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This is peak absurdism. Why not simply donate the money? How is this better than a Kickstarter? How many lives could pg have saved by donating the billable tim

This is peak absurdism. Why not simply donate the money? How is this better than a Kickstarter? How many lives could pg have saved by donating the billable time it took him to write this post? It gets even better, from the NFT article: > • What about the environmental costs? > 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. pg giveth, pg taketh. If you agree that carbon emissions kill, you'd basically donate for a good cause through an absurdly convoluted money laundering scheme called NFT, and cause massive environmental harm on the other side of the planet, killing even more people, again. I might even draw several trolley problem comics, but the fact this is from pg himself makes me question his sanity and everything he's ever written. It's the same feeling of betrayal like when Signal turned around and decided to implement a payment token after several of us went ahead and invested time to convert family members away from WhatsApp. Profit over reason. Pyramid schemes disguised as benevolent startups saving lives. Startup culture needs a reboot.

bszupnick 5y ago
> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Bucket_Challenge
- jonathankoren 5y ago
  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.
  - casi18 5y ago
    > nor do they have an viral sharing feature. yet here we are...
    - jonathankoren 5y ago
      ...talking about NFTs in general rather than the nonprofit[0] or how to donate to them. [0] I already have forgotten their name.
- gowld 5y ago
  Would that $220M have gone somewhere else equally valuable is Ice Bucket didn't become a trend? Attention is a finite resource.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- pavel_lishin 5y ago
  The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge wasn't the ALS Light A Tire On Fire challenge.
- jayd16 5y ago
  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.
gogopuppygogo 5y ago
Tulips everywhere. If a Chinese controlled decentralized ledger like BTC can have assets worth > $50k then obviously an entry in a decentralized ledger proving ownership of something should be worth millions… Profit over reason is a hallmark of MMT capitalism these days.
y2bd 5y ago
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?
- davidgerard 5y ago
  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.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  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.
- casi18 5y ago
  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/ https://rayonism.io/
the_lonely_road 5y ago
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.
- graeme 5y ago
  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.
- notahacker 5y ago
  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...
hammock 5y ago
>This is peak absurdism. Why not simply donate the money? You must not have heard of TITS coin. https://titscoin.io/ https://titscoin.io/
CPLX 5y ago
> 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_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/opensea/company_fina... This is marketing for a YC company.
ravi-delia 5y ago
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.
jborichevskiy 5y ago
> 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.
mrb 5y ago
«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.
dang 5y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
danShumway 5y ago
> 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?

bszupnick 5y ago

> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Bucket_Challenge

jonathankoren 5y ago
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.
- casi18 5y ago
  > nor do they have an viral sharing feature. yet here we are...
  - jonathankoren 5y ago
    ...talking about NFTs in general rather than the nonprofit[0] or how to donate to them. [0] I already have forgotten their name.
gowld 5y ago
Would that $220M have gone somewhere else equally valuable is Ice Bucket didn't become a trend? Attention is a finite resource.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
pavel_lishin 5y ago
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge wasn't the ALS Light A Tire On Fire challenge.
jayd16 5y ago
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.

gogopuppygogo 5y ago

Tulips everywhere. If a Chinese controlled decentralized ledger like BTC can have assets worth > $50k then obviously an entry in a decentralized ledger proving ownership of something should be worth millions… Profit over reason is a hallmark of MMT capitalism these days.

y2bd 5y ago

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?

davidgerard 5y ago
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.
chrisco255 5y ago
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.
casi18 5y ago
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/ https://rayonism.io/

the_lonely_road 5y ago

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.

graeme 5y ago
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.
notahacker 5y ago
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...

hammock 5y ago

>This is peak absurdism. Why not simply donate the money? You must not have heard of TITS coin. https://titscoin.io/ https://titscoin.io/

CPLX 5y ago

> 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_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/opensea/company_fina... This is marketing for a YC company.

ravi-delia 5y ago

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.

jborichevskiy 5y ago

> 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.

mrb 5y ago

«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.

dang 5y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

danShumway 5y ago

> 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?