It may have been a money donation scam (Score 1)

While most of the attention towards this case has gone towards laughing at the presumed inept interpretation of the significance of the Dune manuscript as a token of Dune copyright ownership, I think that the real story here is that this might been a well planned money donation scam, organized by the book previous owner.

IMHO, a plausible sequence of events could have been as follows:

• the owner timed the auction and founding of the Spice DAO with the new Dune movie release (last autumn)
• the owner then hyped the hell out of this "unique" opportunity to lure in a crowd of fools
• during the auction (that closed 22 November, 2021, see https://www.christies.com/en/l...) there was a second bidder that knew exactly how much money the Spice DAO was going to spend
• it was therefore easy to pump the price absurdly high, but just below the threshold

All this could have been done in the cover of illusionary fairness, as the Spice DAO officially did what it had promised to do, except that without all this manipulation going on behind the scenes, the book could have been bought with a fraction of the manipulated price.

One course of action for any individuals who have any saying on the business of this Spice DAO might be to open an investigation to find out the following details:

• when was to book last sold, to whom, and at what price
• why was the book bought with 3 million, when the original estimated asking price was only about 1% of that
• how many bidders were active in that auction, and what was the bidding track (presumable just two, the other magically dropping out just before the DAO cash reserves were about to be exhausted)
• who exactly was the previous owner of the book (and who presumably got all that money)
• what ties the inner circle and founders of the DAO have with the book previous owner