Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

What will happen to the funds contributed to ConstitutionDAO that owners don't feel is worth paying the "gas" fees to get the refund on?

> the group said it had 17,437 donors with a median donation of $206.26... One user on the Discord said that in order to get $400 refunded, they would have to pay $168 in gas (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59392827)

Presumably there are people who donated $100 and it isn't worth getting the money back. Are these pots of money a good way for a scammer to get a lot of money input and then only have to refund 75% of the donated money? If they raised $40M and only $30M gets refunded, who controls the remaining $10M?

At some point it seems like it would be ripe for a scam. Even if this case has some protections, it seems like it would be easy for someone to do something unprotected in the future.

Everyone send me bitcoin and if we hit $2B in bitcoin in the account, we'll buy an NBA team and all share ownership in proportion to our investment. If we aren't able to buy a team, you can get a refund. Oh, 1% of people forgot about it and didn't claim their refund within the 2-year refund window? Well, that's $20M for me.

Has this been solved and I just don't know it?

Their legal claim to the value stored in the eth isn't gone just because they can't get it out. If these are actually set up in a legal way these type of pots are nuclear waste. You don't want to be stuck keeping this thing alive or disbursing money from it.

The first couple of times the scammers may win, who knows.

Ironically, ConstitutionDAO's $PEOPLE token has soared in value and many folks made exits at 30x.

So, a company (DAO) says it's going to use investment money (token contributions) to buy an asset (copy of the Constitution) and fails to buy the asset...and then the stock (token) goes up 30x in price?

Scammers are having a renaissance in rebranding old schemes.

There is no deception behind the marketing for the ConstitutionDAO. No one has made any claims of it being a profitable venture. It was explicitly marketed as a non-profit venture to democratize ownership of important cultural pieces. The PEOPLE tokens appear to be going up in value solely due to the sentimental value attached to them.

How can you be sure this isn’t wash-trading organized by the largest owners so they can attempt to profit at the expense of individual retail investors?

Seems like wash trading in this way would cannibalize your gains if you don't withdraw before too long. I actually don't think that's what's happening. I think it's the memecoin effect. The constitution DAO got a lot of media attention and that's driving speculation on their $PEOPLE token.

That's a different allegation, which would need to be proven.

But then didn't they say that the democracy part, the votes, was going to be dropped on the floor as "advisory"?

Welcome to (a large number of) cryptocurrencies in a nutshell.

Yea, the other day I had the thought that many cryptocurrencies are basically just the stock without the business. So much easier to sell a stock when there's no business behind it, potentially contradicting the hype story.

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