[HN Gopher] An NFT That Saves Lives
___________________________________________________________________
An NFT That Saves Lives
Author : prtkgpt
Score : 124 points
Date : 2021-05-04 14:56 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| serd wrote:
| Can PG sell it later for more?
| dandanua wrote:
| Actually, I'm glad that this happened.
|
| Now everyone can see the essence of NFT scams.
|
| Basically, he made an investment asset from a _donation_ , with
| an ability to gain more later.
|
| How this can be called a donation, if you are going to make more
| money from a single fact of it, FOR YOURSELF?
|
| Hypocrisy maxed out.
| TedShiller wrote:
| awesome, this is great, a good way to show off NFT's
| fwip wrote:
| Just put up a donation link, please.
| marris wrote:
| https://www.noorahealth.org/donate
| joelthelion wrote:
| This is no better than uploading a PDF report on the NGO's
| website. An NFT does not bring any additional guarantees, adds a
| ton of complexity and most definitely doesn't save lives.
| jellicle wrote:
| Charity = good
|
| Cryptoscams = bad
|
| Want to contribute money? Write a check. Don't sully charitable
| operations by trying to glue a cryptoscam onto them.
|
| It seems rude to flag a link to paulgraham.com on Hacker News,
| but I'm going to do it anyway. Down with cryptoscams, even ones
| promoted by Graham.
| eternauta3k wrote:
| If the ~$1000 per life figure is accurate, the GiveWell[1] guys
| will be all over this.
|
| [1] http://givewell.org
| skybrian wrote:
| I'm on a poor Internet connection and can't read the page but a
| search indicates that GiveWell is aware of Noora:
|
| https://www.givewell.org/research/incubation-grants/charity-...
|
| It would be interesting to read about how it compares to
| GiveWell's recommended charities.
| timlod wrote:
| One thing when considering effective giving is that cost-
| effectiveness does not scale linearly with the investment -
| this figure may well be accurate for the investments they've
| received, but that doesn't mean that additional investments
| will be effective to the same degree.
|
| For example, in this case, educating mothers about how to take
| care of their babies will be very effective until most of the
| population is educated - from that point on, there may only
| need to be ongoing low investment to keep that level of
| education.
|
| In general, effective giving would try to keep highly-effective
| charities well-funded, but not have them store excess
| investments - if not all of the donations can be "activated",
| the charity becomes less effective per dollar.
| advisedwang wrote:
| Is the donation still tax-deductible if you do it through a NFT?
| motohagiography wrote:
| I've suspected that the point of NFTs is to transfer
| cryptocurrency into an asset with a different volatility
| proifle without "realizing gains," or even use them as loss
| makers to offset capital gains, so indirectly, maybe?
| 8note wrote:
| Are purchases from charities tax deductible? I thought it was
| only donations
| gowld wrote:
| The amountyou pay in excess of the market value, is
| deductible as a donation. This is how charity auctions of
| commodities work. What's the market value of the NFT? Who
| knows?
| criddell wrote:
| The market value is whatever somebody is willing to pay. If
| PG will pay $2.6 million for the NFT, that's its market
| value.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I used to run the tech side for a couple of UK-based aid
| organisations (just out of college - basically database
| management and home brewed campaign work.)
|
| We had _terrible_ marketing response once we left a core base of
| existing donors - getting new donors in the door for a non-profit
| was (at least for us) a constant challenge. However, once some
| external event (sadly some horrific disaster) occurred we would
| see a spike in willing donors.
|
| So this looks like a non-horrific external event - something that
| might make (at 2 million dollars very rich) rich donors dig deep
| and contribute.
|
| Great - taking money from the wealthy and putting it to good use
| is a perfect use of anyone's time and effort, I hope they raise
| twice what they expect.
|
| Whatever you think of NFTs, I don't care - take advantage of any
| opportunity to increase your donor base - its tough enough out
| there :-)
| glitchc wrote:
| Has your past employer perchance switched from a "give what you
| can" to a subscription "pay X per month" model? The latter has
| proven to be remarkably unpopular with the public.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| This was the best part of 30 years ago - they are still all
| in existence but I cannot comment on their detailed
| fundraising techniques :-(
| criddell wrote:
| I'm only doing anonymous donations these days. Too many
| places do not respect your request to not be contacted in the
| future.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| We donated to the EDF once; the sheer volume of junk mail
| they and their data broker sent us enraged us so much that
| we've sworn off ever giving them money again.
| macawfish wrote:
| It's weird seeing a website that so vehemently defends artificial
| speculation in housing markets get so worked up about digital
| raffle tickets
| dang wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26975955
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26918270
|
| " _Please don 't sneer, including at the rest of the
| community._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| macawfish wrote:
| My bad, the stakes are high. I'll work to cool it next time.
| mxwsn wrote:
| The latest NFT craze is primarily for one-of-a-kind items. I'd
| rather see an org like Noora Health sell unlimited NFTs.
|
| What's exciting is the capability for decentralized apps to
| interact with NFTs. For example, other ethereum-based games are
| able to detect and interact with cryptokitty NFTs without the
| permission of the cryptokitty designer. As a blockchain token
| proof of donating to charity, you can imagine apps that encourage
| more donations by recognizing donaters in special ways to help
| build social capital.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Automatic membership to services based on total amount of
| donations to any charity on the blockchain could be a cool
| thing.
|
| Like, 'to stream this movie, you must have donated $100 to any
| charity within the last 24 hours'.
| psswrd12345 wrote:
| Amazing how short sighted HN is when it comes to NFTs. Blindly
| accepting the "bad for climate" tripe and showing utter ignorance
| to the upcoming transition away from energy guzzling proof-of-
| work to a proof-of-stake world. Sad to see this community act so
| willfully ignorant to all things crypto.
| McGlockenshire wrote:
| > upcoming transition away from
|
| Read: Not here yet, so still doing the whole energy guzzling
| proof-of-work thing.
|
| NFTs are a dumb fad that's likely to die out before the always-
| around-the-corner move away from PoW.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I don't get it. A non-profit is inherently a centralized entity.
| What's the point of using a blockchain in this scenario?
| throwaway_isms wrote:
| > non-profit is inherently a centralized entity.
|
| I would have actually said the opposite, if there is one
| inherently decentralized type of entity that is officially
| recognized by central authorities it is a non-profit.
|
| Yes, non-profits exist because of centralized authorities, if
| they have exempt status for purposes of taxes that
| determination comes from a centralized tax authority, but a
| non-profit itself has no owners and is generally governed by
| the members. The members generally elect a board of directors
| but that is just representative of the collective decentralized
| members and should serve at their collective discretion through
| vote, the board as the official representatives appoints the
| Officers that manage the day to day business of the entity.
| There are arguments to be made, and not all non-profits are
| structured identically, but inherent in all of them is no
| ownership, so should a non-profit be dissolved and have assets,
| those assets are not distributed to any ownership class but
| must be distributed to other non-profits. Based on the lack of
| profits and ownership, non-profits are more decentralized in
| nature than many organizations claiming to be DAOs most of
| which are organized around the concept of an ownership class
| and profits.
| psswrd12345 wrote:
| Verifiable donations, fully transparent reporting/auditing, no
| restrictions on who can donate, NFTs tied to donations that can
| be used for virtue signaling online, etc.
| endisneigh wrote:
| A blockchain isn't necessary for any of these things, though.
| psswrd12345 wrote:
| Might not be "necessary", but sure as heck makes all that a
| lot easier. Sure, one could design their own system that
| accomplishes all of those features, but why if there's an
| existing infrastructure layer that anyone can build on that
| already offers it? Especially a non-profit that likely
| lacks the technical expertise and resources?
| endisneigh wrote:
| I don't understand your point - are you suggesting a non-
| profit will find blockchain easier than a regular ledger?
| Any organization that accepts donations now can already
| do all of the things you originally mentioned, for free,
| by simply signing the donation receipts.
| capableweb wrote:
| > are you suggesting a non-profit will find blockchain
| easier than a regular ledger?
|
| For the features outlined before ("Verifiable donations,
| fully transparent reporting/auditing, no restrictions on
| who can donate"), for sure!
|
| First you have to come up with a ledger you can run on
| your server, but that visitors should be able to verify
| that what your server responds, is actually the values,
| and that you haven't manipulated those values in any way.
| How do you even do that? Since you are running the
| software, you can modify it, either on the machine
| itself, or in transit.
|
| Secondly, you need to come up with a way of avoiding
| AML/KYC since that or similar exists in most countries.
| You might need to hire a lawyer just in order to write
| the user-stories for your sprint.
|
| Or, use existing software and boom, thing done. Publish
| and then circle jerk on Twitter.
| casi18 wrote:
| It works very well for all of them though.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| A PDF of my Watsi donation and credit card statement is
| just as good without any blockchain Rube Goldberg
| mechanizations. By all means, digitally sign the PDF [1]
| if you want to be fancy and hip, but you don't need a
| blockchain, nor is it going to tell you if the healthcare
| donated towards was actually delivered.
|
| If the argument is, "It's on the blockchain for trust
| purposes!" my retort is, "Do you not trust the nonprofit?
| And if you don't, _why are you giving them money?_ "
|
| Please, do donate to non profits that align with your
| philanthropy interests, but don't get caught up in hype.
|
| [1] https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/certificate-
| based-sign...
| capableweb wrote:
| Watsi seems to offer donations via credit cards and
| Paypal, neither which I think supports $2.4 Mil
| donations, but I'm unsure, never tried it myself. Watsi
| overall don't seem to fit the "no restrictions on who can
| donate" part either, as they are an American non-profit
| (subject to US laws, including embargoes).
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Can you name a non profit not governed by nation state
| monetary and financial regulation policy you'd donate to?
| I cannot.
|
| If I was going to donate a substantial sum to Watsi, I
| would wire it to them and have the wire receipt as proof
| of money transmittal.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| Destroying the environment I guess. And surfing on the sad hype
| that the NFT buzzword have.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Except that there are more power-efficient ways to build a
| blockchain than the Bitcoin approach. There's nothing
| inherent about NFTs that means they must destroy the earth.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| There is nothing inherent about NFTs.
|
| You got that right.
| casi18 wrote:
| I imagine @pleasrdao might be bidding on this.
|
| A nice example of what global settlement layers and co-ordination
| tools can be (and should be) used for.
| nrmitchi wrote:
| I'm not sure why this is an NFT other than trying to capitalize
| on the current craze. NFT or not, a charity should still "issue a
| public report tracking how this specific tranche of money is
| spent, and estimating the number of lives saved as a result".
| Having decent reporting on how efficient your charity is feels
| like it should be basic table-stakes in order to raise more money
| in the future.
|
| Is this really any different than a charity asking for donations?
|
| Edit: asking for _one very large_ charitable donation.
| catilac wrote:
| I just deleted my comment wondering the same thing. I don't
| understand why something like opencollective couldn't be used.
| Give money to org, see how money is spent. The NFT is
| completely unnecessary.
| nrmitchi wrote:
| Consider paulg looks to be the only bid (so far, maybe that
| could change), this kind of looks like trading a $2.5M
| donation (that likely would have been made anyways) for a
| feel-good news article pumping a use-case for NFTs as a
| whole.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| This is a charity auction, a common way for charities to get
| donations. The purchase can make sense for the buyer because
| they get the good will of the donation, and they get an NFT
| potentially they could resell later that could be valuable
| because it is saving lives. The only thing the NFT directly
| does is mathematically prove to some future buyer that this NFT
| is the original and not a forgery. And it makes sense for Noora
| because of all the hype and money being spent on NFTs. If they
| were auctioning off a signed physical binder of the same report
| it would probably sell for a lot less even though it is
| effectively the same thing.
| dasudasu wrote:
| It really isn't. It's just a fancy receipt that also happens to
| be particularly harmful to the environment. There is nothing
| preventing a shady charity from embezzling the funds. As with
| everything blockchain related, trust stops every time there
| needs to be an interaction with the real world.
| zebnyc wrote:
| Lots of folks buy NFTs as an investment vehicle expecting them
| to increase in value in the future. What is the value
| proposition of this as an NFT? Why would anyone want to buy
| this NFT from PG? If the price of this NFT were to go up & a
| new investor wanted to buy it, they would just buy a receipt
| that PG paid 2.5 million for this NFT. How does this benefit
| the investor or the charity?(Noora Health)
|
| The more I learn about NFTs the less I understand.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| I thought they would create 100k tokens at $25 so everyone
| could donate, but also the value of the tokens could go up in
| the future. That would've been cool.
|
| But... no. It's a single token worth millions of dollars, so no
| one an actually participate, except PaulG himself
| liuliu wrote:
| If it is $25 a token with 100k of them, these are not exactly
| non-fungible, isn't it :)
| yawnxyz wrote:
| well, some NFTs do have thousands copies, etc. -- they're
| not always unique, but I get your point haha. Maybe they
| should have done it as a ICO / social coin instead :P
| capableweb wrote:
| > well, some NFTs do have thousands copies, etc. --
| they're not always unique
|
| What? No. They are unique and not the same as the others,
| that's what makes them NFTs in the first place.
|
| A NFT that has thousands of copies is just a
| cryptocurrency... You might mean that there are
| "collections" of NFTs, where the artwork happens to be
| the same and the author is the same. But each individual
| piece of that is it's own NFT and not a copy.
| nrmitchi wrote:
| You're just being extremely pedantic around the use of
| the word "copy" to try to make your point. If you have
| thousands of things where the artwork is the same and the
| author is the same, we have a word for that: "copies".
|
| Putting an ID on each one doesn't make them any less
| "copies"; they're just numbered copies. Sure, you can
| call that a "collection" if you want, but they are a
| bunch of instances of the "same thing".
| capableweb wrote:
| Well, without being pedantic about the use of "copy", we
| might as well use "NFT" and "cryptocurrency"
| interchangeably, but it's useful to make the distinction
| between as they are different.
|
| If you pipe /dev/random to 100 different files and hash
| them, the content are "the same" in the sense that they
| are all filled with garbage. But if you hashed the
| content, you'll get different hashes. Use those as Global
| IDs, and you have something like a NFT. The same, but
| also not the same as they are unique.
| babyshake wrote:
| It would make more sense to sell this as an NFT if it were
| paired with a thematically related artwork. A wealthy buyer
| would be able to display the NFT in their home and brag about
| all the lives they saved when they bought it.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| How do you display an NFT? Isn't it literally just a hex
| code, with actual asset hosted somewhere else, which is
| publicly accessible by everyone? I'm serious. Isn't that all
| it is? A pointer to some other resource, without access
| control at all?
|
| At least when I bought a beanie baby, I got beanie baby. NFTs
| always felt like paying money, then printing up the first
| picture of a beanie baby from a Google image search, and then
| trying to convince yourself that had the only one.
| yourabstraction wrote:
| Currently I see NFTs as a new status symbol, but without a
| way to display them (ie: flex your status/wealth). However,
| if you think the world will move further towards the
| digital realm where people will spend large portions of
| their lives in shared virtual worlds, this problem goes
| away.
|
| There will be virtual worlds where only the true owner of
| the NFT (can prove with digital signature) can display
| their artwork. It's not so different from people flexing
| with their skins in various games, so I don't think it's
| much of a stretch to imagine a virtual world where people
| have virtual properties, houses, businesses, etc. where
| they display their NFT artwork. Have a look at Decentraland
| for an idea of where this might be heading.
| babyshake wrote:
| Agreed. If you don't acquire the rights to the contents of
| the NFT when you buy it, it's not very clear what you are
| buying. If you do acquire the rights (including cash flow)
| then buying an NFT has very real meaning.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Good idea, and one I hope yet another decent charity uses.
| And frankly its _waaaay_ more PR friendly than 'a report on
| our spending effectiveness'.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > I'm not sure why this is an NFT
|
| That's what I've said about every existing NFT.
| capableweb wrote:
| Ever seen a programmer creating programs in Brainfuck? I
| don't think I'll never understand Brainfuck, but I do have
| some understanding of why you'd wanna write a program in it.
|
| Ever seen these abstract paintings that go for millions of
| dollars? How dare they? I don't understand anything of it,
| it's weird as fuck, but it doesn't really hurt anybody more
| than anything else so why care?
|
| I feel like NFTs fall into a similar category. I understand
| them, I just don't want them. But I do understand that the
| same people who would collect baseball cards or whatever (I
| also never understood that) could see something in NFTs. Same
| with the art-crowd who been struggling with funding for
| individual artists, I don't want it myself, but I kind of see
| why others would somehow.
| codegladiator wrote:
| I don't see any brain fuck programmer trying to convince us
| that bf is the future. nobody is trying to convince someone
| else to code in bf.
|
| same with the abstract art. someone did it, it happened,
| people appreciated. but they knew that's all about it. no
| artist telling us to do it.
|
| And nft isn't even comparable, it's just become another
| term for cypto coin. Two years ago this would an ICO. coin
| to save lifes.
| mplewis wrote:
| Great, now pg is deep into the Ponzi scheme.
| dvt wrote:
| Seeing pg peddle NFTs after a16z did it just a few weeks ago is
| kind of depressing. I guess Silicon Valley VCs must be _really_
| stinging about missing out on Bitcoin a few years ago. Not to
| mention that disguising what 's essentially a money-making scheme
| as a benevolent donation is morally murky at best.
| tomhoward wrote:
| Giant assumption that Silicon Valley VCs missed out on Bitcoin.
| YC invested in Coinbase in 2012. Andreessen Horowitz and Union
| Square Ventures invested in 2013. You don't think their
| partners bought at least a bit of Bitcoin then as well?
| dvt wrote:
| > You don't think their partners bought at least a bit of
| Bitcoin then as well?
|
| I have no way of knowing but I'd wager probably not; VCs
| invest in highly-speculative moonshot ideas all the time.
| Back then, crypto was mostly naive zealotry. And these days,
| it's mostly greed. It seems people forgot BitTorrent circa
| 1999-2003 -- it's history literally repeating itself.
| tomhoward wrote:
| Marc Andreessen was publicly speaking of Bitcoin as an
| important technology in 2014 [1]. He sounded like a true
| believer then, not a moonshot speculator.
|
| I remember Sam Altman (then YC president) tweeting about
| him and other YC partners trading Bitcoin in about 2014
| too. And I heard of Peter Thiel having bit Bitcoin
| investments several years ago.
|
| It's not so true that VC's "invest in highly-speculative
| moonshot ideas". YC does as their business model is to bet
| on a huge pool to catch the outliers. But traditional VCs
| have to defend their investments to LPs so have to be more
| prudent. Any VC investing in Bitcoin companies in 2013 was
| doing so because they personally believed Bitcoin had huge
| potential.
|
| [1] https://www.econtalk.org/marc-andreessen-on-venture-
| capital-...
| casi18 wrote:
| They absolutely didn't miss bitcoin. Thiel gave Vitalik a
| scholorship to drop out of university and work on ethereum.
| a16z have been massive supporters of cryptocurrency startups,
| as have YC (isnt coinbase their best investment?). Naval,
| Balajis, Alexis Ohanian. The common thread is crypto.
|
| It seems like it is just the HN commenters that don't seem to
| understand why and still talk about Tulips. Meanwhile reddit is
| working on community tokens, ebay working on nft listings...
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| The common sentiment on HN with regards to crypto is baffling
| to me. It's like they stopped paying attention in 2017.
| svarog-run wrote:
| These days
|
| HN commentor = hate computer science
| miguelmota wrote:
| This is interesting but a gofundme or regular fundraising event
| could achieve the same thing, without paying high miner fees too.
| aogaili wrote:
| While I never understood the value of most NFTs yet. I'm still
| not sure if I'm too smart and too stupid. But either way,
| Donation NFT sounds better than the Fart NFT I read about the
| other day. But I'm still not sure what the NFT is for and how
| exactly it will save any life..People seem lost in abstractions
| and fictional stories..
| spamalot159 wrote:
| Seems like even PG is succumbing to the hype of NFTs. I don't
| understand how this will be any better than just doing a donation
| drive and it could possibly be worse for the planet.
| klyrs wrote:
| This is generally the problem with idolizing people. PG is a
| human. Humans do stupid stuff.
| dandanua wrote:
| Why do you think it's stupid? He is legitimizing blockchains
| with the hope that the price will grow (infinitely) and he
| will be at the top of this human pyramid.
|
| Ah, and what about saved lives? Pyramid supporters don't give
| a sh*t about lower levels of the pyramid. That's the main
| point of building it.
| klyrs wrote:
| Sure, I should have said that humans fail to live up to the
| lofty standards that people expect of their idols. But
| "people are stupid" rolls off the toungue, as it were
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| throwaway_isms wrote:
| Back when YC experimented with application through the community,
| or "Apply YC:", I deployed a YCCoin on Ethereum and applied.
| Basically decentralized Karma.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15226688
|
| There was one comment "why would I use this?" Rightly or wrongly
| it seems that is still the question everyone has for NFTs.
|
| At the same time in 2017 I had simultaneously built out
| redditco.in, igco.in, and facebookco.in. If you follow NFTs you
| might be familiar with the Tweet NFTs and Jack's first tweet
| getting a multimillion dollar bid, right as that was occurring I
| got a cease and desist/trademark infringement letter from FB. In
| a responsive letter I encouraged FB to allow me to auction
| Zuckerberg's first FB post as an NFT along side Jack's Tweet and
| with that I would gladly transfer them the domain names. It
| sounds dumb at best, tinfoil conspiracy at worst, but that is
| exactly when the bids on Jack's Tweet and all the media
| surrounding it stopped, and I never got a reply to my response to
| the TM infringement letter.
|
| From there the NFT rabbit hole only got deeper as I began
| receiving quid pro quos, or pay to play requests for invitations
| to join an "exclusive" NFT marketplace, even getting a retweet
| from one of the anonymous NFT collectors on Twitter that has
| spent millions on NFTs as proof the quid pro quo requests were
| legit. The Twitter account I was using literally had 1 follower,
| but was being retweeted by an anonymous NFT collector spending
| millions (I think even bought one of Grimes' NFTs for about
| $750K).
|
| I will say this for pg's essay, this NFT, and bid...at least pg
| and company did not create an anonymous or fake persona or
| personality and pg openly placed the initial bid. However, unless
| this results in so much backlash no one wants to touch it, my
| guess is consistent with the entire NFT space, the ultimate bid
| for this NFT will end up being some anonymous NFT collector with
| a record of spending millions "collecting" NFTs.
| lucasnortj wrote:
| NFTs are idiotic, an NFT in the service of a worthy goal is no
| less pointless nor idiotic
| jtsiskin wrote:
| There is 1 bidder, paulg1
| marris wrote:
| The NFT here seems to be a publicity stunt to both raise money
| directly from the auction and also to raise awareness about the
| charity. I had never heard of this charity before this stunt, and
| I probably would not have heard of them without it. It certainly
| seems plausible that "using an NFT" here is a net good, even if
| there is some carbon cost.
|
| You _could_ argue against the stunt, but it requires more work
| that just stating "carbon costs." You'd have to check whether
| valueOfSavedLife * moneyRaised / 1235 + carbonCost < 0. And it
| looks like the auction is structured so that moneyRaised will be
| at least 2.5M, so the carbonCost would need to be pretty negative
| to make the sum negative. What is carbonCost?
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| If Paul Graham had donated $2.5 million dollars to Noora and
| written a brief article about it, he probably could have
| convinced some percentage of his readers to also donate to Noora
|
| As is, there's a chance that someone will bid more than $2.5
| million for this NFT, but the delta between Paul's bid and the
| winning bid will have to be greater than the sum of other non-
| winner take all donations for this to be a more effective way to
| raise money
|
| On the other hand, if this wasn't an NFT, Paul probably wouldn't
| have put up $2.5 million and written an article about it at all,
| so I guess Noora's already better at this than I am
| [deleted]
| lolsal wrote:
| Isn't this just a receipt? like when I donate shirts to goodwill?
| elliekelly wrote:
| Yes. Except this way you get to pretend your receipt for money
| _given away_ (ostensibly out of the kindness of your heart) has
| magically become an "asset".
| hamhamed wrote:
| I'm not sure why everyone is tripping here. He's about to save
| some fucking lives and you suddenly care about the enviroment for
| sending a mere 100 ETH?
|
| Even if we are to look at the big picture, don't tell me you
| believe PG will be the sole reason everyone is going to pick up
| NFT donations now? It was going to happen regardless.
| teraflop wrote:
| It's great that PG is donating to a good cause, and anyone who
| donates that much money is welcome to brag about it, but that
| doesn't make the explanation any less baffling. Imagine a very
| slight modification of this scenario:
|
| > I'm going to donate millions of dollars to a life-saving
| charity, and in return they're going to manufacture and ship me
| a barrel of low-grade hazardous waste. Anyone who likes is
| welcome to try and outbid me for the barrel in order to raise
| even more money. Of course, I'll pay a bit extra to build a
| vault to safely store the barrel and minimize the risk of
| leakage into the environment. Afterward, we can calculate how
| many ounces of toxic chemicals it took to save each human life.
|
| > Isn't it great how technology can help make a difference in
| people's lives? I'm looking forward to seeing what barrels of
| toxic waste can help us accomplish in the future.
|
| EDIT:
|
| > Oh, by the way, this has nothing to do with the fact that I
| have a lot of money invested in a company that makes and
| transports barrels.
| not1ofU wrote:
| I'm planning on donating 100k packets of chewing gum to
| starving children.
| ASpaceCowboi wrote:
| Maybe i'm just an idiot, but this:
|
| >For this NFT, they're going to issue a public report tracking
| how this specific tranche of money is spent, and estimating the
| number of lives saved as a result.
|
| In my opinion, that is vital.
|
| Many donations to non-profits are used for many various reasons
| (some justifiable, some definitely NOT).
|
| This actually allows tracking on that money. So isn't this a good
| thing? People can easily manipulate stats on documents without
| having to worry about someone else double checking the work.
|
| With the ability to track the NFT's currency transactions is
| good, no?
| elliekelly wrote:
| > People can easily manipulate stats on documents without
| having to worry about someone else double checking the work.
|
| Perhaps I'm misunderstanding how this all works. How is the
| "report" that will be issued any different from a regular
| document? Just because it will be an NFT doesn't mean it will
| be more accurate does it? Someone will still write whatever
| they want on the document itself and there's no mechanism that
| will make this document more accurate than any other document.
| purerandomness wrote:
| This is peak absurdism. Why not simply donate the money? How is
| this better than a Kickstarter?
|
| How many lives could pg have saved by donating the billable time
| it took him to write this post?
|
| It gets even better, from the NFT article:
|
| > * What about the environmental costs?
|
| > We plan to make a significant carbon offset to mitigate the
| environmental impact of this NFT. Within one week of the closing
| of this auction we will update this page with details of the
| steps we took.
|
| pg giveth, pg taketh. If you agree that carbon emissions kill,
| you'd basically donate for a good cause through an absurdly
| convoluted money laundering scheme called NFT, and cause massive
| environmental harm on the other side of the planet, killing even
| more people, again.
|
| I might even draw several trolley problem comics, but the fact
| this is from pg himself makes me question his sanity and
| everything he's ever written.
|
| It's the same feeling of betrayal like when Signal turned around
| and decided to implement a payment token after several of us went
| ahead and invested time to convert family members away from
| WhatsApp.
|
| Profit over reason. Pyramid schemes disguised as benevolent
| startups saving lives.
|
| Startup culture needs a reboot.
| CPLX wrote:
| > Why not simply donate the money? How is this better than a
| Kickstarter?
|
| Because if you're PG and you do it this way you can have the
| money be added to the topline revenue numbers for a company you
| have invested in:
|
| https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/opensea/company_fina...
|
| This is marketing for a YC company.
| bszupnick wrote:
| > This is peak absurdism. Why not simply donate the money? How
| is this better than a Kickstarter?
|
| This reminds me of the Ice Bucket Challenge for ALS.
|
| Does pouring a bucket of ice water over one's head cure ALS?
| Obviously not.
|
| Did creating a trend that went viral help take strides towards
| curing ALS? Yeah! According to Wikipedia[1] this meme brought
| $220 million to ALS research.
|
| So I'm not sure you can simply say "why not donate the money
| instead of buying NFTs" since NFTs are what people are
| interested in now!
|
| Maybe this is an instance of meeting your customer where
| they're at.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Bucket_Challenge
| jayd16 wrote:
| I guess you could say there's value in riding any flavor of
| the month. However, I think there are plenty of fads that
| responsible organisations should shy away from. The fact that
| something is gaining popularity is not an excuse, imo.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Dumping a bucket of ice water over your head doesn't cause
| severe environmental damage. This does.
|
| Also, everyone likes weird videos of bad things happening to
| people. NFTs don't have widespread public interest, nor do
| they have an viral sharing feature. Videos do.
| casi18 wrote:
| > nor do they have an viral sharing feature.
|
| yet here we are...
| jonathankoren wrote:
| ...talking about NFTs in general rather than the
| nonprofit[0] or how to donate to them.
|
| [0] I already have forgotten their name.
| gowld wrote:
| Would that $220M have gone somewhere else equally valuable is
| Ice Bucket didn't become a trend?
|
| Attention is a finite resource.
| [deleted]
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge wasn't the ALS Light A Tire On
| Fire challenge.
| gogopuppygogo wrote:
| Tulips everywhere.
|
| If a Chinese controlled decentralized ledger like BTC can have
| assets worth > $50k then obviously an entry in a decentralized
| ledger proving ownership of something should be worth
| millions...
|
| Profit over reason is a hallmark of MMT capitalism these days.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. It degrades
| discussion, so we should all avoid it.
|
| Thoughtful critique is welcome, but name-calling, fulmination,
| and denunciatory rhetoric are not. If you wouldn't mind
| reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and
| taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be
| grateful.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| I don't think it's fair to say that 'massive environmental
| harm...killing even more people' is a likely outcome. The
| carbon offsetting will fix that up, but even so the
| environmental impact of proof-of-work has likely been
| overstated in online discourse.
|
| Of course, it is indeed a somewhat ridiculous moral money
| laundering scheme. I guess the main argument for it would be
| that NFTs are hot right now, and thus might attract more
| donations? That seems less than likely.
| y2bd wrote:
| Aren't there NFT marketplaces built on top of (minorly
| esoteric) proof-of-stake block chains now? If they're even
| going to _humor_ the environmental cost, why not just use one
| those? Am I missing anything?
| davidgerard wrote:
| There are NFTs on those, but they suffer the problem that the
| currencies of the blockchains in question aren't very
| convertible from actualmoney. ETH is relatively convertible
| and can run NFTs, so they tend to happen there.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| All the liquidity and capital is on Bitcoin and Ethereum
| (~$1.5T in capital). Ethereum is in the late stages of
| migrating to proof-of-stake. It will happen in the next 9
| months.
| casi18 wrote:
| Smaller chains have less economic security and less
| integrations, so it makes sense if they are expecting large
| donations to use something well established that is very
| unlikely to suffer a reorg attack and that is easily accepted
| worldwide.
|
| And as others have said, 1 nft makes no difference to block
| production. and for the long term energy efficient solutions
| are in testing now (for likely deployment in Q4):
| https://rayonism.io/
| danShumway wrote:
| > We plan to make a significant carbon offset to mitigate the
| environmental impact of this NFT. Within one week of the
| closing of this auction we will update this page with details
| of the steps we took.
|
| So this is _less_ efficient than a normal donation of the same
| amount, since we 've now introduced a secondary overhead in
| that you need to waste a portion of the money combating the
| environmental cost.
|
| Feels a little weird to praise the charity for having the
| lowest cost-per-life number that you've ever seen, and then to
| breathlessly announce that you're making that number worse.
|
| Is the cost of the carbon offset going to be lower than the
| cost would be to commission a very nice, unique physical plaque
| or trophy that could be actually displayed by the donor?
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| Marketing is effective and NOVEL marketing is very effective.
| Would we be talking about a spam post PG made begging for more
| money to be donated to another charity? We are here doing just
| that right now precisely because he involved the NFT angle.
| notahacker wrote:
| I agree with _novel_ marketing, but I 'm rather less
| convinced by the long run implications of what this purports
| to _actually do_
|
| The purpose of an NFT, after all, is to create some sort of
| symbolic representation of something you've paid for, and
| allow other parties to buy that representation from you
| without involving any third parties. It doesn't really have
| any other appeal except as signalling; in this case it
| supposedly signals your generosity.
|
| Or more specifically, it enables someone to signal that they
| have donated a lot of money to Noora Health and then try to
| recover that cash by selling it to someone else who wants to
| signal that they have donated to Noora Health without the
| inconvenience of actually donating to Noora Health.
|
| _The actual recipient of donations_ doesn 't sound like the
| sort of entity which needs to be disintermediated from
| donation signalling, and I'm not sure long run philanthropic
| expenditure is going to be increased by the notion that you
| get that money back from some other guy who wants to look
| like a philanthropist donating to you instead of the cause...
| graeme wrote:
| Yes. PG essays reliably hit the front page. I can't think of
| a single exception.
|
| Obviously he can't constantly ask for donations but the first
| ask certainly would have hit the front page.
|
| As far as I can tell, no one has added more to the NFT. Maybe
| that will change with time.
| jborichevskiy wrote:
| > Why not simply donate the money?
|
| Tax deductible email receipts are nice, but an exclusive
| digital asset that says "I donated to this cause" gets people's
| emotional and social gears working in ways a "share with
| Twitter" button does not.
| hammock wrote:
| >This is peak absurdism. Why not simply donate the money?
|
| You must not have heard of TITS coin.
|
| https://titscoin.io/
| mrb wrote:
| << _This is peak absurdism_ >>
|
| Pros of making this whole thing an NFT:
|
| * Capitalizes on a craze to save lives. Consequently, this will
| almost assuredly be more successful at raising money than if
| this had been organized as a traditional campaign with
| donations through credit cards or PayPal.
|
| * Very low friction. Any of the many lucky crypto millionaires
| can bid in seconds. No need to convert crypto to fiat and all
| associated hassles.
|
| * The highest bidder will own cryptographic proof of his
| _donation_ to Noora Health. Other bidders will have proof of
| their _intent_.
|
| * This may motivate other non-profit to seek donations through
| NFTs.
|
| Downsides:
|
| * Contributes to increasing the NFT craze ?
|
| * ???
|
| There are many things you can criticize about cryptocurrency,
| but this Noora Health NFT probably ain't one of them.
| sneak wrote:
| I'm not sure from this blog post what this company has to do with
| NFTs, or how these NFTs are intended to generate revenue for this
| organization, or why the tokens being sold can't be fungible, or
| what they're for.
|
| (Aside: The HTTPs Everywhere extension takes a bit of an issue
| with pg's 199x-vintage website. :)
| detaro wrote:
| Seems fairly clearly just jumping on the bandwagon. Clearly
| people right now spend lots of money on NFTs for whatever
| reasons, so sell one and get money the buyer probably wouldn't
| have donated otherwise.
| prtkgpt wrote:
| I believe, this is a great example to raise funds with the
| NFT models. Crypto to save human life.
| psswrd12345 wrote:
| This + the NFTs will make for truly excellent virtue
| signaling.
| fallat wrote:
| I don't think anyone understands that this is purely a "fun"
| thing to raise money. Yes, it's exactly like a donation drive.
| spamalot159 wrote:
| Except for that it uses technology that harms the environment.
| I don't think this trend is "fun" compared to a normal donation
| drive when it has these negative side effects.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Except for that it uses technology that harms the
| environment.
|
| Apparently it's on Ethereum. Ethereum is already using an
| hybrid PoW / PoS (proof of stake) chain and at some point the
| PoS chain should be the only one. It PoS works, the impact on
| the environment should be a rounding error.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Haven't people been saying this for at least 4 years?
| xur17 wrote:
| Maybe, but as of now the ETH2 beacon chain is running
| with > $14B of ETH locked in it, not launching honestly
| seems unlikely at this point.
| runako wrote:
| For those who, like me, are not knee-deep in crypto
| stuff, $14B of ETH appears to be about 3.7% of the total
| market cap.
| vcxy wrote:
| No, people have not been saying that ethereum is already
| partially on proof of stake for 4 years. I realize that
| isn't what you meant, but what you meant seems to be
| missing the point that it's actually happening recently.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| Great, get back to us when it actually happens, right now
| it is an environmental disaster.
| throwaway_isms wrote:
| Check out Ploygon(MATIC) they have an Ethereum L2 PoS
| network that is fully functional and works.
|
| At this point people are voluntarily using an expensive
| and wasteful mainnet on Ethereum, and it is better to
| promote the the existing solutions rather than spread FUD
| that they do not exist.
| eloff wrote:
| The environmental harm of a single ethereum transaction is
| very low. Lower than a fundraising dinner. Please take your
| nitpicking elsewhere.
|
| They're literally aiming at saving thousands of lives and the
| comments are all focused on how bad NFTs are. Give me a
| break, talk about missing the point.
| endisneigh wrote:
| > The environmental harm of a single ethereum transaction
| is very low. Lower than a fundraising dinner. Please take
| your nitpicking elsewhere.
|
| Source? I'm curious to see exactly how the environmental
| harm of a fundraising dinner is quantified.
|
| edit:
|
| When I google "ethereum transaction energy cost" the Google
| featured snippet says 50kwH for a single transaction. I
| find it hard to believe that it would take 50kWH to cook a
| single dinner. If you're referring to multiple dinners,
| then you would have to subtract the cost to eat in general
| as eating is a human necessity - hence me asking your
| source since I'm genuinely curious.
| sp332 wrote:
| With the NFT minting, several bids, sale, and transfer of
| ownership, it's an average of 340 kWh for a successful
| NFT, according to https://memoakten.medium.com/the-
| unreasonable-ecological-cos... which has sources and
| methodology etc. That seems pretty high even for a
| fundraising dinner, and at least that includes food.
| eloff wrote:
| Think about all the energy costs involved in everyone
| driving to the dinner, the air conditioning or heating
| for the venue, etc. It would depend on the number of
| guests which is more costly to the environment. For a
| dinner where you aim to raise 2.5 million, I think the
| dinner is going to have a bigger impact.
|
| But again, I want to reiterate that focusing on the
| environmental impact here is totally missing the point.
| It's like saying the outside of the hospital is painted a
| jarring color.
| endisneigh wrote:
| this is a really disingenuous comparison. again you'd
| have to subtract the costs that would've already been
| incurred anyway. would someone invited to a fundraiser
| dinner not eat otherwise? or drive? or have AC?
|
| also, given that it's already very easy to send money to
| any non-profit talking about the potentially unnecessary
| environment costs doesn't seem unreasonable. the only
| reason people bring it up is because there's an
| alternative that doesn't incur the same costs but achieve
| the same thing.
| eloff wrote:
| > this is a really disingenuous comparison.
|
| Neither of us put up numbers, but I didn't call you
| disingenuous. I stand by what I said until I see math to
| the contrary.
| endisneigh wrote:
| You're the one who made the claim to begin with - so
| there's nothing to stand on, it's just a baseless claim
| since you didn't really provide any information on how
| much energy is required for a "fundraiser dinner" to
| begin with that wouldn't have been used anyway.
| slg wrote:
| >The environmental harm of a single ethereum transaction is
| very low.
|
| "No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible" ~
| Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
|
| No transaction individually harms the environment. The
| collection of all transactions harms the environment. This
| one transaction is part of that collection and it has
| potential to help attract people to the platform which will
| encourage more transactions in the future.
| rpearl wrote:
| Because doing this as an NFT is utterly nonsensical. The
| NFT is involved for absolutely no reason. The only results
| of involving an NFT are (1) legitimizing a ridiculous scam
| and (2) causing extra environmental damage alongside the
| donation.
|
| Just donate the money, using a fraction of the carbon cost,
| and if you want to generate hype, do a match.
|
| What a waste of time and energy.
| eloff wrote:
| They clearly did it to capitalize on the hype around NFTs
| and draw attention to the fund raising event. Given we're
| talking about it, that looks successful, not nonsensical.
| Welcome to the world of marketing.
| [deleted]
| fighterpilot wrote:
| > Because doing this as an NFT is utterly nonsensical.
| The NFT is involved for absolutely no reason.
|
| It's not nonsensical from the perspective of their
| mission if it increases the amount of money that they're
| able to raise.
|
| > What a waste of time and energy.
|
| They're emitting ~90 kilograms of CO2 to save 2000 lives,
| which is a good trade-off if they wouldn't have been able
| to raise that much through traditional channels.
| throwaway_isms wrote:
| Does government backed fiat harm the environment? Do the
| militaries of the nations protecting their government backed
| fiat have a net positive or negative impact on the
| environment? Does the infrastructure required by central
| banks, retail banking have a net positive or negative impact
| on the environment?
|
| I am not arguing blockchain in various implementations do not
| harm the environment, only that there are many external costs
| and collateral damage by the current systems which is often
| ignored. What is a "normal donation drive" after all? Is it a
| bunch of celebrities and musicians jumping on private
| airplanes? Is it a $10,000 per plate filet mignon dinner
| indirectly supporting bigAG and bigAG animal farming? What
| external costs have you contributed to just to make a post,
| are there plastics in your device, was coal burned somewhere
| or fossil fuel burned to supply parts to your device or
| charge your device?
|
| Certainly this NFT is not saving lives, the entity behind it
| was saving lives before the NFT, and certainly they would
| have continued to save lives without the NFT, but if the NFT
| generates $2.5M and they can save 1 life with every ~$1,200,
| then there is a number. Maybe someone who really believes in
| the argument that saving 1,000 lives is good but not at the
| expense of the environment which will result in killing us
| all can step up and pay this entity double ($5M) not to do
| it, sure its a number reserved for the 1% but its also a
| number that means nothing to the 1%.
| version_five wrote:
| Plus it gives credibility to what is effectively a scam.
| People will be able to point to this and say "look, they're
| being used to do good" and others will take that as social
| proof that there is actually something legit to an NFT (and
| the rest of the various "crypto" scams going on).
| casi18 wrote:
| "We plan to make a significant carbon offset to mitigate the
| environmental impact of this NFT. Within one week of the
| closing of this auction we will update this page with details
| of the steps we took."
|
| Every action we take has tradeoffs. Everyone acts hoping that
| they can bring more good to the world than bad. Thats not to
| say we shouldn't be critical of decisions people make, but
| the moral panic around nfts is overblown imo. There are
| solutions being worked on [1] and the upside to addressing
| coordination problems[2] is huge.
|
| Or, as the saying goes, "Don't throw the baby out with the
| bathwater"
|
| [1]https://our.status.im/ethereum-is-green/
| [2]https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-
| moloch/
| klmadfejno wrote:
| > Everyone acts hoping that they can bring more good to the
| world than bad.
|
| Not so sure about that one
| eloff wrote:
| > Everyone acts hoping that they can bring more good to the
| world than bad.
|
| I want to live in that world.
|
| Those are some seriously potent rose colored glasses you've
| got going on there.
|
| I think it's true that many people think and act that way,
| but I don't know what percentage of people are basically
| good like that.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| Has Mr. Graham done an honest calculation of how many lives will
| be lost to the environmental impacts of NFTs if they become
| mainstream?
| mannykannot wrote:
| I don't think Mr. Graham is under any moral obligation to
| consider this issue unless it remotely plausible that NFTs
| issued for charitable purposes (or just NFTs, period) will "go
| mainstream" to the extent that they have any noticable
| environmental impact.
| [deleted]
| Diederich wrote:
| Is Ethereum anything like bitcoin in terms of power
| utilization/environmental impact?
| psswrd12345 wrote:
| Today, Ethereum uses about 1/6 energy consumption of bitcoin,
| while providing much more utility. But will change later this
| year as it transitions to proof-of-stake, at which point
| Ethereum's energy consumption will be negligible.
|
| https://www.wired.co.uk/article/blockchain-cryptocurrency-
| en....
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| Why in HN of all places do people constantly have years-old
| takes on crypto?
|
| Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake. Most other chains use
| some form of proof-of-stake.
|
| It's not like these projects are unaware of your criticisms,
| nor have they stood still since you stopped paying attention in
| 2017.
| bosswipe wrote:
| Why in HN of all places? Because engineers are more resistant
| to bullshit hype. Proof-of-stake has not been proven at a
| large distributed scale.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Most other chains use some form of proof-of-stake.
|
| I don't think this matters unless you weigh these chains by
| something like popularity or market cap - who cares if a
| blockchain used by a few hundred people is using PoS? Bitcoin
| and Ethereum are the two big ones and neither use PoS
| (yet)[1]. Also, we have new blockchains like Chia that have
| found novel ways to waste resources that don't involve PoW.
|
| [1] People have been saying that Ethereum is "moving to
| proof-of-stake" for _years_. Here 's an article saying it's
| going to happen in Dec 2020 after a Jan 2020 deadline was
| missed: https://www.exodus.com/blog/ethereum-proof-of-stake-
| date/ Is this time different? I don't know. But saying
| Ethereum is moving to proof of stake is like saying "the
| market is going to crash". Yes, maybe, but _when_?
| coolestguy wrote:
| It's currently got PoS working alongside PoW - so it's
| already happening
| jollybean wrote:
| NFT, much like most Crypto doesn't 'do' anything here.
|
| It's not a financial instrument that creates value.
|
| 'Private Corporations' enable people to group capital together to
| make useful stuff, that wouldn't happen otherwise.
|
| 'Public Exchanges' allow more transparency and broader classes of
| investors to participate in markets.
|
| Investment Banks 'make markets' for financial instruments so
| companies can trade things like risk, among other things.
|
| There's a lot of net value creation going on there even when it's
| fuzzy.
|
| If NFTs can encourage people to give to a charity, that's great,
| but of course that shouldn't be necessary. Crypto that can't
| effectively be used as currency is not a value creator, at least
| not until they are exchanged as such.
|
| This is frothy, bubble-ish kind of stuff that in my life I have
| seen implode twice, this time 'it may be different' in that it
| may not crash, but the value creation still isn't there. We
| should probably strive to do better than moving around deck
| chairs, even if it's with fancy math or AI.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| Leveraging manias for social good sounds appropriately disruptive
| ..
|
| Is there a way to short NFTs? I wish I could proactively sell
| people's regret to them.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Shorting low-liquidity assets is a very bad idea.
|
| If you short an NFT with only 1 token, you effectively just owe
| whoever holds it an infinite amount of money.
| smabie wrote:
| Sure you can short some NFTs.
| throwawaytemp27 wrote:
| As Matt Levine would say, the way to do that is to mint and
| sell your own NFT. That way you are on the opposite side of the
| trade as the bulls who you believe are wrong.
| yorwba wrote:
| If you mint an NFT and fail to sell it, you'll lose the
| minting fee. You'd do better to hold off on minting it until
| it has already been sold. And to actually sell some, you need
| to market them as something that people would want (like
| "saving lives") or, if you're short on ideas, crowdsource
| that task. At which point you're basically running an NFT
| platform. And you'll make more money the longer the NFT craze
| runs, which isn't really opposite to the bulls...
|
| The proper way to bet on NFTs being passe soon is probably to
| invest in something that's _not_ an NFT.
| [deleted]
| libra1 wrote:
| While the calculation of $1,235 to save a life is very good,
| donating blood is arguably the most efficient way to save a life
| since it is free.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Is there an under-supply of blood in rich countries to the
| point where people are dying as a result? If 1 regular donor
| stopped donating, how many additional people will die?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| There's lack of supply of some rare blood types[1]. Also
| relevant to point out, if you go donating blood don't just go
| after some disaster hits. It's a common occurrence that tons
| of people show up for blood donations after some tragedy hits
| but blood can only be stored a limited amount of time and it
| tends to be wasted. If you want to donate, go regularly.
|
| [1]https://www.blood.co.uk/news-and-campaigns/the-donor-
| magazin...
| cwkoss wrote:
| Will PG be committing tax fraud when he writes off this
| 'donation'?
|
| He is receiving in exchange a token when notionally has the same
| value as his 'donation'. Being able to resell a 'donation' to
| someone else to recover part of the cost seems weird and like it
| could confuse tax treatment.
| graeme wrote:
| I had hoped PG would write an essay on crypto/NFTs, as he seems
| enthused by them and is good at explaining things.
|
| But he explains nothing here. Noora seems good, but that's a
| feature of Noora, not NFTs.
|
| As for what is going on, I looked at Noora's post, it seems PG
| has placed the sole bid on the NFT, valued at $2.6 million at
| current market prices of ETH.
|
| In return he will get a token that says he did it.
|
| One part I'm unclear on: if someone outbids him, do only they get
| the token and pg pays nothing, or do both pay and are the
| contributions etched into the NFT?
|
| > But the higher the price of this NFT goes, the more lives will
| be saved. What a sentence to be able to write.
|
| Noora sounds like a good charity but what is different here from
| simply saying "the more people donate to Noora, the more lives
| will be saved"
|
| Since Noora knows their ROI they should be able to calculate
| lives saved from a donation whether it is a normal donation or an
| NFT purchase.
|
| If so, what does the NFT do?
|
| Many smart people I follow, who are ordinarily good explainers,
| are inordinately enthused about crypto. And yet on this single
| topic none of them have produced any public writing explaining
| the reasons for their enthusiasm.
|
| It is maddening. There may well be something there. But if there
| is it ought, in principle, to be explainable.
|
| -------
|
| I should also note you can't take this and say "NFTs contributed
| $2.6 million". You have to consider opportunity costs. The
| closest alternative to this post would be PG writing exactly the
| same essay except stating "I donated $2.6 million to Noora and
| you should too!" with a donate now button.
|
| This post hit the HN frontpage, so surely many would have
| donated. Whereas nobody has donated other than PG.
|
| Measured against this alternative, the NFT vs a normal funding
| mechanism has plausibly _cost_ lives. Not to mention the money
| that Noora will take out of its funds to do a carbon offset.
|
| Perhaps I am misunderstanding how this works, but if I have
| understood it properly and PG would have done an essay either way
| this might have cost lives.
| jollybean wrote:
| NFTs will effectively do nothing in this case.
|
| People are 'enthused' because they have a lottery ticket that
| could go to the moon and are want others in on the action.
|
| The charity is trying to hop on the bandwagon of 'money
| appearing out of nowhere'.
|
| We are clearly headed into a fairly inflationary situation, I'm
| curious as to how we will look at this time 20 or 40 years into
| the future.
| yumraj wrote:
| Perhaps he wrote the essay so that other people will find out
| about it and out bid him for the NFT.
|
| You get press for being the good guy and don't have to spend a
| dime. What a great thing to be able to achieve.
| graeme wrote:
| That's possible. Assuming he donates the $2.6 million
| regardless, this could be a high risk, high reward campaign.
|
| So while saying "please donate" might get say
| $100,000-$1,000,000 more, even a _single_ bid from a other
| investor /founder who wanted bragging rights for beating PG
| will dwarf that.
|
| If so it presents an interesting mechanism to elicit
| donations in rich social circles.
| noelsusman wrote:
| I mostly agree, but I don't think a PG post about him donating
| to Noora would make the front page of HN. In this case the NFT
| is providing value by bringing eyeballs due to how much hype
| NFTs have. I know I wouldn't have clicked through his post if
| he was just donating a bunch of money to them.
| a4isms wrote:
| If that's the only reason this is interesting, we're talking
| about digital fashion. It's isomorphic to a celebrity
| endorsing a product.
|
| "Is this person an expert in using this product? No? But it's
| selling like hotcakes because this person is a celebrity, and
| people find them interesting almost solely because other
| people find them interesting."
|
| So taking a donation and wrapping it in an NFT feels like
| taking a product and getting a celebrity to endorse it. The
| NFT itself really adds nothing to the idea of donating to
| this charity.
| lynx234 wrote:
| > One part I'm unclear on: if someone outbids him, do only they
| get the token and pg pays nothing, or do both pay and are the
| contributions etched into the NFT?
|
| No, only the person who wins the bid gets the token.
|
| I typically defend the tech behind NFTs but this just seems
| like it's riding the hype of NFTs more than anything.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| > riding the hype of NFTs more than
|
| Good on them for doing that. Their mission is to save as many
| lives as they can and if riding a hype train lets them do
| that, then the overall outcome is still very positive. The
| environmental externality is bad but trivial compared to the
| benefit of lives saved if this auction goes through.
| graeme wrote:
| And if someone else bids more, is that the only money that
| goes to Noora? i.e. PG's bid is voided
| kemonocode wrote:
| Yes, only the winning bid would go to Noora. However, there
| would be a record of any other bidders' intent.
|
| With a bit more of creativity/effort, someone could have
| created a smart contract for keeping track of all the
| donations and only releasing them once they reach a certain
| threshold, then giving a token back representing a "life
| saved" to donors if they truly wanted, but I get
| capitalizing on NFTs' hype right now.
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| Most charities already give you pdf certificates
| recording how many lives you saved with your donation.
| What's the point in having an NFT instead of just a pdf?
| yrral wrote:
| People have been able to raise non-insignificant amounts of
| money selling NFTs for charities.
|
| Snowden - Freedom of Press Foundation 5.4m
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22388548/edward-snowden-n...
|
| pplpleasr - Stand with Asians 550k
| https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/99615/uniswap-v3-nft-sol...
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| How is this different or better than normal donations? If
| anything, isn't it worse due to the NFT overhead?
| hiq wrote:
| If you go from 5% to 10% overhead but collect 10 times as
| much because of the hype you still end up with more money.
| brown9-2 wrote:
| > I had hoped PG would write an essay on crypto/NFTs, as he
| seems enthused by them and is good at explaining things.
|
| What is there to explain? People who are invested in
| cryptocurrencies are hyping the equivalent of digital trading
| cards because it has the downstream effect of increasing the
| hype on cryptocurrency.
| graeme wrote:
| I don't know what there is to explain, but I'm always open to
| the possibility that I've missed something. Ethereum, in
| particular, is at least capable of _interesting_ things.
|
| That doesn't mean it will change the world. But I'm always
| interested in hearing from intelligent people who differ on
| _why_ they think it will.
| bob33212 wrote:
| I appreciate this as I'm also trying to keep an open mind
| and understand what this means for the future.
|
| So far there are only two arguments that I understand:
|
| 1. Libertarianism: The world will be better if we remove
| the government and other 3rd parties from interfering in
| transactions between individuals.
|
| 2. Decentralization of Money (Crypto), like the
| decentralization of information (The internet) will unlock
| technologies and opportunities that we cannot appreciate
| now.
|
| Those are logical arguments, but I'm still missing the "so
| what" answer. How does the lack of government oversight
| change my life? My next bank account may be decentralized,
| so what? Does that mean I get better service? Lower Fees?
|
| I understand that plenty of people were unimpressed with
| the internet when it first came out, but I was not one of
| those people. I got it and was online in 1995, I bought
| GOOG in 2005, and TSLA in 2014. So I'm not your typical
| technological naysayer. Maybe Bitcoin isn't just an
| accidental Ponzi scheme, but as far as I can tell that is
| what it will be when we look back in 10 years.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Some degree of it has to just be the grown resentment of
| established banking. So this is a view of a certain
| cohort of sentiment, not necessarily exclusive to
| cryptocurrencies and all that.
|
| These days a bank account will _cost_ you money. Any
| savings account available to most people offers interest
| rates at or below inflation, if they 're not 0% and
| charge fees (making those ones functionally offering
| negative interest). Even more glaring is being charged
| fees for not having a high enough balance in your
| account.
|
| When you're young and poor and you look to a bank to help
| you grow out of that state, and you're offered the above,
| you can understand why it would appear the game is just
| plain broken. And that's just talking private bank
| accounts, not the larger economic sphere.
|
| To me, it's no wonder that people are trying out
| different things, even if they don't work. It's better
| than just accepting the thing that's already not working
| for you.
| parksy wrote:
| Well put, and another aspect beyond currency is a move
| against centralised control of enterprise. Centralised
| legal systems governing contracts, centralised ownership
| and rewards, centralised risk, etc. Some people looked at
| how the world is run and thought they could make a more
| efficient and secure way of doing things with more
| freedom for anyone that can swing an IDE to create fairer
| reward systems.
|
| At least one of the implications of systems like ethereum
| is that they enable autonomous contracts that are
| decentralised and at least in theory don't require any
| separate and typically centralised governing body to
| execute and enforce, which could in turn lead to a range
| of new models of business and human interaction.
|
| It remains to be seen what will happen, the technology is
| still young (the Web took about a decade to start
| catching on in the mainstream as perhaps being something
| more than a flash in the pan) and lofty ideas are being
| thrown at the wall as the new concepts are explored in
| both good and bad ways.
|
| Having seen the ups and downs of the online revolution I
| have a hunch at least some of it will stick, and whether
| this moment goes down as some great proletarian
| revolution or becomes just another tool in the
| billionaires belt seems up in the air to me, but at the
| very least it is disruptive and we may be seeing the
| birth of the next generation of crypto barons.
|
| Or anything could happen, like by some unlikely turn of
| events we solve prime factorisation and the whole thing
| fizzles into history as a big oops moment, or jackbooted
| forces raid homes and data centres to destroy all crypto-
| related hardware and knowledge.
|
| I feel the outcome will be somewhere between the two
| extremes of utopia and dystopia, it just seems to be how
| things turn out, but as you say at least people are
| trying things. Disrupting the status quo is how society
| moves forward, humanity never seems too comfortable
| sitting on its haunches (for better or worse).
| yourabstraction wrote:
| I think the problem is you're looking at cryptocurrency
| with the wrong perspective, so you're missing the
| fundamental ways it can rewrite the entire world of
| finance. I imagine you're looking at this from a consumer
| perspective, and you trust your bank, have a stable
| government fiat currency to use, and a credit card to
| make easy transactions with, so you have little use for
| cryptocurrency. Yet with the internet you likely saw the
| immediate ways you could make use of it, or how Google or
| Tesla would change the world with better search or better
| cars.
|
| Cryptocurrency at the core is about solving trust issues
| and human coordination issues. Just because you don't
| have these issues in your life doesn't mean they aren't
| extremely important for the world. Part of the problem is
| that at times crypto has been sold as a consumer
| technology, remember before Bitcoin was digital gold it
| was going to be the microtransaction currency of the
| internet, which excited a lot of people looking through
| the consumer lens. But in the bigger picture of how
| revolutionary the technology is, microtransaction are the
| least interesting thing it could do.
|
| This is a brand new technology that can solve trust
| problems and allow global business and trade to work more
| efficiently. It can allow humans to organize more
| efficiently and create brand new kinds of institutions
| (DAOs). Take Uniswap as an example. It's a decentralized
| exchange running on the Ethereum blockchain that has at
| times done as much daily trading volume as Coinbase. Now
| here's the kicker, they have two orders of magnitude less
| employees than coinbase (15 vs 1500). So not only are
| they vastly more efficient than legacy exchange
| technology, they also solve the trust problem because
| there is no third party taking custody of your funds,
| it's all done on the blockchain.
|
| Another interesting example I've been pondering lately is
| automated insurance policies that run on the Ethereum
| blockchain and payout based on decentralized oracle data
| feeds from Chainlink. Imagine a farmer in Africa who
| doesn't have access to crop insurance, but needs to
| smooth out his year to year risk so that he doesn't go
| bust during a drought year if his crop fails. You can now
| write a smart contract that takes data from a
| decentralized oracle network providing rainfall data. A
| user can then pay into this contract and he will
| automatically be paid out if the rainfall during the
| growing season is below a certain threshold. So the
| farmer gets a slightly lower but much more predictable
| income stream. Someone else (who's better capitalized)
| can take the other side of the bet to collateralize the
| insurance policy, and earn a higher but more volatile
| payout.
|
| This kind of efficiency per employee was never possible
| prior to blockchain. It's like how software and the
| internet allowed greater human coordination and orders of
| magnitude efficiency gains over legacy business
| organization, just applied to the world of finance. In
| the same way those massive gains in efficiency are
| allowing software to eat the world, crypto will eat the
| world of finance. This is a deep back end technology, and
| it's likely that by the time you're using it you won't
| even be aware of it as centralized institutions will
| adopt it on the backend while still providing you with a
| familiar user experience.
| graeme wrote:
| Chainlink sounds interesting. But how can you be _sure_
| about the data and the link?
|
| Insurers have sizeable fraud departments. If a system is
| unreversible and exists in a place without enforceable
| contracts, wouldn't that allow for a large gaming
| opportunity?
| yourabstraction wrote:
| It's probably best to read their whitepaper, as I don't
| know all the details off the top of my head, but they
| have a number of ways to prevent gaming the system. Of
| course, nothing is 100% sure, even Bitcoin can be
| attacked with enough power. It's about putting in place
| the economic incentives, such that the game theoretic
| best approach is to provide value to the network rather
| than trying to harm it.
|
| So in the case of Chainlink the idea would be that it's
| much more profitable to be an honest data provider than a
| dishonest one, and each data source uses a number of
| independent data providers. If you act dishonestly you
| will lose out on the value you could have gained by
| acting honestly and also be penalized in the reputation
| system.
| graeme wrote:
| Cool I'll have a look sometime. I can definitely get the
| sense there seems like there could be _something_ there
| with Ethereum, and if there is something there it could
| be very very big.
|
| What remains unknown for me is whether that something
| actually exists.
| bob33212 wrote:
| You are right, I am in country where there are
| enforceable laws and regulations. Maybe some developing
| countries can skip some of the legal and regulatory
| infrastructure and use software to solve those problems,
| similarly to how those countries skipped the wired
| telephone infrastructure and went directly to cell
| phones.
| yourabstraction wrote:
| Spot on with the analogy of leapfrogging the land line
| technology. Also, just because you live in a country of
| law and order doesn't mean crypto doesn't have value
| there. Imagine missing the value proposition of the
| internet when it came out because you felt you lived in a
| country where you could trust the publishing and news
| industries to provide you with the best information!
|
| Just as the internet unchained information from
| government and industry powers, cryptocurrency breaks the
| world of finance out of institutional control. This has
| the massive benefit of allowing bottom-up innovation,
| which is extremely valuable no matter which country you
| live in.
| anotha1 wrote:
| This NFT will be great for Noora Health. And maybe even N more
| organizations.
|
| Then, as happened many times in the past, similar organizations
| will start optimizing the wrong metric and their actions will
| slowly diverge from their mission.
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