Hacker News Reader

Comment by chillacy | Hacker News Reader

> Nobody knew who won, and there was a lot of misinformation spreading.

It was also very confusing to watch the live chat on YouTube. There was no authoritative communication on the official twitter or website about who would be bidding on their behalf. Nobody knew who the person representing ConstitutionDAO was, or if Constitution DAO was even participating at all. A good number of commenters were convinced it was a "rugpull" / scam.

Then as the article says, in the twitter audio room afterwards there was the "Dewey Defeats Truman" thing. Having gone through a few election cycles in the US, I must say it did remind me of election day results, but that's not a compliment.

View on HN

If you spend any time at all on crypto discord servers you will constantly get commentators saying that any particular project is a rugpull. That is par for the course and the skepticism is justifiable given the track record of frequent scams in this space.

That said I think this is an interesting idea but flawed execution, given that: 1)The most important part of the strategy in an auction is how high to bid (it's almost the only decision you make in the process). If the other side knows your maximum bid but you don't know that info for them you clearly place yourself at a huge disadvantage. A bad actor could bid you up to just below your max price and then stop just to screw you over, so you pay your max for something you would in normal circumstances get much cheaper, or conversely you are guaranteed to lose if someone knows your max and just wants to pay more. They can wait until you bid completely up to your max before putting in their first bid so they are guaranteed to get it very cheaply above your bid assuming noone else is involved. 2)They didn't seem to have much of a plan for success. That's pretty normal in the web3 world in my experience. There's a lot of "let's get there and then see what happens", but I think in this case it would have been great and more in the spirit of DAOs to have a vote and declare ahead of time "if we win we immediately donate it to x museum or whatever" so they don't have to pay for conservation and security.

i don’t understand people who will loudly proclaim “x is true” without themselves having any reason to believe x is actually true. but that seemed to be the case just about everywhere. even coindesk — an entity that i’ve considered decently reliable in this space — published their “ConstitutionDAO wins” article before reliable confirmation (since redacted).

i get the pressure for a news outlet to call the shot early, but for everyday twitter/discord users? why propagate beliefs that you yourself haven’t heard from a reliable source? don’t people care that the things they say are actually true?

it was pretty funny to watch.

also a lot of "rugpull" comments are a meme that get repeated in any uncertainty or accident, i spill my coffee "rugged again". in this case the team didn't know who their bidder was until after the auction ended.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com