Raising money for Haiku (and other Open Source projects) via NFTs

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Exactly. Lunduke already gave that disclaimer that it is not directly affiliated or involves the Haiku Project or Haiku Inc. at all. They are just raising funds via their NFTs and want to donate the money to Haiku. I do not see anything wrong with this.

As for the environmental arguments behind minting NFTs, Lunduke has pointed out that they are using ‘Polygon’ which seems to be more efficient and cheaper than directly using the Ethereum blockchain for minting it. It’s still interesting to see comments about the environment and cryptocurrency being brought up here despite ourselves accepting donations for another cryptocurrency which is hostile to the environment and that is Bitcoin.

I may not like NFTs in general, but if someone wants to raise money via NFTs and wants to donate it here, I don’t see a problem with that. Maybe due to the ‘environmental arguments’, does that mean we should stop accepting Bitcoin donations and sell all of it immediately then?

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It is entirely correct that nobody is forced to do this, but “you are not forced” is one of the worst arguments in support of anything.

Maybe this toy can generate some money, but the goal here clearly is to do some funky stuff with crypto, if the primary goal was a donation one could have simply done a fundraiser and skipped all the crypto-nonsense. Perhaps I am biased here, but I really don’t think saying “some transaction fees get donated” Is nice to anyone, especially not Haiku having to deal with beeing associated with these crypto things, disclaimers or not, It’s not a good precedent to set.

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Raising money for Haiku (and other Open Source projects) via NFTs

but we’re running a campaign to raise funds to be donated to Haiku (and PCLinuxOS this month)

I am not sure how this was brought up to Lunduke’s audience outside of this forum, but it kind of sucks how the wording makes it sound like a charity sale/fundraiser – not a “I’ll have a bunch of this go to my pocket and I’ll donate parts of it to Haiku”… or a straight forward “I will be managing the funds and pick where they get to go” instead of “this project is unaffiliated with Haiku, Inc.”. As far as real money is concerned and using the brand, it feels more sketchy than it should, but hey, we weren’t all born as public relations people and anyone willing to give a large sum of money should probably be careful enough to consider the consequences. I presume the motive to be good, so. Just me being skeptical.

[NFTs are] not worth the bad PR for a measily 5% of the transactions

(I am aware of the whole "you can’t crank up the percentage to 80% because you have to somehow sell this + minting costs, but that’s besides my point.)

As always, I’m assuming that the intentions here are good, but what’s stopping a third-party individual from coming up with tokens to support the development of open-source projects, under pretexts of altruism, and then going ahead and mismanaging the proceeds or saying that “a percentage will be donated” and retroactively making that said percentage considerably small? I could see this happening, especially after the recent wave of “open source needs more money” posts circulating around the circles that are also keen on cryptocurrency. It raises an entirely new type of governance issue. Haiku, Inc. may have to lay down some ground rules about this, as this could really blow up on our faces, as if the annoying resident trolls that actively alienate new people and the drama that recently surrounded Haiku wasn’t more than enough.

As far as my personal take on this is concerned, I believe that technology should be used to liberate us from scarcity and not reinforce it. Haiku is an operating system that stands out for being completely free, built by hobbyists and for working on considerably old hardware better than the top Linux distributions nowadays. If it’s here to stay, despite all of the scandals surrounding OpenSea and the amount of people stealing and reselling art from DeviantArt, then sure, whatever, but I wouldn’t want us to slap our label on top of it because I don’t think that our identity was ever considerably defined by what’s popular in the tech industry nowadays.

edit: opinion is not representative of the project or haiku, inc., i just poke around sometimes

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44

This obviously is not up to me, but since this was brought up, “this, but unironically”. (Would be a good idea to start preferring a coin that is not Proof-of-Work, at the very least)

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You have included Haiku as a donation target without asking the project if we would be interested. Now, you have forced people who are not too happy about NFTs to be part of it. You have to deal with the consequences of that. No, we can’t just say “we don’t care” because you selected a project we have put man-years of effort into, and maybe we don’t want this project to have anything to do with NFTs, and also possibly anything to do with you for other reasons (that is my personal opinion, and I will not expand on it here).

So, as an individual contributor to the Haiku project, I just want to say that I don’t think this is a good idea, I have mentionned why in a previous message, and indeed I surely won’t be taking part into it in any way. I also want other people here to understand how the thing works (not everyone in this thread even knew what NTFs are), and what the problems can be.

About Polygon: it is still based on the Ethereum blockchain, even if it makes a more efficient use of it, that blockchain is still responsible for a lot of CO2 emissions that we could certainly do without. Whatever you try, converting real money to blockchain stuff and then converting back to real money on the receiver side will be less efficient than, you know, just donating money to Haiku in that regard.

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Thats true, for me anyways. Every opportunity to learn something is a good one :wink: . Now that I’ve read quite a bit about it I have to say I agree with you on the problem of environmental impact, at least for now that the Ethereum network is still using proof-of-work.

What I really don’t understand is why anyone would buy these low resolution Tux pictures which I’m sure you can download from a google image search in better quality for free, if you ever need such a thing. (which I don’t ). Would make much more sense to me to just buy a Haiku T-Shirt. You get something real for your money and directly support the project.

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From how I understand it, they’re like Pokemon cards or “skins” like the ones you see in many relevant multiplayer video games and that this is an experiment-turned-into-an-opportunity-to-raise-a-bit-of-money-for-projects.

I would also gladly experiment with it (despite not being very much of a fan of the technologies and the audience or a believer), out of pure curiosity as to what the fuss is all about, but all the “hi, we have to delay the proof-of-stake transition” and the conduct of the current powers that be which control something that’s supposed to be decentralized is what’s putting me off completely from doing so.

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Well, Lunduke actually did send me a message beforehand about this, though with not a lot of specifics. I said I was not in the Inc. and he would have to ask them about more specifics, but that I didn’t think they’d turn money down, and that anonymous donations were always accepted, and of course that they are currently looking for more donations with my contract to fund.

This is not really “anonymous” though, and I haven’t heard from anyone in the Inc. that he reached out to them.

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am a heretic to think it would be nice to have some tools to manage nft with haiku? :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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This has just gotten downright goofy.

Haiku talks about accepting donations via cryptocurrencies and blockchains.

There was zero reason to think Haiku would suddenly reject donations via cryptocurrencies and blockchains… while still accepting donations via cryptocurrencies. That would be unthinkably weird.

If Haiku leadership wants to reject donations from cryptocurrencies (or related to blockchain projects) just say so. We will select other projects to raise funds for.

I have zero interest in, what clearly seems to be, some sort of emotionally charged debate. I simply want to raise some money for Haiku in a fun, goofy way. Because I like Haiku.

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Perhaps I speak only for myself, but my interest in Haiku is partly based on a return to simpler world when personal computers were about empowering to user or playing cool games, rather than being a means of generating data for marketing barons, or a pipeline for media “content” to consumers. I feel this strive for simplicity is contrary to adopting needlessly complex things like blockchain for raising funds.

I think that rich places such as Europe and the USA dispensed with their carbon intensive, smokestack heavy industry (which at least gave meaningful, unionised jobs) in favour of a lightweight creative economies, albeit with too many “bullshit jobs” with no tangible benefit for society. Cryptocurrencies to my mind represent an abomination which somehow manages to combine the nihilism of post industrial “bullshit” economy with the ecological damage of old fashioned energy intensive heavy industry. In other words get the worst of both worlds.

I appreciate @Lunduke for contributing his idea, and have enjoyed his content. I also totally applaud his views on putting video content on youtube and other big “(anti)social media” platforms. I am sceptical of his suggested NFT for the reasons already articulated by many above.

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I can appreciate people’s perspectives on this. With that said, I do think it has been a bit overblown and is turning something that should be positive into something excessively negative. It seems like these NFTs will be sold regardless of what happens to the funds in the end. As we say in English, “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”, in other words it isn’t nice to refuse a gift based on some aspect of it you don’t like.

So personally as a member of Haiku, Inc, and the one who manages the donations, I don’t plan on refusing a donation from this source. Of course Haiku, Inc is not a dictatorship and my say isn’t the end, so if others in Haiku, Inc strongly oppose then I may have to go with them on it. But overall I don’t think we are in a position to refuse any donations, and I personally am really appreciative of all the donations we receive. So thanks again to all our donors in general, and in this case I appreciate @Lunduke thinking of us in this case.

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Me neither. But I think some of the concerns, especially the environmental impact of proof-of-work blockchains are quite valid and it’s a good thing that this is discussed.

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I am not part of Haiku inc, who would be the entity which could decide on that (they manage the donations). I am also not that happy that they accept bitcoin donations. As I have already said, this is only my personal opinion, and I just wanted to express it. We don’t always agree on all things here.

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I think it is important to note that NFT and cryptocurrencies are like comparing apples and oranges. For me I really don’t want Haiku and any ‘get rich quick schemes’ coming anywhere near each other.

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Okay, here you can see some cultural differences.
I know that charity in the US works quite differently as it does in Europe (or at least in Germany). Binding (personal) profit to donations is being considered sketchy - at least. It’s okay to donate money out of the profits of a company. In that respect, it’s okay so sell NFTs and donate a share of it. But setting up a kind of charity event, claiming to gain profit (as described) out of it and donating 5 % (FIVE) of it to a good cause, is kind of shady.
Additionally, NFTs as such are dubious because in essence it’s a pyramid scheme. As I understand the whole NFTs-thing, someone buys a basically worthless digital piece of art and re-sells it, assuming it will have increased in value by then. This works fine, until re-selling gives you less money. NFTs are set up around a gamble. As long as one knows that… well, people also go to casinos. Maybe one values the content of the NFT, then he/she might be okay with it as well. Otherwise one fell for a scam.
And here comes the perspective of a potential donor, who shares the cause (=supporting Haiku). Why should I spend X Euros/Dollars knowing that only one twentieth will be actually beneficial to the project?

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Could you avoid this kind of “self implosion” posts?

  • It is an open source project, “menacing” to fork just look plain stupid… It happened in the past and will happen in the future… that is just the life of any open source project.
  • “I’ve been tempted recently to put a significant amount of money into forking Haiku and purging many of you toxic social justice warriors in the process. Stop encouraging me”: wow, there must be many in this community terrified at this idea… not. Also, menacing to fork a project of this magnitude just because you can’t stand a few opinions on the community make you look like stupid.

People can have an opinion different of yours, and it will not necessarily better or worse than yours (or mine).
Also, people will not change their mind for your view on how the world should be run and what people should do with their money.

Knowing members of the community will not change their opinion just four your pleasure, you have put yourself in a corner:

  • will you go ahead, fork the project and spend your (apparently significant amount of) money on progressing this fork?
  • or will you lower your tone and simply learn to participate in a diverse community, with different opinions, in an adult manner?

Please stop calling a proportion people of this community toxic, with the content of this last post of yours, it looks ironic to say the least.

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See #2 in my previous post

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Coming from somebody active at shutting down opinions. Show us the example by applying it to to you :rofl:

Ho and please, again, fork the project, show us your “menace” is not just hot air (although it probably is). Show us that with your leadership and you money the project will be in a much better place, seriously, we have been waiting for you to make the forum a better place and the project grow bigger! Luckily you have arrived to sort this out. Amen to you.

Or just admit you did a shit post.
Again, apply #2 to yourself and spare us your tantrum.

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Oh yes! That would be great if all the toxic people like YOU could move away of here and run their own fork! I much appreciate it :heart:

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