[sinak]

They're fundraising for a Sotheby's auction, so I think they basically want to raise as much as they can to be able to win the auction. Apparently they were told that it would likely sell for ~$40m, with bidding starting at $20m.

[TigeriusKirk]

The low estimate is $15 million, so bidding will start below there. It may quickly surpass it, or it may not.

I got the impression the original dao goal wasn't accounting for the fees, which are added on top of the winning bid.

https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2021/the-constitutio...

[peter422]

The auction will not sell for any less than the maximum amount the DAO has raised.

If the DAO are heavily incentivized to bid, and you know what their max value is, somebody will bid them up. Sotheby’s is too smart not to make sure that happens.

It is generally a moronic idea to raise funds for an auction like this. You will never get a good deal and your competition knows exactly what your limit is.

[TigeriusKirk]

I certainly have had the same thoughts, but I think it's a little different when you're up in these prices ranges and on a very high profile item. There's a lot at stake, not just for the dao, but Sotheby's as well. Not to mention the possibility the other bidders could conceivably be left holding the bag.

[wallacoloo]

fortunately, aside from Sotheby’s fees, the current owner pledged to give all proceeds from the auction to her charity. it’s not perfect, but it makes the prospect of overpaying far less painful IMO.

[Animats]

Now they're up to $31 million received, $35 million goal. This now looks like a dark pattern intended to deceive contributors into thinking it's almost there.

[Animats]

Now at $34,971,088 / $35,000,000. "100% of goal". It seems to spend a lot of time just below the threshold.

Is someone checking the blockchain address involved to see if this is for real? There's an awful lot of money going into this. I just saw it jump by US$1.2 million.

[holonomically]

It's definitely real. There is some convoluted scheme involved where buying into it gives you the option of converting your shares into $people tokens which give you the advisory voting rights for what to do when they win their copy of the US Constitution. They're using something called Juicebox [1][2] which looks like a set of contracts that simplifies ERC20 token creation and management but the site is designed for children so it's hard to make sense of it.

Balance at time of writing this seems to be ~$38.75M (Ξ9,140.55) and the conversion rate is 1,000,000 PEOPLE/Ξ.

Someone commented this is basically a scam to generate a bunch of hype and transfer a whole bunch of money to whoever owns the contract for this DAO. Whatever money they don't use at the auction will presumably be distributed back to whoever bought into this based on their share of $people tokens (modulo gas fees). It's unclear if the DAO owners have extra shares or not but I guess that could be easily verified by someone who was willing to do the required detective work and chase some pointers on etherscan [3][4].

1: https://juicebox.money/#/

2: https://juicebox.money/#/p/constitutiondao

3: https://etherscan.io/accounts

4: https://etherscan.io/address/0xb1c95ac257029d11f3f64ac67b230...