.
What's to prevent the main stakeholders of The DAO from ensuring they have the majority share by buying up just enough DAO to maintain that position? You would only needed to have been an early adopter in ETH or you'd need a cash equivalent of around USD1.7M at TODAYS price (USD460) to do that. You'll need more and more ETH/cash before this is up but these amounts of money are tiny in the financial world.
With control of the DAO, you now have a huge amount of funds at your disposal. You've effectively doubled your money.
Now you can put in a proposal to pay for some big project that you control. You could effectively pay yourself a huge sum of money to build a product that will return 5% of any revenue.
You now have a lot of cash that built a project that you keep and you'll only pay 5% of any profit it makes. Now that sounds like a bargain to me.
To make matters worse, you can now sell your large stake (because all the funds have been extracted from it) and you're all done.
You can tell me that this will never happen but then I'll point you to the numerous examples of people getting conned by organisations that all claim to be reputable.