Hacker News Reader

Comment by fasthands9 | Hacker News Reader

I personally find SBF smart and interesting but nonetheless very happy to see this very silly ecosystem collapse.

Perhaps bitcoin or a couple other tokens will have longterm staying power still, but remains mysterious to me why there should be so much surplus value to extract around it. Current banks and financial institutions (which are not even that efficient) manage to move around a magnitude more in investments and do not end up taking up the same level of surplus value, somehow.

View on HN

It was not very smart to gamble with customer money.

What's wild is just a few weeks ago SBF was strongly insinuating to the WSJ that FTX was planning to acquire COIN. Not surprisingly COIN has taken a noticeable drop since this news.

I won't even buy puts on crypto companies since the space is completely insane, even if you know the whole thing is a fraud it's still got some clever ways to bite you if you go near it.

I do not get involved with shorting companies either - but with interest rates higher it does strike me as magnitude more difficult to keep some of these companies (or schemes) floating.

So what's gonna happen to the effective altruists? Wasn't he the one bankrolling the movement?

It will still go on. He wasn't the only one, but he definitely supercharged funding as of late.

I think all the longtermism stuff that has come to prominence recently is a side-effect of too much money in EA trying to make up new causes that are magically more effective than philanthropy that currently exists.

I mean I really don't get what they're about. Most of what I know about these guys seems to revolve around shuffling money around so it's not clear to me what exactly is effective or altruistic about what they're doing.

Traditional metrics for charities only included efficiency metrics. Then there was a movement that said actually effectiveness is more important than efficiency even though it's harder to measure, and started trying to measure effectiveness (like Givewell, 80000 hours, etc...). It's called effective altruism because it focuses on effective giving(i.e. altruism).

How much of the actual EA funding is going to longtermist charities vs how much is going to your boring old malaria/infrastructure/de-worming/factory farming initiatives?

I always thought the longtermist stuff was mostly because it was an easy way to criticize EA in a way that drove clicks.

with luck they’ll get their hands dirty, in a good way.

Isn't the whole point that they work for mega-corps and then donate all the money instead of actually doing anything directly? I am pretty sure I read about this somewhere. I don't think effective altruists are the type to actually do anything other than go along with the status quo.

> work for mega-corps and then donate all the money instead of actually doing anything directly?

Early on most effective altruists were working to earn money and fund important things. More recently, with the money from Open Philanthropy (Dustin Moskovitz, FB), FTX Foundation (SBF, FTX), and others there's been less need for money relative to need for doing things, so many of us have switched away from earning to give. Me included: https://www.jefftk.com/p/leaving-google-joining-the-nucleic-...

> do anything other than go along with the status quo

EAs are overall pretty weird folks: there are a lot of criticisms you could make but that they're just going along with the status quo is a surprising one ;)

The whole point is you can fly to Africa and build wells. Which feels really good because you can see your impact.

Or you can work as an investment banker and pay 100 Africans to build wells, which doesn't feel as good, but builds 100x as many wells and employs Africans.

I'd expect the opposite: if FTX's failure means the FTX foundation money is gone then there's more need for money on the margin and more EAs will choose to earn to give.

I can't understand the effective altruist movement in a world of Modern Monetary Theory. When money means nothing and central banks can print infinite money, the only reasonable way to effect change is by donating directly to an extended hand on the street or actually physically helping, imo, but I'm open to changing my mind.

GiveWell explains their reasoning here[1]. For each of their top charities, they give a measure of cost-effectiveness and explain why they believe the charity has such a high impact.[2]

For a decade, one of GiveWell's top charities was GiveDirectly[3], which simply gives your money to poor people in developing countries. In August, GiveWell changed their evaluation criteria to prioritize charities with funding gaps.[4] This bumped GiveDirectly out of their top charities, along with some deworming programs. GiveWell still thinks these charities are extremely effective, just not as much as their new list of top charities.

1. https://www.givewell.org/giving101

2. https://www.givewell.org/impact-estimates#Impact_metrics_for...

3. https://www.givewell.org/charities/give-directly/November-20...

4. https://blog.givewell.org/2022/08/17/changes-to-top-charity-...

The effective altruism movement has been around for over a decade. SBF's financing has been very beneficial, but EA isn't dependent on one financier or organization. At this point it's like moneyball: a concept that can be used by anyone.

like Elizabeth Holmes

It's a public persona

The media props these people up and then dumps them. I'm not saying it is a fraud but it's a recurring pattern.

I am going to go out on a limb here and say you have not moved any significant amount of money around, especially internationally. Trying moving $250,000, between the paperwork, back and forth, fees, it is a nightmare.

If you want to legally move the money you still need to do paperwork and pay fees, as well as the additional slippage from introducing a third currency.

You really do not with Bitcoin. If there are local regulations with declaration, sure. But the fees are dramatically lower to move the funds than using banks.

I did it last year. Was not that hard.

We regularly wire our overseas suppliers > $100k. Costs $40 per transaction. Zero paperwork. Takes several hours for them to receive.

With Bitcoin: Costs $0.4 per transaction. Zero paperwork. Takes several minutes.

And you lose the right to effect any chargebacks if any errors happen anywhere in the process, including mistyping the receiver address. I would happily pay 0.04% for such a powerful insurance.

Are you sure you can charge back that bank transfer? In theory sure, but in practice?

For our purposes (and most businesses), those are marginal improvements. And there's absolutely no way the very significant risks involved with handling cryptocurrency are worth it to us.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com