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An NFT That Saves Lives

paulgraham.com

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Re: An NFT That Saves Lives

#131

Post by capableweb »

jonny_eh wrote: post #47
nrmitchi wrote: post #25

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 diff…

> I'm not sure why this is an NFT That's what I've said about every existing NFT.

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.

Re: An NFT That Saves Lives

#132

Post by jollybean »

NFT, much like most Crypto doesn't 'do' anything here.

It's not a financial instrument that creates value.

'Private Corporations' enable people to group capital together to make useful stuff, that wouldn't happen otherwise.

'Public Exchanges' allow more transparency and broader classes of investors to participate in markets.

Investment Banks 'make markets' for financial instruments so companies can trade things like risk, among other things.

There's a lot of net value creation going on there even when it's fuzzy.

If NFTs can encourage people to give to a charity, that's great, but of course that shouldn't be necessary. Crypto that can't effectively be used as currency is not a value creator, at least not until they are exchanged as such.

This is frothy, bubble-ish kind of stuff that in my life I have seen implode twice, this time 'it may be different' in that it may not crash, but the value creation still isn't there. We should probably strive to do better than moving around deck chairs, even if it's with fancy math or AI.

Re: An NFT That Saves Lives

#133

Post by capableweb »

yawnxyz wrote: post #99
liuliu wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is $25 a token with 100k of them, these are not exactly non-fungible, isn't it :)

well, some NFTs do have thousands copies, etc. — they're not always unique, but I get your point haha. Maybe they should have done it as a ICO / social coin instead :P

> well, some NFTs do have thousands copies, etc. — they're not always unique

What? No. They are unique and not the same as the others, that's what makes them NFTs in the first place.

A NFT that has thousands of copies is just a cryptocurrency... You might mean that there are "collections" of NFTs, where the artwork happens to be the same and the author is the same. But each individual piece of that is it's own NFT and not a copy.

Re: An NFT That Saves Lives

#134

Post by jollybean »

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…

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.

Re: An NFT That Saves Lives

#135

Post by lifeisstillgood »

glitchc wrote: post #103
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #55

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 sp…

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.

This was the best part of 30 years ago - they are still all in existence but I cannot comment on their detailed fundraising techniques :-(

Re: An NFT That Saves Lives

#136

Post by capableweb »

endisneigh wrote: post #56
psswrd12345 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might not be "necessary", but sure as heck makes all that a lot easier. Sure, one could design their own system that accomplishes all of those features, but why if there's an existing infrastructure layer that anyone can build on that already offers it? Especially a non-profit that likely lacks the technical expertise and resources?

I don't understand your point - are you suggesting a non-profit will find blockchain easier than a regular ledger? Any organization that accepts donations now can already do all of the things you originally mentioned, for free, by simply signing the donation receipts.

> are you suggesting a non-profit will find blockchain easier than a regular ledger?

For the features outlined before ("Verifiable donations, fully transparent reporting/auditing, no restrictions on who can donate"), for sure!

First you have to come up with a ledger you can run on your server, but that visitors should be able to verify that what your server responds, is actually the values, and that you haven't manipulated those values in any way. How do you even do that? Since you are running the software, you can modify it, either on the machine itself, or in transit.

Secondly, you need to come up with a way of avoiding AML/KYC since that or similar exists in most countries. You might need to hire a lawyer just in order to write the user-stories for your sprint.

Or, use existing software and boom, thing done. Publish and then circle jerk on Twitter.

Re: An NFT That Saves Lives

#137

Post by dang »

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…

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 and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Re: An NFT That Saves Lives

#138

Post by nrmitchi »

catilac wrote: post #127
nrmitchi wrote: post #25

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 diff…

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.

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.

Re: An NFT That Saves Lives

#139

Post by zebnyc »

nrmitchi wrote: post #25

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 diff…

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.

Re: An NFT That Saves Lives

#140

Post by capableweb »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #48
casi18 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works very well for all of them though.

A PDF of my Watsi donation and credit card statement is just as good without any blockchain Rube Goldberg mechanizations. By all means, digitally sign the PDF [1] if you want to be fancy and hip, but you don't need a blockchain, nor is it going to tell you if the healthcare donated towards was actually delivered. If the argument is, "It's on the blockchain for trust purposes!" my retort is, "Do you not trust the nonp…

Watsi seems to offer donations via credit cards and Paypal, neither which I think supports $2.4 Mil donations, but I'm unsure, never tried it myself. Watsi overall don't seem to fit the "no restrictions on who can donate" part either, as they are an American non-profit (subject to US laws, including embargoes).
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