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graeme
brown9-2
> I had hoped PG would write an essay on crypto/NFTs, as he seems enthused by them and is good at explaining things.
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.
graeme
I don’t know what there is to explain, but I’m always open to the possibility that I’ve missed something. Ethereum, in particular, is at least capable of interesting things.
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.
bob33212
I appreciate this as I'm also trying to keep an open mind and understand what this means for the future.
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.
lynx234
> 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?
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.
fighterpilot
> riding the hype of NFTs more than
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.
graeme
And if someone else bids more, is that the only money that goes to Noora? i.e. PG’s bid is voided
kemonocode
Yes, only the winning bid would go to Noora. However, there would be a record of any other bidders' intent.
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.
jollybean
NFTs will effectively do nothing in this case.
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.
yumraj
Perhaps he wrote the essay so that other people will find out about it and out bid him for the NFT.
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.
graeme
That’s possible. Assuming he donates the $2.6 million regardless, this could be a high risk, high reward campaign.
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.
yrral
People have been able to raise non-insignificant amounts of money selling NFTs for charities.
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...
lalaland1125
How is this different or better than normal donations? If anything, isn't it worse due to the NFT overhead?
JeremyNT
It's "better" in the sense that they can piggyback on the hype train for all things cryptocurrency related.
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.
hiq
If you go from 5% to 10% overhead but collect 10 times as much because of the hype you still end up with more money.
tim333
>If so, what does the NFT do?
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.
noelsusman
I mostly agree, but I don't think a PG post about him donating to Noora would make the front page of HN. In this case the NFT is providing value by bringing eyeballs due to how much hype NFTs have. I know I wouldn't have clicked through his post if he was just donating a bunch of money to them.
a4isms
If that’s the only reason this is interesting, we’re talking about digital fashion. It’s isomorphic to a celebrity endorsing a product.
“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.
nrmitchi
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.
jonny_eh
> I'm not sure why this is an NFT
That's what I've said about every existing NFT.
capableweb
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.
codegladiator
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.
Can_Not
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.
zebnyc
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.
dasudasu
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.
babyshake
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.
jonathankoren
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.
_9omd
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.
babyshake
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.
lifeisstillgood
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'.
catilac
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.
nrmitchi
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.
gnopgnip
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.
yawnxyz
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
lifeisstillgood
I used to run the tech side for a couple of UK-based aid organisations (just out of college - basically database management and home brewed campaign work.)
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 :-)
glitchc
Has your past employer perchance switched from a "give what you can" to a subscription "pay X per month" model? The latter has proven to be remarkably unpopular with the public.
lifeisstillgood
This was the best part of 30 years ago - they are still all in existence but I cannot comment on their detailed fundraising techniques :-(
criddell
I'm only doing anonymous donations these days. Too many places do not respect your request to not be contacted in the future.
ashtonkem
We donated to the EDF once; the sheer volume of junk mail they and their data broker sent us enraged us so much that we’ve sworn off ever giving them money again.
cwkoss
Will PG be committing tax fraud when he writes off this 'donation'?
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.
fallat
I don't think anyone understands that this is purely a "fun" thing to raise money. Yes, it's exactly like a donation drive.
spamalot159
Except for that it uses technology that harms the environment. I don't think this trend is "fun" compared to a normal donation drive when it has these negative side effects.
version_five
Plus it gives credibility to what is effectively a scam. People will be able to point to this and say "look, they're being used to do good" and others will take that as social proof that there is actually something legit to an NFT (and the rest of the various "crypto" scams going on).
eloff
The environmental harm of a single ethereum transaction is very low. Lower than a fundraising dinner. Please take your nitpicking elsewhere.
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.
slg
>The environmental harm of a single ethereum transaction is very low.
"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.
rpearl
Because doing this as an NFT is utterly nonsensical. The NFT is involved for absolutely no reason. The only results of involving an NFT are (1) legitimizing a ridiculous scam and (2) causing extra environmental damage alongside the donation.
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.
dorkwood
Throwing an empty can into the river has a miniscule effect on the environment. You do more damage when you ride the bus to work.
endisneigh
> The environmental harm of a single ethereum transaction is very low. Lower than a fundraising dinner. Please take your nitpicking elsewhere.
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.
TacticalCoder
> Except for that it uses technology that harms the environment.
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.
betterunix2
Great, get back to us when it actually happens, right now it is an environmental disaster.
endisneigh
Haven't people been saying this for at least 4 years?
throwaway_isms
Does government backed fiat harm the environment? Do the militaries of the nations protecting their government backed fiat have a net positive or negative impact on the environment? Does the infrastructure required by central banks, retail banking have a net positive or negative impact on the environment?
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%.
jokethrowaway
Look, you'll be hard pressed finding someone who hates the government more than me; even I can tell you that yes, the government wastes a lot of resources and pollutes the environment - but both government and central banking are much more efficient in managing money.
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.
casi18
"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."
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/
Can_Not
> Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater
But in the case of NFTs, there's no baby in the bathwater.
klmadfejno
> Everyone acts hoping that they can bring more good to the world than bad.
Not so sure about that one
eloff
> Everyone acts hoping that they can bring more good to the world than bad.
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.
eternauta3k
If the ~$1000 per life figure is accurate, the GiveWell[1] guys will be all over this.
skybrian
I'm on a poor Internet connection and can't read the page but a search indicates that GiveWell is aware of Noora:
https://www.givewell.org/research/incubation-grants/charity-...
It would be interesting to read about how it compares to GiveWell's recommended charities.
timlod
One thing when considering effective giving is that cost-effectiveness does not scale linearly with the investment - this figure may well be accurate for the investments they've received, but that doesn't mean that additional investments will be effective to the same degree.
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.
throwaway_isms
Back when YC experimented with application through the community, or "Apply YC:", I deployed a YCCoin on Ethereum and applied. Basically decentralized Karma. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15226688
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.
marris
The NFT here seems to be a publicity stunt to both raise money directly from the auction and also to raise awareness about the charity. I had never heard of this charity before this stunt, and I probably would not have heard of them without it. It certainly seems plausible that "using an NFT" here is a net good, even if there is some carbon cost.
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?
kthejoker2
Leveraging manias for social good sounds appropriately disruptive ..
Is there a way to short NFTs? I wish I could proactively sell people's regret to them.
cwkoss
Shorting low-liquidity assets is a very bad idea.
If you short an NFT with only 1 token, you effectively just owe whoever holds it an infinite amount of money.
throwawaytemp27
As Matt Levine would say, the way to do that is to mint and sell your own NFT. That way you are on the opposite side of the trade as the bulls who you believe are wrong.
yorwba
If you mint an NFT and fail to sell it, you'll lose the minting fee. You'd do better to hold off on minting it until it has already been sold. And to actually sell some, you need to market them as something that people would want (like "saving lives") or, if you're short on ideas, crowdsource that task. At which point you're basically running an NFT platform. And you'll make more money the longer the NFT craze runs, which isn't really opposite to the bulls...
The proper way to bet on NFTs being passé soon is probably to invest in something that's not an NFT.
smabie
Sure you can short some NFTs.
joelthelion
This is no better than uploading a PDF report on the NGO's website. An NFT does not bring any additional guarantees, adds a ton of complexity and most definitely doesn't save lives.
lolsal
Isn't this just a receipt? like when I donate shirts to goodwill?
elliekelly
Yes. Except this way you get to pretend your receipt for money given away (ostensibly out of the kindness of your heart) has magically become an “asset”.
hoppyhoppy2
Has Mr. Graham done an honest calculation of how many lives will be lost to the environmental impacts of NFTs if they become mainstream?
mannykannot
I don't think Mr. Graham is under any moral obligation to consider this issue unless it remotely plausible that NFTs issued for charitable purposes (or just NFTs, period) will "go mainstream" to the extent that they have any noticable environmental impact.
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Diederich
Is Ethereum anything like bitcoin in terms of power utilization/environmental impact?
psswrd12345
Today, Ethereum uses about 1/6 energy consumption of bitcoin, while providing much more utility. But will change later this year as it transitions to proof-of-stake, at which point Ethereum's energy consumption will be negligible.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/blockchain-cryptocurrency-en....
knowaveragejoe
Why in HN of all places do people constantly have years-old takes on crypto?
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.
AlexandrB
> Most other chains use some form of proof-of-stake.
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?
coolestguy
It's currently got PoS working alongside PoW - so it's already happening
bosswipe
Why in HN of all places? Because engineers are more resistant to bullshit hype. Proof-of-stake has not been proven at a large distributed scale.
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I had hoped PG would write an essay on crypto/NFTs, as he seems enthused by them and is good at explaining things.
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.