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.
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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.