An NFT That Saves Lives
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
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.
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.
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.
> > > it's riding the hype of NFTs more than anything.
The point is hype-based advertising. As people have been repeatedly pointing out all over the thread.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
What remains unknown for me is whether that something actually exists.
That would also apply to the stock market etc but ultimately traditional finance does allocate capital to businesses and actually produces things in the economy.
However, if Chainlink etc can link all of that Defi stuff to real activities, it could be powerful.
I’m still on the fence as I haven’t seen too many practical examples, but it definitely seems to be the space to produce one if they can be made to happen.
You're right - I do live in America :)
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.
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.
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.
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...
Some crypto/NFT millionaire who would normally never donate might well well be coaxed into donating once they see that "NFT" or "blockchain" is attached to the prospect.
“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.
My take - it's like a prize result. If you run some race there's a big incentive to be the #1 winner even if there's no prize money or trophy. It's just the general agreement that Joe Bloggs was the winner of the whatever race. Still people dedicate their lives towards achieving such things.
Likewise with PGs NFT someone will be able to say I was the winner of that auction and the world will agree and it is something that will be with you forever.
Is this really any different than a charity asking for donations?
Edit: asking for one very large charitable donation.
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'.
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.
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.
That's what I've said about every existing NFT.
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.
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.
You forgot the comment thread you were on... we aren't arguing that NFT is the future, but that some people can see a use out of it, just like BF.
But when you add "pay $100 in etherium for a reference to a publically jpg hosted on some website" you completely lose me.
But... no. It's a single token worth millions of dollars, so no one an actually participate, except PaulG himself
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.
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".
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.
The more I learn about NFTs the less I understand.
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 :-)
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.
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/
Not so sure about that one
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.
But in the case of NFTs, there's no baby in the bathwater.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible" ~ Stanisław 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.
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.
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.
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%.
You can't solve a political problem with technology. PoW is incredibly inefficient and wasteful. BTC is slow and wastes a lot of energy, just to maintain consensus.
I'd rather see a system with decentralised nodes I can trust (imagine tons of trustworthy corporations running these instead of the duopoly of Mastercard / Visa) which can process transactions without worrying about consensus and without wasting energy.
Looking forward to PoS, which could bring us closer to that reality.
Even with BTC (or a crypto with PoS) the problems with the governments won't disappear, I'm sure they'll find a way to keep ruining our lives and extracting money from us, even with cryptocurrencies.
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.
https://www.givewell.org/research/incubation-grants/charity-...
It would be interesting to read about how it compares to GiveWell's recommended charities.
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.
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?
Is there a way to short NFTs? I wish I could proactively sell people's regret to them.
The proper way to bet on NFTs being passé soon is probably to invest in something that's not an NFT.
If you short an NFT with only 1 token, you effectively just owe whoever holds it an infinite amount of money.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/blockchain-cryptocurrency-en....
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.
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?
Another thought that comes to mind is strategy in holding crypto assets by a non-profit - if an asset appreciates, is it profiting and subject to taxes when converted to fiat? If so, is it better to convert immediately, or take the risk in holding crypto for a chance at improving the value of the donation? If you're holding (closest equivalent I can think of for nonprofits in Inida is generating returns on an FD made on the corpus), is the donation really doing anything?
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.
> 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.
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
>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?
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.
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.
Like, 'to stream this movie, you must have donated $100 to any charity within the last 24 hours'.
[1]https://www.blood.co.uk/news-and-campaigns/the-donor-magazin...
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.
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.
A nice example of what global settlement layers and co-ordination tools can be (and should be) used for.
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.
(Aside: The HTTPs Everywhere extension takes a bit of an issue with pg's 199x-vintage website. :)
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...
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.
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.
You got that right.
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.
HN commentor = hate computer science
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 naïve zealotry. And these days, it's mostly greed. It seems people forgot BitTorrent circa 1999-2003 -- it's history literally repeating itself.
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 big 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-...
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...
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.
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.
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.
yet here we are...
[0] I already have forgotten their name.
Attention is a finite resource.
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/
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.
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...
You must not have heard of TITS coin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26918270
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
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.
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.