I don't think these people realize the futility of their effort. The US Constitution isn't something to be bought and sold. Assigning a dollar value to it is the literal anti-thesis of everything that is outlined in the document itself.
"For the first time in thirty-three years, one of thirteen surviving copies of the Official Edition from the Constitutional Convention will be publicly auctioned by Sotheby's. It is one of the two copies that are still owned by private collectors. The proceeds from the auction will be given to a charity that has been established by the current owner.
ConstitutionDAO is a DAO that is pooling together money to win this auction. We intend to put The Constitution in the hands of The People. "
I understand what they're doing. The Constitution already belongs to the people, no copies need to be bought or sold for this to be the case. That's what I mean by futility of their effort. Their project betrays a profound misunderstanding of the US Constitution.
It doesn't demonstrate any of that. This was pumped on Twitter, Reddit, and other centralized aggregators which defeats the entire argument about decentralized mass coordination.
fine, i cant be bothered with hn anymore. so you can say ok its discord and twitter.
but crypto is fun. people will keep having fun.
we can ignore that and write it off as has been the case for the past ten years, or we can recognise 10% of americans have coinbase app installed. that this is reality. and people can keep saying "we could do this without crypto" but it doesnt change the fact we didnt do it without crypto, we did it with crypto. and then can start to investigate why that is, or bury our heads in the sand saying "show me a real use case"
we can start to investigate why thousands of people are willing to essentially donate money towards a meme, what that sense of community and collective ownership is about, and what this means for the future, and how this tech is enabling that and how we can channel it -> there already talks of BailFundDAO and ReparationsDAO off the back of this...
I can see why you're exasperate but you can also see why sensible people don't think crypto is anything more than a toy. So far it has had no positive real world impact. Most aspects of crypto are dominated by childish memes which drives away sensible people from investing time and effort into doing something meaningful with the technology. The childish culture will have to change for the technology to have any meaningful impact.
I'm very pro-crypto, and also very pro exploring DAOs as an organizing structure.
But this one feels so rushed that I won't be surprised if scandals and controversies follow. A lot has to be done properly here, and there's a lot of places things can go wrong.
If the aftermath has problems that are too spectacular, it could cause trouble for more carefully planned efforts.
So let me get this straight. There is an auction for a priceless (well, very expensive) item.
A group is trying to raise funds to buy this item, but is not guaranteed to win the auction anyways. Participating in an auction while having a publicly known funding cap feels like a poor position to be in.
Further, let's suppose the group wins the auction, and is now the proud owner of a copy of the Constitution. This entire end goal of this project seems dependent on finding a partner that is willing to cover all the costs associated with storage, display, security, etc of this high value item.
This feels like a whole lot of "ifs" for a project trying to collection $20M.
>Additionally, the community has expressed strong preferences for institutions that are free to the public and willing to cover the costs associated with housing the document.
Had to laugh at this. I'd have a strong preference for others subsidizing my questionable decisions too.
I think it's more than that; "preference" aside, if you can't find a partner willing to cover the costs, how will the upkeep costs be paid for? I see 3 options:
1. They are required to raise additional funding for maintenance. I'm not sure I'd bet on them having the same interest in this project in a couple of months
2. The DAO neglects the item, and it gets irrecoverably damaged/destroyed. The ConstituationDAO has now effectively destroyed a copy of the constitution
3. They find themselves in the position of having to firesale the item in a couple of months when they're unable to cover the associated costs.
I'll also add that it would be _possible_ for the DAO to have enough funding after purchasing the item to generate income/returns that can cover the associated costs. Given that their funding is public, and will be participating in an auction, I'm not sure I would bet on having a whole of of funds left over.
I think it's very unlikely they won't be able to find some organisation to host the document.
For an organisation like a museum, who already have secure climate controlled storage, and are already open to the public, it would cost next to nothing extra to keep it.
Yet merely having a copy of the constitution will get many more people through the doors to buy postcards in the shop and coffee in the cafe. That will far outweigh the added costs.
> We intend to put The Constitution in the hands of The People.
Like the US Archives aren't owned by the government of the people. Instead this will be owned by a very few ETH holders willing to participate.
But this might be one of the biggest fundraisers I've seen and it probably wouldn't have happened without the crypto ecosystem. For that, I am very excited.
it has previously been in a private collection, and without constitutiondao would end up in another private collection.
the intention of the dao is clear, display it in a public museum with free entry.
and yes, from a joke last friday to likely suceeding in less than a week! exciting. the velocity of daos is remarkable, and i think it is a just a small hint of what is to come in the future. and it is coming quick.
(meanwhile i expect hn to continue talking about tulips or something :)
Have there been any DAOs designed for long term impact that have been successful at their intended task? Is there a DAO for nuclear fusion and fission projects or anything else that has real world relevance?
Cool idea but this makes too much sense for anyone in the crypto community to take it seriously. They mostly care about what gets the most likes and upvotes on Twitter and Reddit.
you’re criticizing this approach, but twitter and reddit matter. how do you get 10000 people to each give $2000 to a project over the course of 3 days? no startup, no matter how good their product, pulls that off without a strong marketing team. most fail even with traditional marketing.
how do you sell to the millenial/zoomer audience? memes. you make it a social experience. you create not just shared governance over a document, but an entire community around it. organize events like watch parties, etc. especially covid era, creating communities is more valuable to certain groups than is creating an incrementally better search engine.
I don't understand what you're arguing. I don't find meaning, value, and substance in memes and digital communities structured around DAOs. I'd much rather be involved in some real world community that is working towards solving some tangible problem instead of wasting my time speculating on pixelated NFTs or buying something that already belongs to every citizen of the United States.
I think you're missing the point. What if it became a meme to collectivize around a DAO that meme-ifies fighting climate change? Would that be something that interests you? A good example of someone that already altruistic things for the world and makes it fun is Mr. Beast on youtube.
For instance on a quick search I found this video of him rallying a bunch of people to clean an extremely dirty beach.
Humor and productivity don't have to be mutually exclusive. Maybe humor and fun is the way we get the average person to engage in collective action and do things that everybody thinks are impossible otherwise.
Maybe you could use your imagination a little bit to potentially think about why something like ConstitutionDAO might have larger implications than "it's just another ponzi-scheme. Or fall in line with the rest of Hacker News that fails to see how real people can benefit from an interesting technology.
Please explain to me how real people are benefiting from buying something that already belongs to them or how meme-ifying a global existential crisis is beneficial. I mentioned in another comment that I find the crypto community to be childish and seeing things like this does not convince me the community is mature or sensible enough to tackle real problems.
Madagascar is currently going through a humanitarian crisis. Millions of people are facing starvation there and are likely to perish from it [1]. Is anyone in the crypto community trying to coordinate and organize some kind of humanitarian aid for Madagascar? Because if they did that then it would prove to everyone that this technology could be used to affect meaningful change for people in the real world.
This specific copy of the constitution doesn't belong to the people, it is privately held and being auctioned. But if you are talking about the ideas of the Constitution belonging to the people, then how is that any different than the ideas of the blockchain and cryptosphere belonging to the people?
That's the beauty of ConstitutionDAO, it is quite literally proving that we have new ways in organizing and collectivizing. As a signal of that they are buying the constitution so that the people can take back what is rightfully ours. It gives people the freedom to try and solve new and complex problems in new ways.
Memes are the rallying cry of Gen-Z. DAOs are just a tool for organizing. The crypto community may not be ones to rally for Madagascar and I'm not expecting them to! But, DAOs give YOU the power to try and rally the people so we can do something. Rather than trusting you to manage the funds, the collective can trust the smart contract and vote on how they want to approach solving the problem, which professionals they want to delegate to to solve the problem and so forth.
This is so much more than trying pump shitcoins or ponzischeme. This is about allowing societies to collectivize in ways they never have before. You and your neighbors want to start a solar coop? DAO. A neighborhood is lacking the funds to support the local schools? DAO. The county wants to try and build a water treatment plant because they can't get funding from the Fed/State for clean water treatment? DAO.
DAOs will exist in all shapes and sizes and for different causes. Some will fail and some will succeed, but that's how innovation goes. While the technicals behind how these things will develop is still up in the air, this is the Netscape moment for crypto and nobody on Hackernews can come up with any other sort of justification for it not working other than it's a Ponzi Scheme.
None, but those are just a few I had the imagination to come up with. If you fail to see the value, you will at some point. As Jeff Bezos has been quoted saying, "Your margin is my opportunity." and opportunity right now is ripe.
I understand you are committed to this but you should understand that the adults in the room don't take any of it seriously. Jeff Bezos started a book store which he diligently grew to a eCommerce juggernaut. He did not start a project to buy what was rightfully his as a citizen of the United States. I'll repeat what I said previously, if you want people to take crypto seriously then the crypto community will have to start doing serious things instead of just having fun and shilling memes to buy a piece of paper at a Sotheby's auction.
Your generation is going to be faced with unimaginable hardships and the faster you folks grow up the faster you can start working on addressing real problems instead of wasting time on stuff like this.
The adults in the room don't take it seriously because they're blind to future advances. They think the current system can be upgraded and patched, but at present, that is impossible. It is fundamentally broken. The younger generation is already faced with unimaginable hardships and because of that has a tendency to be extremely dynamic and adaptive. They see the true problem as a coordination problem and crypto opens a new door with unexplored possibilities for coordination.
Crypto and thought schools adjacent to it combine elements of Libertarianism and Socialism in ways that were unable to exist before their advent. These typically contradictory ideologies can be combined in a new way that help us overcome these systemic coordination problems and let us execute collective action faster. Find me another cause that has raised 40 million dollars in less than a week where funds are held in escrow by a computer contract.
To expand on that the field I work in is communication by nature and I'm literally planning on pitching a project to a startup DAO this evening. This project may quite well open the door for people in my field to jump start a new way of funding projects which makes sure that Consumers, project contributors and everyone involved are compensated in a fair way while also not requiring a private investor. This literally would have been impossible without a DAO.
If the pitch goes well and the project is successful it would allow me to undercut all of my potential competitors. As people who enjoy a free market might say "That's just business baby". Then on top of that, because of the nature of how it's structured, nobody is exploited and no rent is extracted from a private party.
Good point about combining markets and social aspects but that is possible without DAOs as well. You're confusing the hype with the actual underlying technology and blockchains are not necessary to have any of what you described.
Good luck with your pitch. Sounds like a cool project.
Thanks. If you're willing to expand on your thoughts about blockchains not being necessary to any of the things I described, I would like to hear it. I'm honestly looking for any reason to be wrong on this, and I have yet to find that reason.
How else could ConstitutionDAO have raised funds as quickly as they have and in a secure manor without an intermediary company/legal entity holding the pooled funds?
How is ConstitutionDAO not a legal entity? It seems like once people bought into the DAO they could not reclaim their funds so it was essentially acting as a trusted escrow service. Since they were acting as a de facto escrow service this could have been accomplished with existing financial services. Most escrow companies don't care why they're holding the money and the issue would have been convincing them that this is a reasonable thing to do. But convincing an escrow company that what you're doing is sensible in this case is a feature and not a bug because they would have immediately pointed out the obvious issues with this scheme.
In fact, going through an escrow service would have kept the amount hidden and given them an edge in actually being able to win the auction but this wasn't their goal. They wanted to show that they could hype this up and get people to sign up for it. I doubt they were ever serious about actually placing the winning bid which goes back to my original point about the crypto community not being serious about anything other than hype. I understand they're trying to grow the network of people that participate in the crypto community but shenanigans like this prove my point about them not being serious.
ConstitutionDAO exists as a smart contract on Ethereum, not a legal entity. Funds pooled in that contract are spent at the discretion of users in the DAO, by contributing to the DAO you agree to the multisig stipulation (this could vary depending on the DAO).
Because the constitution and ownership of the constitution is managed in the current legal and financial world (centralized), the DAO has to bridge out of the decentralized network to purchase it. Since no decentralized system exists in the current legal infrastructure they had to incorporate in Wyoming to make the purchase. (I don't think they would have been required to do this if Sothebys had an Ethereum Wallet)
If the DAO had won the bid and kept the constitution and managed it, nobody from the centralized world would be able to purchase the Constitution without the permission of the DAO and it's 17 thousand users (aka a buyer coming into decentralized territory). This is the purpose of the purchase, it is purely symbolic. The metaphorical possession of the DAO sets the precedent that blockchains can set a new standard for building Governance systems. What better way to demonstrate the growth of innovative governance bodies than buying the foundational document of modern day governance itself?
Moreover, it may be wrapped up in humorous memes and shitposts, but the sentiment is the same. That being the blockchain is a contender for overthrowing all current financial systems, and by proxy Governance as well. This is the whole idea behind the metaverse. Emergent and collaborative digital cities that are representative of real world communities working together to solve real problems like climate change, world hunger, poverty, education and every other problem you could think of. It breaks the shackles of the masters inside corporations and the masters inside the government.
Also, after losing the bid, do you think it is a coincidence that one of the men who stands to lose the most from the success of cryptocurrency was the person who won the auction?
-note, this is probably my last comment for this thread. I appreciate the friendly debate. I always like chatting with those who hold opposing views. I will definitely be pondering points you've brought up and do more reading.
> Like the US Archives aren't owned by the government of the people. Instead this will be owned by a very few ETH holders willing to participate.
The ConstitutionDAO changed their website to remove references to distributed ownership. They went on to clarify that owners of the token won't have fractional ownership of the copy of the constitution.
The also added clarification on the website about ownership questions:
> No. You are receiving a governance token, not fractionalized ownership. Governance includes the ability to advise on (for illustrative purposes) where the Constitution should be displayed, how it should be exhibited, and the mission and values of ConstitutionDAO. ConstitutionDAO is taking donations and donors are receiving governance tokens with no expectation of profit.
So someone will technically own it, but it won't be the people who bought these tokens. In theory the token holders can vote on things, but they go out of their way to clarify that the votes are advisory in nature.
Anyone who buys into this is basically making a donation to this group. The crypto and DAO stuff is just window dressing.
This is rather unfortunate. I understand they have good intentions of keeping an important document out of private collector hands but this would have been a stellar time to issue governance tokens and expose the wider world to the potential offered by DAOs.
> It cannot be taken for granted that they have good intentions.
This is where I pull back and kinda laugh with irony at the effort. Much of this process (most likely because of the hurried pace) seems to be "just trust us" but wasn't the whole point of the Constitution to build a system of checks and balances so we didn't have to just trust one group of people?
> "they have good intentions of keeping an important document out of private collector hands"
Well, out of other private collector hands, into their own private collector hands. As other commenters have pointed out, the members of the public who donate to this don't have any form of ownership.
They could have formed a 501c3 non profit, accepted tax deductible fiat donations, established a governance model, and arranged ongoing storage and viewing of the document. Private shared ownership could’ve been membership interest in an LLC managed by Carta or similar. LLCs have no membership limit unless taxed as an S corp (to my knowledge).
I bet if you brought Carta enough money they’d prioritize an option to make your ownership interest public and shareable on their backlog, by entity, individual participant, or however else you want to slice and demonstrate ownership interest.
> Private shared ownership could’ve been membership interest in an LLC managed by Carta or similar. LLCs have no membership limit unless taxed as an S corp (to my knowledge).
You can’t offer membership interest to the public unless you are registered with the SEC and in compliance with the states you make your public offering. There are some exceptions to the SEC for limits much lower than the ~$30M raised as of now.
but they didn’t offer a security or investment contract, they offered a token that gives holders a form of governance/voting.
You are saying you offered a suggested oath to “avoid unnecessary tech”, but you removed the concept of a voting right for a security.
There is plenty of precedent of the SEC responding favorably to “no action letter requests” without requiring registration when organizations publicly offer voting/governance rights in exchange for money.
but they didn’t offer a security or investment contract, they offered a token that gives holders a form of governance/voting.
You are saying you offered a suggested path to “avoid unnecessary tech”, but you removed the concept of a voting right for a security by suggesting they could have offered interest in an LLC.
There is plenty of precedent of the SEC responding favorably to “no action letter requests” without requiring registration when organizations publicly offer voting/governance rights in exchange for money.
> You are receiving a governance token, not fractionalized ownership. Governance includes the ability to advise on (for illustrative purposes) where the Constitution should be displayed, how it should be exhibited, and the mission and values of ConstitutionDAO.
uh, that’s what they’re doing. They ARE issuing governance tokens.
DAOs (distributed Autonomous Organizations) could be better thought of in a corporate governance framework.
A) Least distributed corporate governance: Sole proprietorship who owns 100% of their business
Every other organization sits between least and most distributed
B) Most distributed corporate governance: Full democracy state controlled
DAOs are special because the voting mechanism lets people vote across boarders/jurisdictions etc from their computer... but it also relies on the creators giving the right level of control to the DAO voting. If they gave voters 100% control, someone could do a 51% attack and have it destroyed, or something else. But, if they don't give enough control it is effectively a rug pull.
ConstitutionDAO is an amazing initiative because it puts so many assumptions up for a test, and crosses crypto world to mainstream. Its revolutionary.
The 'power' struggle is real... and fully on display
If there is an undemocratic layer exercising overall control then the net result is authoritarian. It would be neither distributed nor autonomous. It’s precisely why democratic governance generally tries to balance power between elements that can exercise checks on one another and why eroding those checks is so worrying.
Like if you’re trying to buy the constitution in a democratic fashion you’d think you’d at least try to understand what it means.
It's not amazing. Like any company (a DAO is just a company), it could be run well, by good people, or run badly, by bad people. Whichever ways it turns out will not prove anything about DAOs.
A DAO is more like a specific corporate governance mechanism than a company. For example, ConstitutionDAO will be a non-profit, with a non-profit board etc. I presume they will put things up for vote using the DAO.
If it is executed flawlessly it will prove DAOs as a viable corporate governance mechanism. If it fails or struggles, there will be learnings.
> For example, ConstitutionDAO will be a non-profit, with a non-profit board etc.
Ok but you can just form a 501(c)(3) whenever you want right, which actually has some force of law over its activities.
> I presume they will put things up for vote using the DAO.
But... they don't have to.
It's all fun and games until there's a disagreement over what to do. The way in which a meaningful disagreement is resolved is what will prove the viability of this model. When everyone's aligned already, it doesn't really prove much.
> DAOs are special because the voting mechanism lets people vote across boarders/jurisdictions etc from their computer... but it also relies on the creators giving the right level of control to the DAO voting.
Aren't these votes broadly speaking non-binding?
Is this really any different than an LLC that runs a periodic twitter poll?
Yes, one major difference between DAOs and LLCs is that DAOs exist in a nebulous legal space and might technically be general partnerships. Members of a DAO have potentially unlimited liability if it gets sued.
I think you're right that the lack of fractional ownership undermines what should be the primary benefit of the crypto + DAO model.
However, I think they aren't doing the fractional ownership to avoid running afoul of securities laws-- ie. this is a coincidental drawback of this instance of a DAO under today's US laws, and less so a fundamental issue with the DAO model.
90% of what “ownership” of a non yield-bearing asset gets you is governance over the project. We’ve seen things like UNI and ENS which are governance tokens w/o any yield component, and they keep value. So it’s sort of just a game of semantics. Plenty of people are contributing to this expecting that the governance token will be worth as much as their contribution — you’re just not supposed to be super vocal about that to avoid drawing attention from the SEC.
While also true, the reason they changed the wording is for regulatory purposes, and is not at all the limitation of the token or the project.
This is standard word games in crypto projects that are acknowledging their US components. Keeps the SEC off their backs.
It is not possible for projects to compete with asian crypto token offerings that say speculation inducing things. But if you understand already you can see through it and speculate wildly for great reward.
The site has a total deposited and a "goal" number. When the total deposited passed $25 million, the goal jumped from $25 million to $30 million. When does it stop?
They're fundraising for a Sotheby's auction, so I think they basically want to raise as much as they can to be able to win the auction. Apparently they were told that it would likely sell for ~$40m, with bidding starting at $20m.
The auction will not sell for any less than the maximum amount the DAO has raised.
If the DAO are heavily incentivized to bid, and you know what their max value is, somebody will bid them up. Sotheby’s is too smart not to make sure that happens.
It is generally a moronic idea to raise funds for an auction like this. You will never get a good deal and your competition knows exactly what your limit is.
I certainly have had the same thoughts, but I think it's a little different when you're up in these prices ranges and on a very high profile item. There's a lot at stake, not just for the dao, but Sotheby's as well. Not to mention the possibility the other bidders could conceivably be left holding the bag.
fortunately, aside from Sotheby’s fees, the current owner pledged to give all proceeds from the auction to her charity. it’s not perfect, but it makes the prospect of overpaying far less painful IMO.
Now they're up to $31 million received, $35 million goal. This now looks like a dark pattern intended to deceive contributors into thinking it's almost there.
Now at $34,971,088 / $35,000,000. "100% of goal". It seems to spend a lot of time just below the threshold.
Is someone checking the blockchain address involved to see if this is for real? There's an awful lot of money going into this. I just saw it jump by US$1.2 million.
It's definitely real. There is some convoluted scheme involved where buying into it gives you the option of converting your shares into $people tokens which give you the advisory voting rights for what to do when they win their copy of the US Constitution. They're using something called Juicebox [1][2] which looks like a set of contracts that simplifies ERC20 token creation and management but the site is designed for children so it's hard to make sense of it.
Balance at time of writing this seems to be ~$38.75M (Ξ9,140.55) and the conversion rate is 1,000,000 PEOPLE/Ξ.
Someone commented this is basically a scam to generate a bunch of hype and transfer a whole bunch of money to whoever owns the contract for this DAO. Whatever money they don't use at the auction will presumably be distributed back to whoever bought into this based on their share of $people tokens (modulo gas fees). It's unclear if the DAO owners have extra shares or not but I guess that could be easily verified by someone who was willing to do the required detective work and chase some pointers on etherscan [3][4].
It’s going to be a disaster. I hope Sotheby’s doesn’t let them bid.
Either they do whatever the random people who hold tokens tell them to do—including, if you read their Discord, destroy it—or you don’t. In the latter case, everyone gets all upset that governance tokens are not real things and blockchain is, once again, not in fact “code is law”.
Main issue with the crypto community is they throw around words like "trust-less" without truly understanding what they mean so it's very hard to take them seriously. It is impossible to have markets and governments without trust. At some point digital transactions must be reified as real world actions and that means the people carrying out the actions must be trusted to do what is expected of them. There is no system that doesn't assume trust somewhere, the trusted base can be made smaller but it can never be entirely removed.
Trustless in the context of crypto means you don’t have to put your trust (if you don’t want to) a 3rd party because they don’t have the option to not do the right thing. It gives you the ability to know exactly what you will lose and what you will gain when you press confirm on a transaction. It doesn’t matter whether or not you trust the other person because they simply don’t have the ability to do anything other than the code–that you both can verify–says.
(This isn’t to say that there are no bad actors, but that a wolf in sheep’s clothing would be forced to act like the sheep it presented itself as.)
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. The real world requires trust. It doesn't matter what the code says. If I buy something then I have to trust that it will be delivered in some way by passing through trusted 3rd parties like FedEx. There is no way around trust. As soon as the digital makes contact with reality all mathematical guarantees of being "trust-less" are no longer relevant.
Ah, so the real world requires trust but despite what the blockchain says. I get what you mean now but you can still make it a lot easier.
Using your example, you could write a contract such that: you buy an item for X dollar amount, the contract holds it in escrow, waiting for FedEx to confirm receipt of the package and a deposit of Y% of X into a rolling insurance fund from both FedEX and the seller. At this point, if FedEx fails to deliver you’re fully refunded out of the insurance pool and the seller gets their money back. If they deliver, FedEx gets 90% of the insurance payment back, the shipper gets your payment, and they split the seller’s premium as a shipping fee. If the seller never drops off the package you get your money back.
You could even throw in a return period where a third party can confirm whether a bad package is eligible for refund.
There are obviously holes in this haphazard scenario but the big picture is that there’s a lot of stress that can be offloaded to a truly unbiased 3rd party, even if you can’t achieve full trustlessness in real life.
Yes, the point isn't that digitization is bad but that the crypto community is mostly full of people that don't really understand what they stand for and why. So whenever I hear things like "crypto is a trustless and distributed platform for democracy" I immediately assume that these people are not really serious about anything. They're just interested in parroting memes from Twitter and Reddit.
Who is in charge of confirming to the smart contract that FedEx delivered? Whoever you pick, they have a strong financial incentive to lie. If the recipient confirms, they can lie in order to keep the item and get their money refunded. If Fedex confirms, they can lie in order to keep the item and they only lose the shipping costs.
I beat this drum on HN and IRL and get tired of being downvoted for it.
Trust is a lower energy state - it allows specialization, and conservation of energy that might need to be spent defending against threats from different directions.
But people who hold anti-social ideas seem to indulge in thinking that they can create a novel system where they have no obligations, just privileges. Crypto prices going up causes these anti-social delusions to flourish because the increasing prices seem to validate the libertarian futurists fantasy of a world with no trade-offs, where we can avoid having responsibility to other humans.
This is not how a blockchain works though. Transactions are appended to the blockchain by a 3rd party that has discretionary power, not by some computer code.
> 3rd party that has discretionary power, not by some computer code.
I genuinely have no idea what you mean by this. Unless you manage a 51% attack there’s no discretion to be had. You can for sure push nonsense to the chain, but it would either be ignored or punished [1][2] in some cases.
For one thing, miners can choose which transactions to include in the transaction block. This means they have the power to censor transactions. The claim that a blockchain is uncensorable is untrue. Under certain assumptions, it's unlikely that transactions will be censored, but there's no guarantee that that will be the case (as would be if this process was handled by a set of predetermined rules, e.g. computer code).
The webpage says your token just lets you "advise" on what to do with it, which feels completely meaningless. The FAQ says:
>We recognize that much more detail is required here! Due to the unusual and extremely short timeline of needing to rally around obtaining the Constitution during the auction window, we have not been able to focus on giving the technical aspects of DAO governance mechanics the careful consideration and community deliberation this topic requires. The Delegates do not want to simply declare how this will work, and we will be working with the DAO community post-auction to make these decisions.
most successful crypto projects begin centralized and become distributed over time.
you can conceivably encode certain limits into the underlying LLC that physically stewards the document (“the document may not be intentionally destroyed”, etc) and then have the shareholder decisions be held via crypto votes. the problems which remain are the same problems existing corporations have: e.g. what happens if the company doesn’t fulfill their shareholder obligations? existing law provides mechanisms for recourse. if ConstitutionDAO goes the route outlined above, it’s really not much different than ordinary corporation-based ownership, just with a more accessible/visible shareholder voting/discussion mechanism.
>ConstitutionDAO is seeking an esteemed partner to publicly display the Constitution. The eventual home must have the expertise to properly house, store, and maintain the artifact. Additionally, the community has expressed strong preferences for institutions that are free to the public and willing to cover the costs associated with housing the document.
Really putting the cart before the horse on this, aren't we?
If they wanted to "essentially donate" it, they could just donate it. And if museums are jumping at the chance, they could have arranged it ahead of time.
I can't speak for other Americans, but as much as I try to see this as "organized by a bunch of kids for fun," I also feel a strong emotional attachment to the Constitution and an original copy of it. So I try to balance that "cool experiment" with "wait, what are they doing with a sacred document?" I say it genuinely, I feel torn by the excitement at the experiment and frustrated/angry at what seems to almost be a parody of the Constitution itself.
I think of it as a homage to the U.S. constitution actually. I respect your sentiment as it seems we are both coming from the same perspective. I, however, look at this not as a parody, but an incredible tribute and homage o the U.S. constitution....
If it brings attention to the constitution and bill of rights, so much the better. Besides, they will feature it in a public museum ( presumably ) so they will honor it and preserve it.
I guess for me, homage to the document would be people hunkering down to debate philosophies on how to structure governance to balance powers between a lower and higher level.
I could see maybe how it was showing more respect for the document, I guess I just wish it went a lot deeper.
So what’s the point? There is a copy of the Constitution that is owned by the American people. It’s on display in the National Archives in Washington, DC. So what’s the point of this DAO?
To me, it's more about the idea than the actual action on display here. Decentralizing a process than is normally very opaque and centralized is what's being attempted and it's a cool idea. Whether this is executed well or not, that's a different story.
I wonder if one of the main reasons it hasn't been decentralized is because it has been illegal to do so—selling shares/securities to the general public without disclosure of risks and other rules set forth by the SEC.
I remember being in the Bay Area back in 2014-16 and people talking about wanting to use Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms for not just buying products but owning the company, but kept getting stuck at the accredited investor requirements for private companies.
So, I guess I'm curious about this as a referendum on why we have securities laws and accredited investor laws and whether those should change or stay, I just don't think it's necessarily as brand new of an idea as it seems.
EDIT: The concept I was talking about is called equity crowdfunding [0] and the SEC opened it up to more people in 2012 [1].
I think these types of decentralized entities will collide with a long list of legal issues in the future. The technology is just moving too quickly for any elected official to understand. Just imagine that instead of buying this copy of the constitution, the resources were anonymously being used in some malicious way and there is no accountability along the way.
show me how this would have happened without crypto. in less than a week going from being a joke in a group chat to a registered organisation with $25m funding and a clear mission statement to take something from private ownership into public display.
people can keep dismissing how strong a coordination and communication tool crypto, is or we can start taking it seriously.
I don't see how any feature specific to crypto contributed here? The only coordination required is to get the requisite number of people to contribute - and that's a social problem, not a technical one.
Ignoring the questionable end-goal here, the 'crypto' aspect of this is apparently completely orthogonal to the fund-raising effort[1]. What's the point?
>No, the crypto bit absolutely doesn’t do anything useful
None of this would have happened without 'the crypto bit'.
People are just annoyed that crypto is happening and theyve been betting against it. they were so focused on the 'currency' aspect they missed that groups of people can coordinate, they missed that a reddit group can become a political force, they missed that people are buying land together, the missed that coordination is the killer app.
HN and the cynics have been telling us for years that none of this would work, and when we get examples of it working we hear "you could do this without x".
yes, in theory you could have a mysql database and a company registered in deleware, and stripe processing payments, and also companies in other countries to handle international payments, and blah blah.....
> HN and the cynics have been telling us for years that none of this would work, and when we get examples of it working we hear "you could do this without x". yes, in theory you could have a mysql database and a company registered in deleware, and stripe processing payments, and also companies in other countries to handle international payments, and blah blah.....
Or just use GoFundMe?
I agree that none of this would have happened without the crypto bit, but only for the reason that its a rushed and poorly thought out idea that crypto nerds are latching onto as proof that crypto finally has a high profile use beyond speculation.
In reality this solves effectively nothing that centralized systems don't while adding the risk of there being no legal recourse if the team decides not to do what the DAO says.
i'm far from hn cynic regarding crypto, but wholy shit, some of crypto projects/ICOs/NFTs are so dumb you have to have literally no brain cells to buy into them. including the one this post is about.
> None of this would have happened without 'the crypto bit'.
In the sense that it wouldn't have happened without a bunch of people suddenly finding themselves with so much wealth that spending it on a lark is fine and a nihilistic meme culture where throwing money at jokes is a growing global activity, sure.
Wouldn't it be nicer if millions were instead spent on fighting poverty?
yes, im a big supporter of thing like proofofhumanity ubi, also $400m was donated from crypto to the india covid relief fund over the past 6 months. These initiatives are great and happy to share any you have.
This week, on the back of constituitondao, people have started making other daos for other causes like repatriation of stolen historical artifacts https://twitter.com/bronzedaotweets
The crypto aspect serves a very important feature, hype. Anything tangential to crypto gets the attention of all of crypto twitter. This would not have nearly as much money in it if not for that hype.
One thing I do wonder though: at some point all this ethereum gets converted to dollars in order to buy the constitution. What does this DAO do with any "extra" dollars from the increasing value of ethereum?
Win the bid, then publicly burn this copy of the Constitution, as an act of sacrifice to imbue it's original rarity into a digital representation (some kind of NFT) that an unbounded number of people can own shares of, thereby transmitting the memetic essence of the object into the hyperverse to be preserved and treasured for trillions of years, long after all physical copies have disintegrated away.
Despite being seen as an unconscionable and horrific act of destruction by the citizens of meatspace, it could in reality end up being the most powerful act of preservation we could ever do.
Interesting idea. But doesn't this rely on public acceptance of the "imbuing of the original object's essence into NFT?"
How do you encourage people to associate the act of destruction with an act of value transfer?
As a counterexample, an art vandal destroying a piece of art does not inherit the value of the art, even though the vandal and art interact in a culturally significant way such that the art ceases to exist after the interaction.
First, I think there's a fundamental difference between a vandal destroying something they don't own, and the owner intentionally choosing to destroy it as an act of sacrifice.
Having said that, there actually is some power in the self sacrifice of engaging in a destructive act giving a person's message more power and attention (see Unabomber Manifesto as a prime example).
Second, at least a subculture of people already do accept destruction of real world things as an act that imbues the a digital entity with the real world scarcity. It's called proof of work, and bitcoin is constantly 'sacrificing' real world energy which imbues the token with value in many people's minds. Enough so make it a trillion dollar asset class.
Someone did this with a Banksy print a while back, bought it, burned it, sold it as an NFT. And the NFT sold for several times the value that the print would have. That was back in the NFT frenzy days of early-this-year though.
The reaction to burning the constitution would be overwhelmingly negative. Maybe like KLF's burning a million quid it would ultimately shake out as a powerful statement, but I sort of doubt it.
The fact that the NFT sold for more than the original print after the act suggests to me that the "sacrifice-value-transfer" is not an exact 1:1 process, since the resulting NFT had a different value. Yes, the owner is probably delighted that the NFT is worth more, but then I'd argue that "uploading a physical object's value to the digital realm" is no longer the right way to think about this.
It's so original you're the third person in this threat to propose it. Congratulations! So smart!
Unfortunately, that sort of self-aggrandizing pseudo-clever cynicism is what's driving this whole fad. There were times when a generation thought free love and rock & roll were the answer. Their children knew weed wasn't the answer, but it tuned out those voices asking questions. Now, their children believe they'll strike it rich on the PGA Tour of buzzword-bingo, and while they wait for what they obviously deserve to materialize, they'll get started on the tacky simulations of what they believe the lifestyle of rich people to be a.k.a. Instagram. And when that doesn't work, they get frustrated, do the closest their fragile will allow them to get to therapy (Proud Boys telling each other they don't need women) and reach their final form once they've made up their mind if it's jews, liberals, women, or "the elite" that's screwed them out of the good life.
I can just imagine the weeping historians and archivists of the future learning that this happened. Digitized artifacts are not the same artifacts, even when photographed at incredible resolution. We keep finding more ways of understanding objects that rely on more than just their text or visual perception.
Information is more easily lost if there's no powerful incentive to preserve it.
By digitizing it AND minting an NFT around the information that is traded and valued as a piece of rare art, there is a strong monetary incentive to preserve the information, because it's an asset that can be bought and sold.
They are probably going to win the auction + gas fees included, but they would probably need more money to protect it than just simply 'owning it'.
> The eventual home must have the expertise to properly house, store, and maintain the artifact. Additionally, the community has expressed strong preferences for institutions that are free to the public and willing to cover the costs associated with housing the document.
The problem with DAOs is 'trust' which they are vulnerable to this trust being abused. Hence, I'm afraid that such 'DAOs' don't have a good history of being trustworthy, especially when there is little to no regulations involved, but we'll see.
Maybe to launder the $30M, would be to mint the Constitution as an NFT perhaps?
> Am I receiving ownership of the Constitution in exchange for my donation?
> No. You are receiving a governance token, not fractionalized ownership. Governance includes the ability to advise on (for illustrative purposes) where the Constitution should be displayed (...)
So some anonymous group is raising money to buy the constitution and in exchange you get voting rights? Which they totally pinky-promise will adhere to. Oh, and it's crypto, so it's a token.
This sounds like Victor Lustig selling the eiffel tower but with technology.
Not anonymous, team is very public. because of US law this is the practical way of actually doing it, the alternative seems to be not doing it and thatd be boring. theres been long discussions for days in the discord, if people have suggestions of a better way to do this come join in.
people are very open to how else could we do this and how it can be improved and secured.
remember this was just a joke in a group chat last week, that speed of development will have issues, but community and reputation matter, and we can lean on that as we solve the legal structure.
The team may be in the public, but neither on Twitter nor on their website is any imprint or personal information.
The proper way to do it, would be to set up a non-profit organization where each funding/paying member gets voting rights (no crypto needed).
It's funny as a joke and maybe the intention is good, but in the end this could just as well be a new crypto scam and funding this project is the same as gambling at a casino.
> The proper way to do it, would be to set up a non-profit organization where each funding/paying member gets voting rights (no crypto needed).
You just can’t make something like this happen in < 1 week using the “proper”/traditional methods.
Put differently: those “proper” tools have existed for decades. If they were as easy to use as you claim then why haven’t we seen them used to achieve something comparable to this project yet? (or have we?)
The only kickstarters I’ve seen that are to fund just a single thing (instead of individuals each getting a product) are for funding R&D or medical bills. I haven’t seen any of those reach $30M, nor have I seen any kickstarters that intend to have open governance. And I’m doubtful many kickstarters have been quite as social as today’s DAOs either.
> which will fail in one way or another.
It might fail. That’s fine (though I’d prefer it pass). The novelty and enjoyment of it has already been worth the $.
There are any number of other, more rational ways of doing this. The only "problem" is that they don't involve crypto because, in this case, crypto brings absolutely nothing to the table that I can discern except an increased risk of getting scammed. The most obvious would be to sell shares in a corporation or LLC. That entity could then use the money raised to buy the constitution. That way the funders would actually have something of recognized legal value (fractional ownership in an entity that owns a copy of the U.S. Constitution) instead of a largely worthless "governance token."
Under the current approach, it seems like people are being asked to contribute money so that someone else can buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution, with the funders having--at best--merely a say in how/where it is displayed. I can't imagine why anyone would want to do this, unless they are misunderstanding what they are getting in return for their ETH.
> crypto brings absolutely nothing to the table that I can discern except an increased risk of getting scammed
So you think it'd have the same chances of success if it didn't involve crypto? Of course not! Yes the point is it's crypto, it's experimenting with new ways of doing things, and that's what people want to be a part of.
But doesn't this just give the game away? It seems like you're simply agreeing that the only reason this is happening is crypto hype. There is nothing actually better about crypto for this application, it's just channeling (or taking advantage of) people's general excitement about crypto.
And, honestly, I get that. There's nothing wrong with wanting to participate in something new. But nobody should be deceived into thinking that DAOs are really creating any important new capabilities here.
> There is nothing actually better about crypto for this application
> The most obvious would be to sell shares in a corporation or LLC
Well certainly you can do it faster with crypto. How long would it take to set up the corporation / LLC? How quickly / easily could people buy shares? Could anyone buy shares?
Yes there are more risks this way, but I don't think there are zero benefits to the crypto approach.
I think this is the real answer. People are just having more fun doing it this way. That's OK. But I worry they're getting scammed as a result, and that's not going to convince anyone else to use a DAO for anything important.
I can create an LLC online in an hour. Then people can Venmo me or something. The tech part is not the interesting part, its interesting that this whole effort ignores or seems to ignore the fact that people are just donating money to help someone buy something - even if its "boring", it would be more honest to admit that tokens dont connote any rights, and shares in an LLC do.
It's true that, in theory, you can do it faster with crypto. But I don't see how that benefit is material. It's easy to set up an LLC in approx. 1 day. With crypto, I guess you could theoretically do it in seconds. But, as this project demonstrates, delay in setting up the entity isn't the limiting factor. Actually raising the funds takes much longer.
And it's not as though setting up a DAO is easier. Both require either a substantial amount of domain-specific knowledge, or trust in general purpose tools/forms.
Can we think of a a similar case where the crypto speed benefit would be meaningful?
Edit: Your question about who can buy shares raises an interesting issue. It may be true that, if you did this in the traditional way, you could only sell shares to accredited investors. (I'm not sure. But that's my hunch.) But I wouldn't be so sure that these same rules don't apply to DAOs. It may be a complex legal question, and I haven't researched it, but I would certainly not assume that these solicitation rules don't apply to soliciting contributions to DAO's. After all, the same regulatory goal applies: preventing amateur investors from getting scammed, or taking on more risk than they had intended, through private-placement style investments where there are fewer market signals to help people make informed decisions. (Of course, it's a separate question whether we should have laws like that in the first place.)
> So some anonymous group is raising money to buy the constitution and in exchange you get voting rights? Which they totally pinky-promise will adhere to. Oh, and it's crypto, so it's a token.
I'm not sure what structure they are using, but in theory they could setup an LLC that was required to adhere to what the token votes on (within some predefined bounds). Projects like RealT have property ownership / dividends based on token ownership, so there's no reason something similar / legally binding couldn't be done for this.
Why give governance tokens? The second blurb there states they wish to hand it over to some place that can house it open to the public free of charge, but then later state the purpose of giving you a governance token in exchange for contributing to the auction bid pool is you get a say in what will be done with it. It sounds like they've already decided what to do with it. Give it to a public national museum. Reserving the right to take it back and do something else instead doesn't make much sense. I'd rather fund a bid that promises to donate it and relinquish any further rights than get some tradable ownership share I can sell to someone else who decides they want to burn it ten years from now.
"Will the core team receive any of the raised funds for themselves or get compensated in any way from this?
The core team has not received or pre-minted any tokens. Following the purchase of the Constitution, we intend to submit a proposal to be voted on by the community. While this is unusual, we believe that it establishes a precedence of mutual trust between the core team and the backers of the ConstitutionDAO."
So anyone who funds this has to trust that a) You are not a dog, b) ConstitutionDAO will use the money to buy the copy of the constitution, c) All extra money will be returned, d) The above mentioned proposal will be in the interests of the community, and e) ConstitutionDOA will abide by the above mentioned vote.
Setting all of that aside, what mechanism exists for a "governance token" to actually have any power in this relationship at all?
It’s a physical thing and a DAO (mostly) isn’t a recognised legal entity so there is always a disconnect here irrespective of the crypto side of things. There’s an awful lot of trust being put into the honesty of the people organising this effort with little ability to hold them to account. Which is par for the course and why rug-pull is a turn of phrase.
Beyond this, there doesn't appear to be any explanation of how this works from a legal and tax perspective.
There's no mention of a legal entity receiving the funds, but at the same time, they state these are donations, not fractional ownership, so presumably from a legal perspective this is actually just giving the funds to the core team, who appear to be mostly in the US, but not entirely? And, while I had always thought that the point of DAOs was that they were autonomous, this appears to be just giving the core contributors direct control over the money? Surely, for example, the actual bidding is not coded into the contract?
So, considering this is now over $25m, wouldn't there be some tax involved if people pay you in this way? Maybe if you argue they are gifts (but are they?), and no individual donation is over $10k, but I suspect many are?
And at over $25m, Sotheby's is obviously going to have some ownership identification requirements. So who will actually be the legal owner here, and how will they account for this revenue?
I think I'd be a lot more excited about this if they had an innovative governance system underlying the DAO, as a way to talk about the future of governance. Considering the Constitution is a document about governance structure, it surprises and disappoints me that their system of checks and balances seems to be mostly missing, with maybe just a phrase of "pro rata" or whoever has the most tokens gets the most votes. Seems not much different than how most corporation voting works. Just seems like there's an opportunity to more deeply discuss what the future of online and offline governance will be, as geographic governing bodies struggle to deal with digital spaces. But memes seem more cool I guess lol.
> We intend to put The Constitution in the hands of The People. Additionally, the community has expressed strong preferences for institutions that are free to the public and willing to cover the costs associated with housing the document.
They should lend it to the US Government, it meets all these goals.
does it? what’s our president’s approval rating again? 41%?
American government, while better than what came before it, still isn’t perfect. Crypto and DAOs are experiments in government. The whole point is to (try to) do better than our existing institutions.
The highest bidder wins the auction, according to Sotheby's rules. The DAO has already has more than the estimated bidding range and has a good chance of beating all other bids. We will find out tomorrow.
I'm confused, if an individual bidder bids more than the DAO, wouldn't that bring more to charity than the DAO?
Perhaps the argument is that the DAO is raising hype and therefore raising the price for the winning bid and the hype itself will increase the total going to charity, I just don't see how the DAO would necessarily be giving more to charity than an individual if the individual had a higher bid.
This is an interesting experiment that I'm excited about. The fact that a financial flash mob is possible is incredible. Anybody from anywhere can participate and have voting power by joining the DAO. Regardless of the outcome, it's good to see the convergence of DAOs into meatspace.
Well, I think they've been saying that the tokens guarantee voting power to advise the LLC which actually owns the physical document, not to actually own the document, because, as someone else mentioned, that may run afoul of US securities laws.
I say all this being excited about iterating on the future of governance, I also worry that such quick financial flash mobs could really screw people really fast.
except of course there is literally zero voting power from participating in this project because the "power" bit is always assigned by a source of authority and nothing about this project tells you how can this power be realized or enforced.
> Ben Thompson points out that this is all pretty approximate; ConstitutionDAO will not give its token holders fractionalized ownership of the Constitution...
> Also, not to be like this, but there is an original copy of the Constitution on permanent display at the National Archives; it is already “in the hands of the people,” in the sense that (1) it is owned by the U.S. government and (2) the U.S. government is, when you think about it, sort of a decentralized autonomous organization made up of the citizens of the U.S.? The citizens can kind of tell the government what to do? By voting? When you think about it? I don’t know. I’m sure that in five years ConstitutionDAO token holders will vote to change the Second Amendment to say “putting laser implants in your eyes is now mandatory” and somehow that will have the force of law.
I have read approximately 100 times that this is a grand, endlessly interesting experiment and whatever happens it will be a new era for crypto. OK, sounds kind of cool but what is the hypothesis, or the interesting thing, or the thing that will change?
Only things I can think of are meta-crypto stuff, like that crypto hype can hype better than any other hype, that seems clear since Dogecoin. Or maybe how good/fast communities can coordinate using current web2 tooling, which is neat, sure. The speed and scale do feel interesting, but I don‘t really know why.
Anyway seems harmless and very fun for everyone involved.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadConstitutionDAO is a DAO that is pooling together money to win this auction. We intend to put The Constitution in the hands of The People. "
It's a copy of the original.
In the same way a Gutenberg Bible is "a copy of the original" I suppose...
but crypto is fun. people will keep having fun.
we can ignore that and write it off as has been the case for the past ten years, or we can recognise 10% of americans have coinbase app installed. that this is reality. and people can keep saying "we could do this without crypto" but it doesnt change the fact we didnt do it without crypto, we did it with crypto. and then can start to investigate why that is, or bury our heads in the sand saying "show me a real use case"
we can start to investigate why thousands of people are willing to essentially donate money towards a meme, what that sense of community and collective ownership is about, and what this means for the future, and how this tech is enabling that and how we can channel it -> there already talks of BailFundDAO and ReparationsDAO off the back of this...
> So far it has had no positive real world impact
lots of opposition politicians in repressive regimes are currently funded using bitcoin, so be careful with generalizations
But this one feels so rushed that I won't be surprised if scandals and controversies follow. A lot has to be done properly here, and there's a lot of places things can go wrong.
If the aftermath has problems that are too spectacular, it could cause trouble for more carefully planned efforts.
A group is trying to raise funds to buy this item, but is not guaranteed to win the auction anyways. Participating in an auction while having a publicly known funding cap feels like a poor position to be in.
Further, let's suppose the group wins the auction, and is now the proud owner of a copy of the Constitution. This entire end goal of this project seems dependent on finding a partner that is willing to cover all the costs associated with storage, display, security, etc of this high value item.
This feels like a whole lot of "ifs" for a project trying to collection $20M.
Had to laugh at this. I'd have a strong preference for others subsidizing my questionable decisions too.
1. They are required to raise additional funding for maintenance. I'm not sure I'd bet on them having the same interest in this project in a couple of months
2. The DAO neglects the item, and it gets irrecoverably damaged/destroyed. The ConstituationDAO has now effectively destroyed a copy of the constitution
3. They find themselves in the position of having to firesale the item in a couple of months when they're unable to cover the associated costs.
I'll also add that it would be _possible_ for the DAO to have enough funding after purchasing the item to generate income/returns that can cover the associated costs. Given that their funding is public, and will be participating in an auction, I'm not sure I would bet on having a whole of of funds left over.
For an organisation like a museum, who already have secure climate controlled storage, and are already open to the public, it would cost next to nothing extra to keep it.
Yet merely having a copy of the constitution will get many more people through the doors to buy postcards in the shop and coffee in the cafe. That will far outweigh the added costs.
You lose a lot of negotiating power though when everyone knows that you are going to have a very short deadline, and don't really have an alternative.
It's common for artifacts to go on 'tours' like this, so as many people as possible get a chance to view them.
> We intend to put The Constitution in the hands of The People.
Like the US Archives aren't owned by the government of the people. Instead this will be owned by a very few ETH holders willing to participate.
But this might be one of the biggest fundraisers I've seen and it probably wouldn't have happened without the crypto ecosystem. For that, I am very excited.
the intention of the dao is clear, display it in a public museum with free entry.
and yes, from a joke last friday to likely suceeding in less than a week! exciting. the velocity of daos is remarkable, and i think it is a just a small hint of what is to come in the future. and it is coming quick.
(meanwhile i expect hn to continue talking about tulips or something :)
how do you sell to the millenial/zoomer audience? memes. you make it a social experience. you create not just shared governance over a document, but an entire community around it. organize events like watch parties, etc. especially covid era, creating communities is more valuable to certain groups than is creating an incrementally better search engine.
For instance on a quick search I found this video of him rallying a bunch of people to clean an extremely dirty beach.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV2gBU6hKfY
Humor and productivity don't have to be mutually exclusive. Maybe humor and fun is the way we get the average person to engage in collective action and do things that everybody thinks are impossible otherwise.
Maybe you could use your imagination a little bit to potentially think about why something like ConstitutionDAO might have larger implications than "it's just another ponzi-scheme. Or fall in line with the rest of Hacker News that fails to see how real people can benefit from an interesting technology.
Madagascar is currently going through a humanitarian crisis. Millions of people are facing starvation there and are likely to perish from it [1]. Is anyone in the crypto community trying to coordinate and organize some kind of humanitarian aid for Madagascar? Because if they did that then it would prove to everyone that this technology could be used to affect meaningful change for people in the real world.
1: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148636/drought-in-m...
That's the beauty of ConstitutionDAO, it is quite literally proving that we have new ways in organizing and collectivizing. As a signal of that they are buying the constitution so that the people can take back what is rightfully ours. It gives people the freedom to try and solve new and complex problems in new ways.
Memes are the rallying cry of Gen-Z. DAOs are just a tool for organizing. The crypto community may not be ones to rally for Madagascar and I'm not expecting them to! But, DAOs give YOU the power to try and rally the people so we can do something. Rather than trusting you to manage the funds, the collective can trust the smart contract and vote on how they want to approach solving the problem, which professionals they want to delegate to to solve the problem and so forth.
This is so much more than trying pump shitcoins or ponzischeme. This is about allowing societies to collectivize in ways they never have before. You and your neighbors want to start a solar coop? DAO. A neighborhood is lacking the funds to support the local schools? DAO. The county wants to try and build a water treatment plant because they can't get funding from the Fed/State for clean water treatment? DAO.
DAOs will exist in all shapes and sizes and for different causes. Some will fail and some will succeed, but that's how innovation goes. While the technicals behind how these things will develop is still up in the air, this is the Netscape moment for crypto and nobody on Hackernews can come up with any other sort of justification for it not working other than it's a Ponzi Scheme.
Your generation is going to be faced with unimaginable hardships and the faster you folks grow up the faster you can start working on addressing real problems instead of wasting time on stuff like this.
Crypto and thought schools adjacent to it combine elements of Libertarianism and Socialism in ways that were unable to exist before their advent. These typically contradictory ideologies can be combined in a new way that help us overcome these systemic coordination problems and let us execute collective action faster. Find me another cause that has raised 40 million dollars in less than a week where funds are held in escrow by a computer contract.
To expand on that the field I work in is communication by nature and I'm literally planning on pitching a project to a startup DAO this evening. This project may quite well open the door for people in my field to jump start a new way of funding projects which makes sure that Consumers, project contributors and everyone involved are compensated in a fair way while also not requiring a private investor. This literally would have been impossible without a DAO.
If the pitch goes well and the project is successful it would allow me to undercut all of my potential competitors. As people who enjoy a free market might say "That's just business baby". Then on top of that, because of the nature of how it's structured, nobody is exploited and no rent is extracted from a private party.
Good luck with your pitch. Sounds like a cool project.
How else could ConstitutionDAO have raised funds as quickly as they have and in a secure manor without an intermediary company/legal entity holding the pooled funds?
In fact, going through an escrow service would have kept the amount hidden and given them an edge in actually being able to win the auction but this wasn't their goal. They wanted to show that they could hype this up and get people to sign up for it. I doubt they were ever serious about actually placing the winning bid which goes back to my original point about the crypto community not being serious about anything other than hype. I understand they're trying to grow the network of people that participate in the crypto community but shenanigans like this prove my point about them not being serious.
Because the constitution and ownership of the constitution is managed in the current legal and financial world (centralized), the DAO has to bridge out of the decentralized network to purchase it. Since no decentralized system exists in the current legal infrastructure they had to incorporate in Wyoming to make the purchase. (I don't think they would have been required to do this if Sothebys had an Ethereum Wallet)
If the DAO had won the bid and kept the constitution and managed it, nobody from the centralized world would be able to purchase the Constitution without the permission of the DAO and it's 17 thousand users (aka a buyer coming into decentralized territory). This is the purpose of the purchase, it is purely symbolic. The metaphorical possession of the DAO sets the precedent that blockchains can set a new standard for building Governance systems. What better way to demonstrate the growth of innovative governance bodies than buying the foundational document of modern day governance itself?
Moreover, it may be wrapped up in humorous memes and shitposts, but the sentiment is the same. That being the blockchain is a contender for overthrowing all current financial systems, and by proxy Governance as well. This is the whole idea behind the metaverse. Emergent and collaborative digital cities that are representative of real world communities working together to solve real problems like climate change, world hunger, poverty, education and every other problem you could think of. It breaks the shackles of the masters inside corporations and the masters inside the government.
Also, after losing the bid, do you think it is a coincidence that one of the men who stands to lose the most from the success of cryptocurrency was the person who won the auction?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/citadels-ken-griff...
-note, this is probably my last comment for this thread. I appreciate the friendly debate. I always like chatting with those who hold opposing views. I will definitely be pondering points you've brought up and do more reading.
The ConstitutionDAO changed their website to remove references to distributed ownership. They went on to clarify that owners of the token won't have fractional ownership of the copy of the constitution.
The also added clarification on the website about ownership questions:
> No. You are receiving a governance token, not fractionalized ownership. Governance includes the ability to advise on (for illustrative purposes) where the Constitution should be displayed, how it should be exhibited, and the mission and values of ConstitutionDAO. ConstitutionDAO is taking donations and donors are receiving governance tokens with no expectation of profit.
So someone will technically own it, but it won't be the people who bought these tokens. In theory the token holders can vote on things, but they go out of their way to clarify that the votes are advisory in nature.
Anyone who buys into this is basically making a donation to this group. The crypto and DAO stuff is just window dressing.
In the crypto/NFT/DAO space, be suspicious until proven otherwise.
This is where I pull back and kinda laugh with irony at the effort. Much of this process (most likely because of the hurried pace) seems to be "just trust us" but wasn't the whole point of the Constitution to build a system of checks and balances so we didn't have to just trust one group of people?
Well, out of other private collector hands, into their own private collector hands. As other commenters have pointed out, the members of the public who donate to this don't have any form of ownership.
I bet if you brought Carta enough money they’d prioritize an option to make your ownership interest public and shareable on their backlog, by entity, individual participant, or however else you want to slice and demonstrate ownership interest.
You can’t offer membership interest to the public unless you are registered with the SEC and in compliance with the states you make your public offering. There are some exceptions to the SEC for limits much lower than the ~$30M raised as of now.
An SEC complaint would likely clear the matter up, if anyone is feeling particularly adventurous.
You are saying you offered a suggested oath to “avoid unnecessary tech”, but you removed the concept of a voting right for a security.
There is plenty of precedent of the SEC responding favorably to “no action letter requests” without requiring registration when organizations publicly offer voting/governance rights in exchange for money.
You are saying you offered a suggested path to “avoid unnecessary tech”, but you removed the concept of a voting right for a security by suggesting they could have offered interest in an LLC.
There is plenty of precedent of the SEC responding favorably to “no action letter requests” without requiring registration when organizations publicly offer voting/governance rights in exchange for money.
uh, that’s what they’re doing. They ARE issuing governance tokens.
DAOs (distributed Autonomous Organizations) could be better thought of in a corporate governance framework.
A) Least distributed corporate governance: Sole proprietorship who owns 100% of their business
Every other organization sits between least and most distributed
B) Most distributed corporate governance: Full democracy state controlled
DAOs are special because the voting mechanism lets people vote across boarders/jurisdictions etc from their computer... but it also relies on the creators giving the right level of control to the DAO voting. If they gave voters 100% control, someone could do a 51% attack and have it destroyed, or something else. But, if they don't give enough control it is effectively a rug pull.
ConstitutionDAO is an amazing initiative because it puts so many assumptions up for a test, and crosses crypto world to mainstream. Its revolutionary.
The 'power' struggle is real... and fully on display
Like if you’re trying to buy the constitution in a democratic fashion you’d think you’d at least try to understand what it means.
If it is executed flawlessly it will prove DAOs as a viable corporate governance mechanism. If it fails or struggles, there will be learnings.
Ok but you can just form a 501(c)(3) whenever you want right, which actually has some force of law over its activities.
> I presume they will put things up for vote using the DAO.
But... they don't have to.
It's all fun and games until there's a disagreement over what to do. The way in which a meaningful disagreement is resolved is what will prove the viability of this model. When everyone's aligned already, it doesn't really prove much.
Traditional shareholders have actual legal voting power. Nothing is stopping this group from ignoring governance token votes.
A DAO is not special. It's just an unregulated international corporation.
Aren't these votes broadly speaking non-binding?
Is this really any different than an LLC that runs a periodic twitter poll?
However, I think they aren't doing the fractional ownership to avoid running afoul of securities laws-- ie. this is a coincidental drawback of this instance of a DAO under today's US laws, and less so a fundamental issue with the DAO model.
This is standard word games in crypto projects that are acknowledging their US components. Keeps the SEC off their backs.
It is not possible for projects to compete with asian crypto token offerings that say speculation inducing things. But if you understand already you can see through it and speculate wildly for great reward.
I got the impression the original dao goal wasn't accounting for the fees, which are added on top of the winning bid.
https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2021/the-constitutio...
If the DAO are heavily incentivized to bid, and you know what their max value is, somebody will bid them up. Sotheby’s is too smart not to make sure that happens.
It is generally a moronic idea to raise funds for an auction like this. You will never get a good deal and your competition knows exactly what your limit is.
Is someone checking the blockchain address involved to see if this is for real? There's an awful lot of money going into this. I just saw it jump by US$1.2 million.
Balance at time of writing this seems to be ~$38.75M (Ξ9,140.55) and the conversion rate is 1,000,000 PEOPLE/Ξ.
Someone commented this is basically a scam to generate a bunch of hype and transfer a whole bunch of money to whoever owns the contract for this DAO. Whatever money they don't use at the auction will presumably be distributed back to whoever bought into this based on their share of $people tokens (modulo gas fees). It's unclear if the DAO owners have extra shares or not but I guess that could be easily verified by someone who was willing to do the required detective work and chase some pointers on etherscan [3][4].
1: https://juicebox.money/#/
2: https://juicebox.money/#/p/constitutiondao
3: https://etherscan.io/accounts
4: https://etherscan.io/address/0xb1c95ac257029d11f3f64ac67b230...
Either they do whatever the random people who hold tokens tell them to do—including, if you read their Discord, destroy it—or you don’t. In the latter case, everyone gets all upset that governance tokens are not real things and blockchain is, once again, not in fact “code is law”.
(This isn’t to say that there are no bad actors, but that a wolf in sheep’s clothing would be forced to act like the sheep it presented itself as.)
Using your example, you could write a contract such that: you buy an item for X dollar amount, the contract holds it in escrow, waiting for FedEx to confirm receipt of the package and a deposit of Y% of X into a rolling insurance fund from both FedEX and the seller. At this point, if FedEx fails to deliver you’re fully refunded out of the insurance pool and the seller gets their money back. If they deliver, FedEx gets 90% of the insurance payment back, the shipper gets your payment, and they split the seller’s premium as a shipping fee. If the seller never drops off the package you get your money back.
You could even throw in a return period where a third party can confirm whether a bad package is eligible for refund.
There are obviously holes in this haphazard scenario but the big picture is that there’s a lot of stress that can be offloaded to a truly unbiased 3rd party, even if you can’t achieve full trustlessness in real life.
Who is in charge of confirming to the smart contract that FedEx delivered? Whoever you pick, they have a strong financial incentive to lie. If the recipient confirms, they can lie in order to keep the item and get their money refunded. If Fedex confirms, they can lie in order to keep the item and they only lose the shipping costs.
Trust is a lower energy state - it allows specialization, and conservation of energy that might need to be spent defending against threats from different directions.
But people who hold anti-social ideas seem to indulge in thinking that they can create a novel system where they have no obligations, just privileges. Crypto prices going up causes these anti-social delusions to flourish because the increasing prices seem to validate the libertarian futurists fantasy of a world with no trade-offs, where we can avoid having responsibility to other humans.
I genuinely have no idea what you mean by this. Unless you manage a 51% attack there’s no discretion to be had. You can for sure push nonsense to the chain, but it would either be ignored or punished [1][2] in some cases.
Blockchains are just distributed computing, it’s all computer code. The first two sections here (https://paulx.dev/blog/2021/01/14/programming-on-solana-an-i...) explain it much better than I can.
[1]https://support.polkadot.network/support/solutions/articles/... [2]https://docs.solana.com/proposals/slashing
Suddenly the promise of "trust-less" makes no sense, and we are just left with poor performance and immutability of human errors.
They don't care as long as they can take their buyers premium.
>We recognize that much more detail is required here! Due to the unusual and extremely short timeline of needing to rally around obtaining the Constitution during the auction window, we have not been able to focus on giving the technical aspects of DAO governance mechanics the careful consideration and community deliberation this topic requires. The Delegates do not want to simply declare how this will work, and we will be working with the DAO community post-auction to make these decisions.
So definitely completely meaningless.
you can conceivably encode certain limits into the underlying LLC that physically stewards the document (“the document may not be intentionally destroyed”, etc) and then have the shareholder decisions be held via crypto votes. the problems which remain are the same problems existing corporations have: e.g. what happens if the company doesn’t fulfill their shareholder obligations? existing law provides mechanisms for recourse. if ConstitutionDAO goes the route outlined above, it’s really not much different than ordinary corporation-based ownership, just with a more accessible/visible shareholder voting/discussion mechanism.
Also I feel like one of the only thirteen surviving copies of the US Constitution will sell for a lot more than $20M.
Really putting the cart before the horse on this, aren't we?
I could see maybe how it was showing more respect for the document, I guess I just wish it went a lot deeper.
I remember being in the Bay Area back in 2014-16 and people talking about wanting to use Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms for not just buying products but owning the company, but kept getting stuck at the accredited investor requirements for private companies.
So, I guess I'm curious about this as a referendum on why we have securities laws and accredited investor laws and whether those should change or stay, I just don't think it's necessarily as brand new of an idea as it seems.
EDIT: The concept I was talking about is called equity crowdfunding [0] and the SEC opened it up to more people in 2012 [1].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_crowdfunding [1]: https://www.sec.gov/divisions/marketreg/tmjobsact-crowdfundi...
people can keep dismissing how strong a coordination and communication tool crypto, is or we can start taking it seriously.
owning the constitution does not need to be a financial transaction, this seems like a scam. we need less money in politics, not more.
[1]https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/11/16/constitution...
>No, the crypto bit absolutely doesn’t do anything useful
None of this would have happened without 'the crypto bit'.
People are just annoyed that crypto is happening and theyve been betting against it. they were so focused on the 'currency' aspect they missed that groups of people can coordinate, they missed that a reddit group can become a political force, they missed that people are buying land together, the missed that coordination is the killer app.
HN and the cynics have been telling us for years that none of this would work, and when we get examples of it working we hear "you could do this without x". yes, in theory you could have a mysql database and a company registered in deleware, and stripe processing payments, and also companies in other countries to handle international payments, and blah blah.....
this is faster, easier, and more fun.
Or just use GoFundMe?
I agree that none of this would have happened without the crypto bit, but only for the reason that its a rushed and poorly thought out idea that crypto nerds are latching onto as proof that crypto finally has a high profile use beyond speculation.
In reality this solves effectively nothing that centralized systems don't while adding the risk of there being no legal recourse if the team decides not to do what the DAO says.
In the sense that it wouldn't have happened without a bunch of people suddenly finding themselves with so much wealth that spending it on a lark is fine and a nihilistic meme culture where throwing money at jokes is a growing global activity, sure.
Wouldn't it be nicer if millions were instead spent on fighting poverty?
This week, on the back of constituitondao, people have started making other daos for other causes like repatriation of stolen historical artifacts https://twitter.com/bronzedaotweets
One thing I do wonder though: at some point all this ethereum gets converted to dollars in order to buy the constitution. What does this DAO do with any "extra" dollars from the increasing value of ethereum?
shitcoiners are evolving, they now have a sense of humour too
Win the bid, then publicly burn this copy of the Constitution, as an act of sacrifice to imbue it's original rarity into a digital representation (some kind of NFT) that an unbounded number of people can own shares of, thereby transmitting the memetic essence of the object into the hyperverse to be preserved and treasured for trillions of years, long after all physical copies have disintegrated away.
Despite being seen as an unconscionable and horrific act of destruction by the citizens of meatspace, it could in reality end up being the most powerful act of preservation we could ever do.
How do you encourage people to associate the act of destruction with an act of value transfer?
As a counterexample, an art vandal destroying a piece of art does not inherit the value of the art, even though the vandal and art interact in a culturally significant way such that the art ceases to exist after the interaction.
Having said that, there actually is some power in the self sacrifice of engaging in a destructive act giving a person's message more power and attention (see Unabomber Manifesto as a prime example).
Second, at least a subculture of people already do accept destruction of real world things as an act that imbues the a digital entity with the real world scarcity. It's called proof of work, and bitcoin is constantly 'sacrificing' real world energy which imbues the token with value in many people's minds. Enough so make it a trillion dollar asset class.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/17/burnt-banksys-...
The reaction to burning the constitution would be overwhelmingly negative. Maybe like KLF's burning a million quid it would ultimately shake out as a powerful statement, but I sort of doubt it.
Unfortunately, that sort of self-aggrandizing pseudo-clever cynicism is what's driving this whole fad. There were times when a generation thought free love and rock & roll were the answer. Their children knew weed wasn't the answer, but it tuned out those voices asking questions. Now, their children believe they'll strike it rich on the PGA Tour of buzzword-bingo, and while they wait for what they obviously deserve to materialize, they'll get started on the tacky simulations of what they believe the lifestyle of rich people to be a.k.a. Instagram. And when that doesn't work, they get frustrated, do the closest their fragile will allow them to get to therapy (Proud Boys telling each other they don't need women) and reach their final form once they've made up their mind if it's jews, liberals, women, or "the elite" that's screwed them out of the good life.
There is fundamentally no act of preservation in destroying a physical object, you have to twist all logic and reality to think so.
It's ascended to a higher plane of existence, above the constraints of meatspace.
How do you define "real"?
>> the most powerful act of preservation
As if we don't already have scans / text of the constitution archived.
By digitizing it AND minting an NFT around the information that is traded and valued as a piece of rare art, there is a strong monetary incentive to preserve the information, because it's an asset that can be bought and sold.
> The eventual home must have the expertise to properly house, store, and maintain the artifact. Additionally, the community has expressed strong preferences for institutions that are free to the public and willing to cover the costs associated with housing the document.
The problem with DAOs is 'trust' which they are vulnerable to this trust being abused. Hence, I'm afraid that such 'DAOs' don't have a good history of being trustworthy, especially when there is little to no regulations involved, but we'll see.
Maybe to launder the $30M, would be to mint the Constitution as an NFT perhaps?
So some anonymous group is raising money to buy the constitution and in exchange you get voting rights? Which they totally pinky-promise will adhere to. Oh, and it's crypto, so it's a token.
This sounds like Victor Lustig selling the eiffel tower but with technology.
people are very open to how else could we do this and how it can be improved and secured.
remember this was just a joke in a group chat last week, that speed of development will have issues, but community and reputation matter, and we can lean on that as we solve the legal structure.
The proper way to do it, would be to set up a non-profit organization where each funding/paying member gets voting rights (no crypto needed).
It's funny as a joke and maybe the intention is good, but in the end this could just as well be a new crypto scam and funding this project is the same as gambling at a casino.
You just can’t make something like this happen in < 1 week using the “proper”/traditional methods.
Put differently: those “proper” tools have existed for decades. If they were as easy to use as you claim then why haven’t we seen them used to achieve something comparable to this project yet? (or have we?)
> why haven’t we seen them used to achieve something comparable to this project yet? (or have we?)
This is a kickstarter (or scam) which will fail in one way or another. There is no achievement here.
The only kickstarters I’ve seen that are to fund just a single thing (instead of individuals each getting a product) are for funding R&D or medical bills. I haven’t seen any of those reach $30M, nor have I seen any kickstarters that intend to have open governance. And I’m doubtful many kickstarters have been quite as social as today’s DAOs either.
> which will fail in one way or another.
It might fail. That’s fine (though I’d prefer it pass). The novelty and enjoyment of it has already been worth the $.
Under the current approach, it seems like people are being asked to contribute money so that someone else can buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution, with the funders having--at best--merely a say in how/where it is displayed. I can't imagine why anyone would want to do this, unless they are misunderstanding what they are getting in return for their ETH.
So you think it'd have the same chances of success if it didn't involve crypto? Of course not! Yes the point is it's crypto, it's experimenting with new ways of doing things, and that's what people want to be a part of.
And, honestly, I get that. There's nothing wrong with wanting to participate in something new. But nobody should be deceived into thinking that DAOs are really creating any important new capabilities here.
> The most obvious would be to sell shares in a corporation or LLC
Well certainly you can do it faster with crypto. How long would it take to set up the corporation / LLC? How quickly / easily could people buy shares? Could anyone buy shares?
Yes there are more risks this way, but I don't think there are zero benefits to the crypto approach.
You dont even need to sell shares, just a contract which entitles you to a vote or a future share of the company.
And it's not as though setting up a DAO is easier. Both require either a substantial amount of domain-specific knowledge, or trust in general purpose tools/forms.
Can we think of a a similar case where the crypto speed benefit would be meaningful?
Edit: Your question about who can buy shares raises an interesting issue. It may be true that, if you did this in the traditional way, you could only sell shares to accredited investors. (I'm not sure. But that's my hunch.) But I wouldn't be so sure that these same rules don't apply to DAOs. It may be a complex legal question, and I haven't researched it, but I would certainly not assume that these solicitation rules don't apply to soliciting contributions to DAO's. After all, the same regulatory goal applies: preventing amateur investors from getting scammed, or taking on more risk than they had intended, through private-placement style investments where there are fewer market signals to help people make informed decisions. (Of course, it's a separate question whether we should have laws like that in the first place.)
I can't put my finger on why exactly, but that seems all manner of shady to me.
I'm not sure what structure they are using, but in theory they could setup an LLC that was required to adhere to what the token votes on (within some predefined bounds). Projects like RealT have property ownership / dividends based on token ownership, so there's no reason something similar / legally binding couldn't be done for this.
The core team has not received or pre-minted any tokens. Following the purchase of the Constitution, we intend to submit a proposal to be voted on by the community. While this is unusual, we believe that it establishes a precedence of mutual trust between the core team and the backers of the ConstitutionDAO."
So anyone who funds this has to trust that a) You are not a dog, b) ConstitutionDAO will use the money to buy the copy of the constitution, c) All extra money will be returned, d) The above mentioned proposal will be in the interests of the community, and e) ConstitutionDOA will abide by the above mentioned vote.
Setting all of that aside, what mechanism exists for a "governance token" to actually have any power in this relationship at all?
There's no mention of a legal entity receiving the funds, but at the same time, they state these are donations, not fractional ownership, so presumably from a legal perspective this is actually just giving the funds to the core team, who appear to be mostly in the US, but not entirely? And, while I had always thought that the point of DAOs was that they were autonomous, this appears to be just giving the core contributors direct control over the money? Surely, for example, the actual bidding is not coded into the contract?
So, considering this is now over $25m, wouldn't there be some tax involved if people pay you in this way? Maybe if you argue they are gifts (but are they?), and no individual donation is over $10k, but I suspect many are?
And at over $25m, Sotheby's is obviously going to have some ownership identification requirements. So who will actually be the legal owner here, and how will they account for this revenue?
Apparently, they're planning on setting up a (for-profit?) LLC? (https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/11/16/constitution...)
They should lend it to the US Government, it meets all these goals.
American government, while better than what came before it, still isn’t perfect. Crypto and DAOs are experiments in government. The whole point is to (try to) do better than our existing institutions.
Very interesting. If Sotheby's accepts the DAO's bid, it will potentially bring much more money to charity than any individual bidder.
Perhaps the argument is that the DAO is raising hype and therefore raising the price for the winning bid and the hype itself will increase the total going to charity, I just don't see how the DAO would necessarily be giving more to charity than an individual if the individual had a higher bid.
1: https://crypto.com/defi/dashboard/gas-fees
I say all this being excited about iterating on the future of governance, I also worry that such quick financial flash mobs could really screw people really fast.
> Ben Thompson points out that this is all pretty approximate; ConstitutionDAO will not give its token holders fractionalized ownership of the Constitution...
> Also, not to be like this, but there is an original copy of the Constitution on permanent display at the National Archives; it is already “in the hands of the people,” in the sense that (1) it is owned by the U.S. government and (2) the U.S. government is, when you think about it, sort of a decentralized autonomous organization made up of the citizens of the U.S.? The citizens can kind of tell the government what to do? By voting? When you think about it? I don’t know. I’m sure that in five years ConstitutionDAO token holders will vote to change the Second Amendment to say “putting laser implants in your eyes is now mandatory” and somehow that will have the force of law.
Only things I can think of are meta-crypto stuff, like that crypto hype can hype better than any other hype, that seems clear since Dogecoin. Or maybe how good/fast communities can coordinate using current web2 tooling, which is neat, sure. The speed and scale do feel interesting, but I don‘t really know why.
Anyway seems harmless and very fun for everyone involved.