There are many reasons this wouldnât be a good idea, some of which you identified. The first two:
Itâs completely separate from GiveWellâs mission and brand; it has nothing to do with their work
It has nothing to do with effective altruism, and runs counter to many of the things EA tries to promote (weâre interested in careful reasoning, long-term thinking, and real-world impact; your use of terms like âpyramid schemeâ and âpeak euphoriaâ show why this side of the crypto market doesnât represent those ideals)
In general, the EA movement aims to be exceedingly moral, transparent, and trustworthy, and to hold individuals/âorganizations in the movement to high standards. Creating speculative investment vehicles in order to take money from people who make foolish decisions just doesnât fit EA at all.
While I donât like this idea, I should emphasize that you didnât do the wrong thing by sharing it here (rather than e.g. on Reddit, or by trying to implement it yourself without asking anyone first). Itâs not a bad thing to consider unusual fundraising ideas: projects like EA Giving Tuesday have been quite successful despite not looking like standard fundraising. But if the outline of your idea sounds at all like âmanipulating people into supporting charityâ or âadding overhead cost and risk to a standard fundraiserâ (which seem to be the two options for an âEA coinâ), thatâs not a good sign.
For what itâs worth, awareness of EA in the crypto community is quite high, largely thanks to the charitable giving of longtime community member Sam Bankman-Fried (founder of FTX).
Holy crap you guys, what a terrible idea to offhandedly reject and ignore. Spreadloveâs version of the idea isnât exactly what I would propose, and the postâs formatting leaves something to be desired, but⌠look.
Today I was looking at top cryptocurrencies by market cap. XRP, in third place, stood out at $94 billion. There is a fixed amount of it, 100 billion tokens, of which the founders âgiftedâ 80 billion to their own company (and the rest, I assume, to themselves?). Itâs set up so that whenever you buy it, youâre making the founders richer. I am considering buying some myself, despite the fact that I have no interest whatsoever in helping those founders earn billions of dollars.
If there was a cryptocurrency that enriched the poor instead of the wealthy, Iâd hop on that train right now, today, and I think a lot of non-EAs would do that too. And here you are saying no, we shouldnât do that?
Unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum, XRP is designed above all to facilitate transactionsâto process transactions as quickly and efficiently as possible. This should make it better as a currency than Ethereum and (obviously) Bitcoin. I donât know the technical details or the social details of the deals theyâre making with financial institutions, but I do think cryptocurrency has some potential value as an efficient medium of exchangeâa system in which transaction costs are secure and competitive. When I buy something with a credit card, I do so despite the fact that Visa and affiliates are most likely getting a cut of 2.5% or more.
If a cryptocurrency could be used to cut transaction costs to, say, 15 cents, thatâs a genuinely valuable thing, not simply a âspeculative investment vehicleâ. 5 cents would be substantially better still. Iâve dreamed for as long as 20 years of being able to pay 10-20 cents to read an article /â web page, or on the flip side, to charge 10-20 cents for my own blog posts (if I ever became popular), and still today I hate the subscription model because it centralizes power and says âwell, you paid us $8/âmo., you may as well get your moneyâs worth and get all your news from usâ. 5 cent transactions would make my dream possible (though, yes, it doesnât strictly need to be a distributed trustless blockchain system).
In addition, while speculation is rampant, the technology is young enough that it is still plausible to create a new system that is superior (in terms of cost, efficiency, security and human-centric safety) than most/âall of the top 20 coins. In particular I think there is a very strong need for better trust systems. Simply put, we need a coin that is more easily safeguarded from theft, while simultaneously making it easier to avoid permanently losing oneâs coins.
GiveWell doesnât have the necessary expertise to build a best-in-class crypcur (can I call it crypcur? âCryptoâ ought to refer to cryptography), but you know who I bet would have some good ideas about how to build an altruistic crypcur? Sam Bankman-Fried. Would love to hear his thoughts on this. And if he doesnât have good ideas himself, heâs probably already hired some people who would. But, a negative-scoring post is likely to be immediately forgotten and Samâs probably not going to notice this or comment.
But me, I imagine a âpublic benefit corporationâ or something, that would reserve the first $F per year of token sales for R&D costs, operating costs and marketing (where F is a floor amount such $1 million, plus maybe an amount proportional to the logarithm of the coinâs popularity), so that in the beginning the money raised would only be used to support the initial cost of development and so on, but as it becomes more popular, more and more money goes to effective charities.
No problem. I thought maybe if GiveWell was exceedingly straightforward and included something in their page about the crypto saying something like âLet us be very clear, this is a speculative investment with zero intrinsic investment value. More people will lose money than will gain money by investing in this coin. We advise you not to invest in it. However, if people are going to invest in speculative coins anyways, at least this one will save thousands of lives.â then it might be reasonable, but I understand if people are of the opinion that it has too many reputation downsides/ârisks for GiveWell.
There are many reasons this wouldnât be a good idea, some of which you identified. The first two:
Itâs completely separate from GiveWellâs mission and brand; it has nothing to do with their work
It has nothing to do with effective altruism, and runs counter to many of the things EA tries to promote (weâre interested in careful reasoning, long-term thinking, and real-world impact; your use of terms like âpyramid schemeâ and âpeak euphoriaâ show why this side of the crypto market doesnât represent those ideals)
In general, the EA movement aims to be exceedingly moral, transparent, and trustworthy, and to hold individuals/âorganizations in the movement to high standards. Creating speculative investment vehicles in order to take money from people who make foolish decisions just doesnât fit EA at all.
While I donât like this idea, I should emphasize that you didnât do the wrong thing by sharing it here (rather than e.g. on Reddit, or by trying to implement it yourself without asking anyone first). Itâs not a bad thing to consider unusual fundraising ideas: projects like EA Giving Tuesday have been quite successful despite not looking like standard fundraising. But if the outline of your idea sounds at all like âmanipulating people into supporting charityâ or âadding overhead cost and risk to a standard fundraiserâ (which seem to be the two options for an âEA coinâ), thatâs not a good sign.
For what itâs worth, awareness of EA in the crypto community is quite high, largely thanks to the charitable giving of longtime community member Sam Bankman-Fried (founder of FTX).
Holy crap you guys, what a terrible idea to offhandedly reject and ignore. Spreadloveâs version of the idea isnât exactly what I would propose, and the postâs formatting leaves something to be desired, but⌠look.
Today I was looking at top cryptocurrencies by market cap. XRP, in third place, stood out at $94 billion. There is a fixed amount of it, 100 billion tokens, of which the founders âgiftedâ 80 billion to their own company (and the rest, I assume, to themselves?). Itâs set up so that whenever you buy it, youâre making the founders richer. I am considering buying some myself, despite the fact that I have no interest whatsoever in helping those founders earn billions of dollars.
If there was a cryptocurrency that enriched the poor instead of the wealthy, Iâd hop on that train right now, today, and I think a lot of non-EAs would do that too. And here you are saying no, we shouldnât do that?
Unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum, XRP is designed above all to facilitate transactionsâto process transactions as quickly and efficiently as possible. This should make it better as a currency than Ethereum and (obviously) Bitcoin. I donât know the technical details or the social details of the deals theyâre making with financial institutions, but I do think cryptocurrency has some potential value as an efficient medium of exchangeâa system in which transaction costs are secure and competitive. When I buy something with a credit card, I do so despite the fact that Visa and affiliates are most likely getting a cut of 2.5% or more.
If a cryptocurrency could be used to cut transaction costs to, say, 15 cents, thatâs a genuinely valuable thing, not simply a âspeculative investment vehicleâ. 5 cents would be substantially better still. Iâve dreamed for as long as 20 years of being able to pay 10-20 cents to read an article /â web page, or on the flip side, to charge 10-20 cents for my own blog posts (if I ever became popular), and still today I hate the subscription model because it centralizes power and says âwell, you paid us $8/âmo., you may as well get your moneyâs worth and get all your news from usâ. 5 cent transactions would make my dream possible (though, yes, it doesnât strictly need to be a distributed trustless blockchain system).
In addition, while speculation is rampant, the technology is young enough that it is still plausible to create a new system that is superior (in terms of cost, efficiency, security and human-centric safety) than most/âall of the top 20 coins. In particular I think there is a very strong need for better trust systems. Simply put, we need a coin that is more easily safeguarded from theft, while simultaneously making it easier to avoid permanently losing oneâs coins.
GiveWell doesnât have the necessary expertise to build a best-in-class crypcur (can I call it crypcur? âCryptoâ ought to refer to cryptography), but you know who I bet would have some good ideas about how to build an altruistic crypcur? Sam Bankman-Fried. Would love to hear his thoughts on this. And if he doesnât have good ideas himself, heâs probably already hired some people who would. But, a negative-scoring post is likely to be immediately forgotten and Samâs probably not going to notice this or comment.
But me, I imagine a âpublic benefit corporationâ or something, that would reserve the first $F per year of token sales for R&D costs, operating costs and marketing (where F is a floor amount such $1 million, plus maybe an amount proportional to the logarithm of the coinâs popularity), so that in the beginning the money raised would only be used to support the initial cost of development and so on, but as it becomes more popular, more and more money goes to effective charities.
No problem. I thought maybe if GiveWell was exceedingly straightforward and included something in their page about the crypto saying something like âLet us be very clear, this is a speculative investment with zero intrinsic investment value. More people will lose money than will gain money by investing in this coin. We advise you not to invest in it. However, if people are going to invest in speculative coins anyways, at least this one will save thousands of lives.â then it might be reasonable, but I understand if people are of the opinion that it has too many reputation downsides/ârisks for GiveWell.