Seth Udinski, FISM News
On Thursday, a priceless piece of American history was sold at an auction in New York City for a massive price.
At the Sotheby’s Manhattan event, a private collector purchased a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution for $43.2 million, massively outbidding a conglomeration of cryptocurrency users who had hoped to buy the artifact with combined funds.
Historians and curators are curious why the conglomeration of crypto users, known as Constitution DAO, did not use all $47 million of their collected cryptocurrency funds to place a higher bid on the Constitution copy. The group only bid for copy at $1 million, far short of the winning number.
This copy of the most important governing document in the United States is extremely valuable. Historians estimate that it was created in the year 1787, the year the Constitution itself was written, making this a preeminent primary document from the early stages of the United States. This is not the original Constitution, but it is one of the original 13 copies still in existence today.
The last time the 1787 U.S. Constitution copy was sold was in 1988 for a price of $165,000, to a historical collector named Howard Goldman. The artifact passed to his wife Dorothy when he died, and she kept it safe until she sold it at Thursday’s auction. Shortly before the auction, she spoke of the profound responsibility she felt when this incredible piece of history fell into her possession,
When it passed to me, I felt an incredible sense of responsibility to care for it, to share it, and to promote our nation’s Constitutional principles.