Ian Hutchinson

This will be the sixth time I have rewritten my bio, and I have become exceedingly inefficient at it.

A thought exercise regarding ConstitutionDAO

Posted:

2 minute read

I believe the following thought exercise is useful when considering the benefits of ConstitutionDAO

I won’t introduce ConstitutionDAO. If you don’t know anything about it, consider yourself blessed, close this tab, and get on with your day.

Answer the following questions for yourself:

  1. Is ConstitutionDAO a DAO?
  2. What does it mean to be a DAO? What technical innovation does a blockchain provide this organisation? (if you have used words like ‘open’ and ‘decentralised’ in your answer to (2), define these in the context of the DAO, and explain how the DAO and its members enjoy these benefits.)
  3. ConstitutionDAO failed to buy the constitution, but they did their best! In the event that they had succeeded in purchasing the document, who or what would have been the owner of the document, legally? Where did the money put into ConstitutionDAO go?
  4. Who or what owns (as in, according-to-the-law-owns) the answer to (3)?
  5. What claims do the members of ConstitutionDAO have on the assets of the answer to (4)
  6. I have all faith that the organisers behind ConstitutionDAO will handle the money in a manner satisfactory to all parties, whether that means refunds, partial refunds, putting the money towards other causes, or something else. In the hypothetical scenario where the organisers were less scrupulous, what recourse would the members of ConstitutionDAO have against them?
  7. Again on the topic of what to do with the money, if the members of ConstitutionDAO all voted to buy Abraham Lincoln’s hat, but the owners of the multisig wallet decided, at the last minute, to buy (say) George Washington’s silverware instead, what recourse would the good people of ConstitutionDAO have against this misuse of their funds?
  8. The ConsititionDAO organisers proposed a refund process involving a website, a new token, and a lot of manual work on their part. Their hard work at bootstrapping this governance infrastructure is admirable. Why are the governance features of the DAO itself (such as, voting rights of DAO tokens) unable to meet their requirements?
  9. Given your answers to (5), (6), (7) and (8), do you still feel that ConstitutionDAO enjoys the benefits you described in your answer to (2)?
  10. Given your answer to (9), do you still stand by your answer to (1)?

Bonus round! Between the first draft of this article and publication, the ConstitutionDAO inner circle announced that ConstitutionDAO would shut down. Consider the following bonus questions:

  1. The announcement was made on the ConstitutionDAO website. Is there any record of the decision on-chain?
  2. Who made the decision? Did members of the DAO outside the inner circle have any input?
  3. Were any votes held with the DAO’s governance token, like, at all? Ever?