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An NFT That Saves Lives

paulgraham.com

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Re: An NFT That Saves Lives

#71

Post by yorwba »

throwawaytemp27 wrote: post #40
kthejoker2 wrote: post #14

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.

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.

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.

Re: An NFT That Saves Lives

#72

Post by gowld »

bszupnick wrote: post #52
purerandomness wrote: post #44

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 w…

> 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 "wh…

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

Attention is a finite resource.

Re: An NFT That Saves Lives

#73

Post by sp332 »

endisneigh wrote: post #26
eloff wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 co…

With the NFT minting, several bids, sale, and transfer of ownership, it's an average of 340 kWh for a successful NFT, according to https://memoakten.medium.com/the-unreasonable-ecological-cos... which has sources and methodology etc. That seems pretty high even for a fundraising dinner, and at least that includes food.

Re: An NFT That Saves Lives

#74

Post by throwaway_isms »

betterunix2 wrote: post #29
TacticalCoder wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Great, get back to us when it actually happens, right now it is an environmental disaster.

Check out Ploygon(MATIC) they have an Ethereum L2 PoS network that is fully functional and works.

At this point people are voluntarily using an expensive and wasteful mainnet on Ethereum, and it is better to promote the the existing solutions rather than spread FUD that they do not exist.

Re: An NFT That Saves Lives

#75

Post by graeme »

lynx234 wrote: post #63
graeme wrote: post #49

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…

> 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.

And if someone else bids more, is that the only money that goes to Noora? i.e. PG’s bid is voided

Re: An NFT That Saves Lives

#76

Post by rpearl »

eloff wrote: post #23
spamalot159 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: An NFT That Saves Lives

#77

Post by timlod »

eternauta3k wrote: post #51

If the ~$1000 per life figure is accurate, the GiveWell[1] guys will be all over this. [1] http://givewell.org

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.

Re: An NFT That Saves Lives

#78

Post by brown9-2 »

graeme wrote: post #49

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…

> 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.

Re: An NFT That Saves Lives

#79

Post by casi18 »

jonathankoren wrote: post #66
bszupnick wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 "wh…

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...

Re: An NFT That Saves Lives

#80

Post by pavel_lishin »

bszupnick wrote: post #52
purerandomness wrote: post #44

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 w…

> 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 "wh…

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