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We’re excited to announce the launch of EffectiveCrypto.org, a donation platform targeting members of the crypto community. The platform is a project of Effective Altruism Funds (and uses the same payments infrastructure), but is targeted towards people who have done well out of the recent crypto boom and haven’t yet engaged much with EA.

Check out EffectiveCrypto.org here

TL;DR: We’d love your help getting the word out, so we’ve listed some ways that you can get involved;  you can also read a bit more about our motivation for the project.

 

The EffectiveCrypto.org landing page

How you can help

We think that there’s a great opportunity here to engage the crypto community with effective altruism, and you can help us make EffectiveCrypto.org a success.

Promotion

If you have friends or contacts in the crypto community who you think might find EffectiveCrypto.org valuable, or you’re active in the crypto community, it’d be great if you could share the website. We think that there’s a huge amount of potential for engagement here, and you can make a big difference by helping us to get the word out.

Some things that would be really helpful:

  • Tweeting about EffectiveCrypto.org. You could talk about why giving crypto effectively is personally motivating for you, or about the benefits of focusing on effectiveness. Any time is fine, but bonus points for tweeting this Thursday (Dec 2 2021). Here’s a sample tweet to get you started.
  • Posting in relevant crypto Telegram groups/Discords/subreddits that you’re a member of, and who would be interested
  • You can also follow us on Twitter
  • Talking about it to EA-adjacent friends in the crypto community
  • Dank memes??? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you’d like to take a more active role in helping us promote the site, or you have ideas for how we could promote this more widely/go viral, please comment below, or email crypto@effectivealtruism.org.

Feedback

EffectiveCrypto.org is an experiment. We built it quickly to test out the hypothesis that there’s a market for a crypto-focused website that encourages people to donate effectively. However, this means that there’s probably a lot we could do to improve the site in terms of the information we present, the design, and the overall user experience.

If you’re someone in our target audience (or you feel like you can get in the right mindset), please feel free to comment below, or email crypto@effectivealtruism.org with any suggestions.

Motivation and Goals

At the moment, many cryptocurrencies are at all-time high prices, and many people who hold crypto are looking to donate some of their holdings. Donating appreciated crypto directly is often more tax-advantaged than converting the crypto into a fiat currency first, because doing so avoids capital gains tax in many jurisdictions.

There is already a fair amount of overlap between the crypto community and EA (cf. Sam Bankman-Fried/FTX, Lantern Ventures, etc.), and it seems like the quantitative mindset that many EAs exhibit is also a trait found in many crypto early adopters. We think that a lot of people who hold crypto would probably be interested in donating effectively. However, there aren’t currently many places that are trying to build this bridge explicitly. There are many websites aimed at making it easy to donate crypto (e.g. The Giving Block, Endaoment etc), but typically give a huge range of donation options, with no particular focus on effectiveness. EffectiveCrypto.org makes it easy to give crypto, but aims to showcase a smaller number of donation options that are informed by the principles of effective altruism (basically, the funds and non-profits supported by EA Funds).

Our two main goals for the project are:

  • Increase overall counterfactual donations to effective charities, by making it quick and easy for people to make effective donations using crypto (who might otherwise have defaulted to less-effective options).
  • Introduce members of the crypto community to effective altruism, by providing engaging information that piques users’ interest, and allows people to ‘fall down the EA rabbithole’ if they want to.

To make it easier, we’ve grouped some selected charities (and some of the EA Funds) into ‘bundles’ that cover a specific cause area. We’ve chosen causes and charities that we think people without too much background in EA would find appealing, and to avoid decision fatigue associated with choosing between the ~40 charities supported by EA Funds (although we do provide donors with the option to ‘build their own bundle’, and choose from the full set of charities).

 

Donation bundles on the EffectiveCrypto.org home page

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I'm so excited to see someone in EA finally targeting the crypto audience - I think the opportunities are huge.

In the EA community, it's somewhat common to use "effective" in a jargon-y sense to mean "effectively improving the world", but that's not at all the standard meaning of "effective". "Effective crypto" sounds like crypto that works really well; "effective thesis" sounds like a thesis that is persuasive, well-reasoned, and successful. In general, I think "impactful" would be better for conveying the meaning of "effectively improving the world". I don't think renaming "EffectiveCrypto.org" would be worthwhile, but I'm curious about your thoughts about naming it that.

Out of all the suggestions, this seemed the least bad one. If you have a better suggestion, we might rename it!

I think it's pretty good. I don't think it's that big of a problem that it may be a bit initially confusing.

It's nice that "effective crypto" (like "effective thesis") ties to effective altruism. "Impactful" doesn't do that.

Oh no! I just named my project "Effective Developers"

Some related news: Peter Singer has released a (very limited) NFT series! They're up for auction on OpenSea, with proceeds going to TLYCS.

Dank memes...

takes a long breath from vape pen

Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

We do, although it looks like it's not showing on the site. I'm just fixing the issue, will update when it's there.

Exciting development!

Just wanted to flag that the part of the webpage with the four steps has the number 3 twice. The second 3 should be 4.

Thanks a lot evelynciara. 
I fixed the mistake and the fourth step should be labeled correctly now.

I agree with others that this is great and much needed! I'm curious how you chose the recipient charities for the different bundles, which seem to be a select few for the different issue areas. For instance, I would think that the ACE Recommended Charity Fund might be more aligned than their relatively speculative Movement Grants. Important disclosure, however: I'm on the board of an ACE recommended charity and am inherently biased. 

Hi Che, I am preparing a small project to map the current state of crypto within the EA community. Would be very interested to your thoughts on this subject. Open to disucss? 

This is great! 

I had a similar idea regarding the crypto community as a great potential source of EA funding but I'm thinking more for-profit than strictly donation. It might be possible to tie crypto profits to EA funding by creating an impact certificate DAO.

I have a working project proposal I've been getting feedback on, if anyone is interested in reading it and giving me their thoughts just message me and I'll send you the link!

I would love to connect with the EffectiveCrypto.org team to see if we can bounce some ideas off or learn from each other.

Hey Matt, 

A bit late to the game, but would love to read your project proposal!

Hey Simon,

We've been funded by the FTX Future Fund regrantor program!

Check out our website here: https://impactmarkets.io/ Join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/7zMNNDSxWv Read (or skim) our long EA post here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7kqL4G5badqjskYQs/toward-impact-markets-1

Hey Matt, 

I am preparing a small project to map the current state of crypto within the EA community. Would be very interested to hear what you are working on! 

Cheers

Hey Robbert-Jan,

Sorry, somehow I missed your comment but saw it once Simon replied and I got a notification.

We're likely staying in the web2 world for now, but there is a chance we graduate to web3/crypto in the future.

Check out our website here: https://impactmarkets.io/ Join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/7zMNNDSxWv Read (or skim) our long EA post here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7kqL4G5badqjskYQs/toward-impact-markets-1

This is really exciting! You could try reaching out to coinbase to get listed as an organization on this page: https://www.coinbase.com/learn/crypto-basics/how-to-donate-crypto

 

I totally agree Harry and great recommendation. Would love to have a chat with you to hear more about your ideas on EA in relation to crypto. 

Cheers

Interesting!

I don't have the money to buy up secondhand GPUs, but that's absolutely an underexploited market. Mainly because my pop-culture side hears 'GPU' and thinks 'gaming computer', rather than 'the sort of computer part that can help biologists and filmmakers'.

I may need to start a hardware tech company.

I think I have been wildly misinterpreted somehow?

I'm not into cryptocurrency; I just know protein folding and gene sequencing and suchlike is a thing molecular biologists (e.g. vaccine researchers) sometimes need supercomputer time to do.

Given how much the Crypto market relies on supercomputers at the moment, I'm assuming that some of the people who've done well on it own supercomputers that could be repurposed.

I think this platform is absolutely fantastic and much needed. I haven't made a donation yet, but it seems like the user experience is very smooth.

Just one note: the link on the notification "Donations to Effective Crypto may not be tax deductible where you live. We think that you shouldn't worry too much about this, but just so you know." is broken.

Interesting. One thing I would mention, which I suspect this site has overlooked, is the value of computing power to altruistic projects - Cryptocurrency is quite unsustainable at the moment due to being essentially a 'print money using huge numbers of computers and huge amounts of electricity' industry, but if someone could figure out how to change those crypto rigs into more general-purpose supercomputers, or even just write some conversion algorithms?

We could get cheap protein folding out of it.

This is such a big deal to medical research; I don't think I can articulate how big a deal it is. (Quite frankly, I do not know. But.)

It's worth looking in to. :)

Okay, why are people downvoting so strongly? I've been giving unsolicited advice, to be sure, but that's a huge part of Rationalist culture. Do you just have a thing against bizarre positivity?

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