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Comment by nrmitchi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> I'm not sure why this is an NFT

That's what I've said about every existing NFT.

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.

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.

> I don't see any brain fuck programmer trying to convince us that bf is the future.

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.

I understand why somebody would buy a baseball card, even if I would never want to. I understand why someone would right-click and download a jpg of a baseball card, or screenshot one, even if I would never want to.

But when you add "pay $100 in etherium for a reference to a publically jpg hosted on some website" you completely lose me.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

I believe in a digital world future but have a hard time believing there would be DRM on images that would prevent me from displaying this gif in my house if I wanted to

No, there won't be DRM that would prevent you from printing the digital image of an NFT and displaying it in your house. The DRM will be inside your virtual house or virtual museum. The creator of said virtual world can require proof via digital signature that you are the owner of the NFT.

Whatever the NFT contains/links to, anyone can make another NFT with the same content, and prove they own that NFT.

Exactly. The whole “rarity” of NFTs is laughingly absurd. The idea of scarcity of digital artifacts was always a joke, and was dramatically disproved more than 20 years ago.

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.

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.

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.

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

If it is $25 a token with 100k of them, these are not exactly non-fungible, isn't it :)

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

> 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.

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".

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.

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