Buying part of the US Constitution

In the past 4 days, a movement has grown to buy an original copy of the US Constitution that is going up for auction. There are only 13 surviving copies, and this is one of two that are still owned by private collectors. The twist is that everyday Americans, and even foreigners around the globe, are chipping in to pool their money together in an attempt to place a winning bid. This is being done through Web 3.0 technology: cryptocurrency and blockchain through a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). Everyone will have a say in the governance of what will be done with Constitution if won, based on how much they contributed. This is democracy through computer code. The plan is to display it in a public where people can view it for free. Instead of one rich collector hoarding the Constitution for themselves, everyone who has pitched in will have a voice. So far, over $40 million dollars worth of Ethereum cryptocurrency has been gathered by over 14,000 people in this ConstitutionDAO.

I first learned about this from a friend from the Write of Passage course: Jon Hillis, who has created his own DAO for Creator Cabins. Turns out, he's one of the core 13 signers of the wallet behind ConstitutionDAO. It wasn't until I saw the project mentioned in the Unchained crypto newsletter, and then later found Packy McCormick talking about it in his Not Boring newsletter that I decided to participate. ConstitutionDAO was also mentioned on the Stratechery podcast that I listen to.

By donating Ethereum, I got PEOPLE tokens in return, which represents my stake in the governance of the ConstitutionDAO once the Constitution is won. If we don't win, the Ethereum will be refunded to everyone. My purpose in joining this is to make history, not make money. It would be cool to be able to brag about owning 0.0005% of the Constitution. (Although this isn't exactly true. I would have that much governance, not ownership. It's legally owned by an LLC that was set up to represent ConstitutionDAO. And it's only 1 of 11 original copies.) DAOs are going to be the future, and I'm excited to be on these new digital frontiers.

(Why 0.0512 ETH? I was going to donate a nice round number that I could afford giving away: 0.5 ETH, which was about a couple hundred dollars at the time. (Remember, I just received a large sum of crypto last week.) 12 is my favorite number, so I tacked that on at the end. 512 is also a number often used in computing, being a power of 2. The timing of this being posted at 5:12am UTC was purely a coincidence. A very cool one.)