Take it with a grain of salt since the guy writing it is totally going to benefit from The DAO doing well. But TheDAO seems very promising and the sale is seemingly doing splendid even taking into account that its "money raised" can be turned into fiat in a whim.
insomniasexx mk, what do you guys think the real value of TheDAO / the Tokens is?
I think it's a very interesting experiment. I have much more invested in The DAO than Digix, and I have a lot of faith and trust in the Slock.it team, again much more than Digix. Not saying that Digix isn't the following, but I have seen nothing but smart, quick-moving, ambitious, a bit dreamy, from Slock.it. This is their baby, and they love it and want nothing for the best to it. They want to change the world, and they are smart enough that they may be able to make a dent in it.
I do think that at this point there is a bit more $$ than I would liked in The DAO. I think for an interesting experiment, $200M is probably a bit much. But, I have no doubt that the key players (Slock.it, other proposers, key community members who have stepped up, etc) are going to do everything in their power to try to make it better and the code better and address issues.
I think the real value of The DAO is one more step towards a more decentralized world, one more thing that gets referenced when people are trying big things, one more thing that either proves or disproves the impossible debate regarding wisdom of the crowd.
A blockchain based tech at scale is "decentralized" in the same sense that a large number is subject to factorization. Bitcoin is almost perversely designed to mask its unquestionable tendency to create centers of (computing) power under a guise of anonymous and decentralized protocol.
(Pre-emting the "fork it" reply, allow me the rejoinder to you to go and "fork" the social graph of Facebook.]