FTX Future Fund

[exdsq]

If people are interested in where these ideas come from, please look at these links:

https://www.givingwhatwecan.org

https://80000hours.org

https://www.effectivealtruism.org

If you're thinking about how you can contribute more than you currently are but don't want to leave a comfy FAANG job, I highly recommend reading a little about giving what we can. Disclaimer: I pledged with GWWC and am involved in some EA groups.

[JumpCrisscross]

If you're in the New York City, this is the philosophy the Robinhood Foundation [1] pursues.

[1] https://www.robinhood.org

[oldstrangers]

Anyone else oddly skeptical of FTX? They seemingly came out of no where with ungodly amounts of money, and began slapping their name on anything and everything.

[exdsq]

No. I have some mutual acquaintances with the owner through effective altruism and I've heard good things. It's pretty insane that he left Jane Street to try make more money to give to effective charities and now at 29 is worth $22.5 Billion! So they have the money to spend on these things and the fact he's running a future fund makes total sense based on what his original goals were.

[dkasper]

There’s incredible amounts of capital going into the crypto industry and FTX is one of the biggest players. There may be some froth but they seem like one of the least shady players in the space to me.

[fezzez]

The story is that their founder made billions of a crypto trade a couple years ago so I think they might have the funding to do stuff like this.

[bena]

I first heard about them when they began to sponsor a Magic: the Gathering related podcast and about a month(?) later, they're everywhere.

But I'm wary of the crypto space in general. A lot of bad faith actors.

[space_rock]

Their growth was reasonably organic if you were following the popularity of exchanges

[lavezzi]

Tether

[y0ssar1an]

textbook greenwashing. if they want to make the world a better place, shut down FTX and stop enabling the insane, planet incinerating, fraud enabling, money laundering, rogue regime financing, fake tech breakthrough called "crypto". crypto companies like FTX should be viewed with the same disdain as Big Oil and Big Tobacco. this is like investing with ExxonMobil to stop climate change. don't fall for it.

https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/Sustainability/Environmenta...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-60281129

[htlion]

I would add the fact that the company is based in Antigua. So the overall picture is a very profitable company, in a domain which, as of now, mostly enables fraud at an insane energy cost, based in a tax haven. But somehow, this is for the greater good. With the challenges ahead, we, all of us, will have to decrease our consumption of most if not all resources. This can not be achieved by just pouring money from the penthouse of a skyscraper of a capital city.

[spir]

Mostly True: "planet incinerating, fraud enabling, money laundering, rogue regime financing"

Totally False: "fake tech breakthrough called "crypto""

[SparkyMcUnicorn]

It's hard to look at this founder and say he isn't extremely well intentioned.

For a very young guy in this scene you'd expect expensive watches and cars, but instead he drives a budget car, is giving away a great majority of his wealth, and seems to truly care.

The reason he's keeping FTX open is to earn more money to give away to environmental, socioeconomic, and health organizations and research. His track record speaks for itself.

[PretzelPirate]

> planet incinerating

FTX pushes Solana, a PoS coin, very hard. Blockchain doesn’t need to use PoW.

Solana has other issues around scalability, reliability, and decentralization, but it isn’t “planet incinerating”.

[jamesshamenski]

Here's how FTX deals with climate: https://www.ftx-climate.com/

Is your stance on the environment what led you to leave the auto industry?

[rattlesnakedave]

Very little on the site has to do with environmentalism.

[babyshake]

The "Project Ideas" section has next to nothing regarding energy. Surprising given the focus on "humanity's long-term prospects".

[exdsq]

Energy is a very important problem but also one that is heavily funded and researched. It makes more sense to focus on underfunded issues that offer a high reward. I argue that energy should be more funded for what it's worth, but climate change and renewable energy sources aren't that popular in effective altruism circles.

[jamesshamenski]

FTX has a dedicated Climate initiative: https://www.ftx-climate.com/

[beefman]

We'd love to see thoughtful plans for how to spend $1-100B to make humanity's future as good as possible. We might learn a great deal from these plans, even when we don't put them into action—and in some cases, we might do that too!

... We'd be excited and grateful to see rigorous criticisms of our priorities and concerns.

Ok, how do we contact you about this? None of the forms here seem appropriate

https://ftxfuturefund.org/apply/

[aaaaaaaaata]

Twitter.

[aaaaaaaaata]

Would a PWA targeting a large niche of underserved users who are accustomed to awful software in their niche be sufficiently altruist to contact them?

I've been procrastinating investment talks due to exhaustion by the state of ethics in the space; Sam's one of the few people I think I'd want to be involved in seeding my business.

[joshxyz]

God, so much hate on this thread. Damned if he do, damned if he don't. Always amazes me how HN crowd loves to project their ideals on how people with money should spend their money.

[skinnymuch]

Yes because no billionaire has ever actually been as amazingly ethical as they have claimed. It’s not really damned on either side for the guys who got rich off this.

[wmf]

You want to reduce risk? Stop letting people gamble with 20x leverage.