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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.

> 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

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.

> nor do they have an viral sharing feature.

yet here we are...

...talking about NFTs in general rather than the nonprofit[0] or how to donate to them.

[0] I already have forgotten their name.

Would that $220M have gone somewhere else equally valuable is Ice Bucket didn't become a trend?

Attention is a finite resource.

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge wasn't the ALS Light A Tire On Fire challenge.

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.

«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.

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.

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.

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...

>This is peak absurdism. Why not simply donate the money?

You must not have heard of TITS coin.

https://titscoin.io/

> 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.

> 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?

> 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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/