BREAKDOWN: This DAO Is Trying to Buy the Constitution for $20M
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 15 November 2021
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A look at one of the boldest experiments in internet financial organizing yet.
This episode is sponsored by NYDIG.
On Thursday, Nov. 18th, Sotheby’s is auctioning off one of just 13 (or 11, depending on your source) copies of the original edition of the U.S. Constitution, printed in September 1787 for distribution to members of the Continental Congress and the states that would need to debate and ratify the document. It’s the first time the document has been for sale in a third of a century, and this time, a new DAO has sprung up to make the purchase collectively. On today’s episode, NLW breaks down ConstitutionDAO, looking at:
- What the project is trying to achieve
- How quickly it’s coming together and gaining momentum
- What it means for the future of DAOs
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NYDIG, the institutional-grade platform for bitcoin, is making it possible for thousands of banks who have trusted relationships with hundreds of millions of customers, to offer Bitcoin. Learn more at NYDIG.com/NLW.
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“The Breakdown” is written, produced by and features Nathaniel Whittemore aka NLW, with editing by Rob Mitchell, research by Scott Hill and additional production support by Eleanor Pahl. Adam B. Levine is our executive producer and our theme music is “Countdown” by Neon Beach. The music you heard today behind our sponsor is “Dark Crazed Cap” by Isaac Joel. Image credit: rdegrie/E+/Getty Images, modified by CoinDesk.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. |
| 0:09.2 | It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. |
| 0:16.3 | The breakdown is sponsored by Nidig and produced and distributed by CoinDes. |
| 0:22.7 | What's going on, guys? It is Monday, November 15th, and today we are talking about one of the |
| 0:28.1 | crazier, more fascinating, more compelling stories that I've seen in some time. A Dow is trying |
| 0:35.7 | to buy the U.S. Constitution. I started paying attention to this over the weekend |
| 0:40.9 | when I saw a tweet from Zero X Planet that said, I've been talking about BTC all morning, not Bitcoin, |
| 0:47.7 | buying the Constitution. So what the hell are they talking about? Well, this is one of the more |
| 0:52.7 | ambitious things I've seen in some time. But before we talk about Constitution Dao specifically, I want to look at some |
| 1:00.3 | precedent. Dows are decentralized autonomous organizations. It's a term that you've probably |
| 1:06.0 | heard me talk about before. A couple of weeks ago, I featured an essay about the legal |
| 1:10.6 | ramifications for |
| 1:11.6 | Dow's on Longreed Sunday. Dows represent online collectives, people getting together to do things, |
| 1:18.6 | and there are people who are looking to do dows for all types of things. But if the history of |
| 1:22.9 | crypto shows us anything, it is that while there may be a million big different use cases, things |
| 1:28.5 | usually hit their stride when they're about the better coordination of money. Certainly, |
| 1:33.8 | when it comes to all of the experimental DAOs out there right now, that is the fundamental |
| 1:39.3 | driving use case so far. Now, for me, I've always thought that Daos were some type of inevitable. |
| 1:46.1 | It's just seemed insane to me that the only options for human organization would remain, |
| 1:51.4 | on the one hand, legal structures that had existed for tens, if not hundreds of years, |
| 1:56.7 | and on the other hand, super informal things like Facebook groups or GoFundMe pages, it just seemed |
| 2:02.8 | like there had to be something that lived in that middle space, and that enabled strangers |
... |
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