THE rIGHT EXISTS TO AMUSE US:

The specifics of what is happening are quite complicated, but, basically, ConstitutionDAO raised more than $40 million worth of Ethereum using a crowdfunding platform called Juicebox. In exchange for donations, contributors had the option to redeem a "governance token" called $PEOPLE at a rate of 1 million $PEOPLE tokens per 1 ETH donated, issued through Juicebox. If ConstitutionDAO had won, those $PEOPLE tokens would be used for voting on what would happen to the Constitution. 

It was never explained exactly how voting rights would be apportioned (the DAO said "Due to the unusual and extremely short timeline of needing to rally around obtaining the Constitution during the auction window, we have not been able to focus on giving the technical aspects of DAO governance mechanics the careful consideration and community deliberation this topic requires.") But many DAOs use a proportional voting structure; for explanation's sake, one way of doing this would have been to give 1 vote per $PEOPLE token, allowing people who donated more to have an outsized say in what happened to the document.

Crucially, ConstitutionDAO repeatedly said that donors were not buying a fractionalized share of the Constitution and that individual donors would not "own" part of the Constitution, they would merely have a say in where it was displayed, etc. ConstitutionDAO also said that donating to the project should not be looked at as an "investment." 

"You are receiving a governance token rather than fractionalized ownership of the artifact itself. Your contribution to ConstitutionDAO is a donation with no expectation of profit," the DAO's FAQ section read. "Some examples of this would be voting on advisory decisions about where the Constitution will be displayed, how it should be exhibited, and for how long."

That's all well and good, but regardless of the intentions of the core team, many people of course were looking at this as an investment (the meme was "buy the Constitution," after all.) This was a somewhat reasonable expectation--many cryptocurrencies have skyrocketed to ridiculously high valuations off the strength of a meme alone, and DAO governance tokens are themselves a $40 billion market. Clearly, some people expected to be able to flip either a tiny ownership stake in the Constitution or $PEOPLE tokens for a profit. This did start happening over the weekend, with some investors selling $PEOPLE tokens on decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap. ConstitutionDAO repeatedly said on Discord that it "neither prohibits nor encourages any secondary trading of the $PEOPLE token."

This is all important because, on Saturday, ConstitutionDAO's admins announced two important things. First, it announced that it would be moving away from the $PEOPLE token into a new, yet-to-be-created token called "We the People" ($WTP), which would govern whatever future the project had. $PEOPLE, meanwhile, would go by the wayside because "we did not acquire the constitution and $PEOPLE's explicit reason for existing has now run its course," an admin said in what was billed as "a note from our legal team." They also announced that they were going to try to issue refunds outside of the Juicebox platform to those who wanted them.

These announcements had the effect of cratering the price of the now apparently worthless $PEOPLE, according to hundreds of angry messages on the Discord ($PEOPLE's price is not currently tracked by any exchanges, but recent trades on Uniswap show it going for $0.0044), as well as sowing confusion and anger within the community. Many posters on the ConstitutionDAO Discord felt like the team was moving away from $PEOPLE tokens for reasons that weren't well-explained; this also led to a bunch of arguments about what the purpose of the project was, what the intentions of the founders were, and whether they were being scammed or not. As the price of $PEOPLE cratered, some people bought tons of the now close-to-worthless token. 

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