I had hoped PG would write an essay on crypto/NFTs, as he seems enthused by them and is good at explaining things.<p>But he explains nothing here. Noora seems good, but that’s a feature of Noora, not NFTs.<p>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.<p>In return he will get a token that says he did it.<p>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?<p>> But the higher the price of this NFT goes, the more lives will be saved. What a sentence to be able to write.<p>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”<p>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.<p>If so, what does the NFT do?<p>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.<p>It is maddening. There may well be something there. But if there is it ought, in principle, to be explainable.<p>———-<p>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.<p>This post hit the HN frontpage, so surely many would have donated. Whereas nobody has donated other than PG.<p>Measured against this alternative, the NFT vs a normal funding mechanism has plausibly <i>cost</i> lives. Not to mention the money that Noora will take out of its funds to do a carbon offset.<p>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.