My friends and I are buying 1 of the 11 surviving copies of the US Constitution | Hacker News Reader

My friends and I are buying 1 of the 11 surviving copies of the US Constitution

twitter.com

16 pointsmooreds24 comments

FYI you can view one of the other copies at the National archives, which is carefully preserved and put on display for the public. That also might be defined as “for the people”.

But I’m sure this multi million dollar deal also has solely altruistic goals.

There are more than 11 surviving copies of the Constitution, by many orders of magnitude.

This is one of 11 surviving first printings of the Constitution. (Original source and thread uses the two descriptions equivalently, but they are...not.)

> The Constitution is one of the most symbolic and important governance documents in the world

For the US, with their fetishisation of "Founding Fathers" and "The Constitution", yes. The rest of the world, really not so much.

Many other countries have realised that those things can and should be improved upon to correct original failures and mistakes. With the US Civil Religion, that sadly doesn't look likely there.

If i were American I'd pool money to lobby/fight for change, like a new constitution getting rid of obsolete and/or racist terrible ideas like the first past the post, weird elected officials ( judges, prosecutors, sheriffs) and fix abused things ( election funding, gerrymandering). Examples off the top of my head.

If someone owns 50% + 1, can they vote to have it displayed solely on their private property? If so, how exactly does this solve your goal of making it public? If not, what exactly does ownership mean?

What does any NFT “ownership” mean?

Exactly my point, but there could be legal documents to back this ownership up.

We’ll have to wait and see what the structure of the DAO is (I think the contract was released this morning, but I haven’t read it yet), but it’s pretty trivial to design this to prevent that from happening. You also want to make sure that no group gains too much power in the DAO and votes to destroy it.

It's a little half-baked, IMHO, when they talk about making this available to the public. They even mention The Smithsonian, but we already have a copy of the constitution on display at the National Archives Museum in DC.

Overall, it sounds like a fun project and I'd be curious to see how things work out if they do end up getting it, but it doesn't sound like anything I'd want to put my money into.

I predict that they'll eventually sell it for a profit.

Also for those unfamiliar with the layout of DC, the National archives and the Smithsonian are literally next to each other and a document like this obviously belongs at the archives (which is of course why it is there already).

Their stated rationale makes no sense.

A marginally related anecdote: I did some graduate work in the English department at the University of Virginia, which holds one of the Dunlap broadside printings of the Declaration of Independence from July 5, 1776. During a seminar on bibliography (the study of books as physical objects—not how to generate citations!), we had a couple of classes on paper and watermarks. At the end of this section, a librarian brought up the copy of the DOI. We all got the chance to touch it, which was cool. But the highlight was when our professor put a light panel behind the sheet so that we could examine the watermark: It was the arms of King George III. I still relish the irony.

In any case, the aims behind this Constitution purchase seem laudable, at least on the surface.

Maybe I don't get it, but this doesn't strike me as particularly interesting... ie who cares who owns it and what they do with it? They are framing this as an important cause, but I just don't believe it is.

smells more like a PR stunt for crypto

It is fascinating to me how this crowdsourcing of money and trust cycle seems to jump around every couple of years, from Kickstarter and now in DAOs.

After enough bad actors, it will move on again to somewhere without a bad history.

Does anyone recall how people crowdsourced before kickstarter?

More details here: https://constitutiondao.com/

Looks like yet another scam based on blockchain?

As soon as I see Discord community I click away.

Maybe we should use this model to buy forests, lands, water resources etc held by profiteers.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there are DAOs out there doing exactly that. I know of one that is buying up carbon emission credits to drive their prices up in cap-and-trade systems to force corporations to reduce their emissions rather than buying credits

Not a bad idea, in developed nations I could see this happening in large scale. How would it be possible to evade the tragedy of commons? With restricted rights of the owners, perhaps?

In the case of forests, we can just turn them over to a team of conservationists - absolutely nothing to be done to them, except the minimum necessary to preserve them. No tourism, no logging, nothing - the only ones to access the forests would be scientists and conservationists. That would be my take. Imagine if we could buy Amazon forests and just leave them alone (or reforest the already fucked up areas of the forest because of logging etc).

I guess the big value add here is probably the style of governance. Otherwise I suppose it would be just a normal non-profit organization?

Believe it or not, that is actually against the law. Lessees of public lands can be required to extract resources from them or lose the lease. https://reason.com/2019/11/18/why-dont-environmentalists-jus...

It's just crowdfunding, what's the point of calling it a DAO?

It is exactly crowdfunding.

Unfortunately, It is the web3 newspeak where they have to rephrase everything to make as if everyone is missing out on the action.

They are very predictable. They will get this surviving copy and mint it as an NFT.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com