NFT’s aren’t a harmless digital fad – they’re a disaster for our planet
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
In other words, wasting extreme amounts of energy that could have been put to productive use, to generate in essence a glorified MD5 hash, which points to a URL that could be deleted or changed at any time in the future.
It is the ultimate in pointless and useless conspicuous consumption, so of course people are going wild for it.
And the world burns for it.
> And the world burns for it.
Please support this with data. It doesn't literally burn for it; fires are down, what, 90% from a century ago?
That makes it an issue of global concern.
why not
It's not obvious at all. A title of ownership that doesn't grant ownership of anything at all is, in principle, worthless.
Just as you cannot solve the problem of harmful emissions or pollution by measuring individual harm and somehow tracing that back to the source.
How would a person trace their illness caused by PFOA emitted by DuPont, if DuPont could simply counter with "prove that the specific PFOA molecules that made you sick came from our plant."?
It doesn't work that way, and for damn good reason. You don't have to prove specific individual harm, in order to condemn and regulate actions that do harm on societal, national or global scale.
Cryptocurrency demonstrably does harm by vastly increasing global power consumption, plus the cost and environmental damage from producing the increasing amounts of hardware needed to run crypto as a whole.
That is why regulation is needed, because we cannot let the misguided desires of a few crypto-obsessed tech heads contribute to climate change on such a scale.
Got a source for the "fires are down 90%" statistic?
I think it's pretty clear that GP was referring to climate change, which wastes of energy like NFTs and BTC exacerbate. A side note - climate change means that bushfires are more common and their severity is worse than in the past. I don't think it's a stretch at all to say that the world burns for it.
The proof of stake (PoS) network has been live with serious money since late last year, so it's becoming relatively established, and the merge is the technical steps to join the entire PoW Ethereum transaction history, processes and existing software into the PoS network, without a single disruptive event.
It's as much of an ecosystem process as a technical process, to retain its value across the merge. Technically it is rather complicated too. The PoS system diagram is more complex than the equivalent PoW system diagram. There are so many things to get right in a complex adversarial computation system like Ethereum, where economic motivations cause people to hunt for every conceivable hack and advantage, and the system's logic has to be regularly updated to deincentivise those.
Not a single mention of Ethereum switching to proof-of-stake which will reduce the power requirements by ~99,9%. Because the author doesn't know or because he wants to only show one side of the argument?
The "article" is written by the author of: "Against the smart city". So I'm gonna go with him just wanting clicks and to show only one side of the argument.
But governments are usually really bad at this sort of thing and they'd probably just mess it all up. It would likely involve a messed up website, multiple privacy violations, various forms of messed up bureaucratic red tape and all sorts of other anti-patterns.
Also, incentives being incentives, forcing crypto miners to use, eg solar, would likely just spike the prices of renewables and cause other issues.
Ok, I'm outta ideas.
Any downsides to that?
It really is just fiat currency with extra steps.
It can't be any other way, the "work" and consumed resources are the value, if it was quick, simple and efficient, it would have insane inflation rates, or the entire space would be run through quickly, entrenching the majority of wealth with the early adopters and making it impossible for new players to enter.
People talking about blockchain technologies being wasteful are just literally ignorant.
Is this not true of proof of work mining already? The majority of wealth captured by miners appears to be going to those who were early adopters or with significant capital. Newcomers can enter and play at the fringes, but they cannot get seriously involved without large capital investment.
To be honest proof of stake looks no better for this at the monent. But no worse either, and at least the energy consumption is a vastly lower.
Imagine that bitcoin is 1st and worst cryptocurrency, but the technology can be improved and it's improving!
If they continue to operate, even with wind or solar, those green energy sources can’t be used to help with the legitimate electricity demand, so we rely less on gas power plants.
As I see it, the best course of action is to ban any bank/company from exchanging money for crypto and vice versa.
The typical way for digital monetary exchange is a credit card transaction, which is completely obsolete. It's like giving away the key to your cryptocurrency wallet every time you make a transaction.
I hope your funbux go to zero.
> I hope you will research some more.
This is sort of a snarky way to start a post. :) Maybe they know something you don't know?
> Cryptocurrency is about democratization of money.
I never can figure out what this means. By some point of view, all money is democratic; it only has value if other people assign it value, and it has value roughly in proportion to how much value people assign it.
This is extremely democratic!
(Arguably, if you're a chartalist, then most "fiat" currency only has value because governments assign it value, but I think this is a bit of a silly perspective; even if it is true, it's like saying "when you cast your vote, it only has value because governments assign it value", which, like, yes? That's the point? But also, strict chartalism doesn't really make a lot of sense; people are often keen to buy Swiss Francs even though the tax base for Francs is quite small, after all.)
> Removing intermediaries for holding and exchanging money digitally.
I don't think this has anything to do with the definition of "democratic." Maybe you mean disintermediated? Grassroots? Distributed? But none of those adjectives suggest quite the normative value that "democratic" does. Why do I care if my money is disintermediated?
> The typical way for digital monetary exchange is a credit card transaction, which is completely obsolete.
"Obsolete" is an odd way to describe something used by hundreds of millions or billions of people on a regular basis.
> It's like giving away the key to your cryptocurrency wallet every time you make a transaction.
This is perhaps your least well-founded statement.
First, it isn't: if you give away your cryptocurrency wallet, anyone can steal your money without recourse. But if I give you my credit card number--which I'm not inclined to do, I admit--the worst case is I have to call my credit card company and get a new number. This is wildly different than the cryptocurrency analogy.
(Now, it is true that all that fraud detection, insurance, chargebacks, etc, are all paid for, directly or indirectly, by transaction fees. But the average BTC transaction fee is about $8, which would be break-even with a ~2% credit card transaction fee when the transaction exceeds $400--not very efficient either, and with far fewer consumer protections!)
But more to the point, and what strikes me as especially ludicrous about your argument: every time you do a transaction online, be it with BTC or Visa, what do you do? You go to a site with "https". Who are you trusting to help you validate that HTTPS identity? Some certificate authority.
Bitcoin doesn't exist in a "zero trust" world. There's no such thing. I do think shipping around static credit card numbers is kind of bad, and we're gradually seeing more secure replacements (EMV in the real world, online systems like Apple Pay in the virtual). But the idea that cryptocurrency is somehow immune to this reliance on trusted third parties is just wrong, and the suggestion that for practical usage it's actually better for consumers is just laughable.
I do disagree with the parent poster--cryptocurrencies serve a (currently) legal and (in most social systems) "legit" purpose: as a store of wealth and speculative asset. But they don't serve as the basis for regular consumer transactions, because most cryptocurrencies are just really bad for that.
I explained some of what I meant by "democratization". For another example, people without banks may find it harder to get debit cards to make digital transactions.
The fundamental technology is like giving away the key. The fraud protection and everything is largely there due to the poor structure of the technology.
This was not about BTC specifically so that fee discussion is a straw man.
Being completely immune to trust is another straw man, I never claimed that. But it's objectively true that auditable public ledgers using cryptography require less trust.
You think it's laughable, but that isn't an argument, it's just a baseless characterization.
The fact that a practical cryptocurrency for transactions hasn't been widely deployed doesn't mean that doesn't exist or could not happen very soon or change the underlying technical argument.
The basic idea is that we are not going to give away the actual numbers that enable someone to make a transaction on our behalf. It's just objectively an outdated approach. You suggest something like Apple Pay. We cannot audit the operation of a private payment entity, but it will probably be based on something like credit card numbers or something less secure. And also the principal is the ability to control one's own money and transfer it without a private intermediary.
You just sort of throw out Apple Pay like it's automatically going to be as good as or better than some cryptocurrency without argument. Which is just your bias against cryptocurrency.
I'm glad you know my opinions better than I do. :)
> The fundamental technology is like giving away the key.
Which fundamental technology? EMV is not, nor are the delegated payment models of PayPal/Apple Pay/Google Pay, nor the similar models supported by some European banks. Static credit card numbers are indeed, but this isn't fundamental to centralized payments; if your primary goal is to eliminate shared-secret payment schemes, Bitcoin is overkill, obviously.
Conversely, if what you think is great about cryptocurrency is that it avoids shared secrets, you're really missing the key innovations and advantages. :)
> This was not about BTC specifically so that fee discussion is a straw man.
Sure, but POW has an inherent economic requirement that workers get paid, either via fees or via currency devaluation. Can you name a POW scheme where what I said is not true?
> You just sort of throw out Apple Pay like it's automatically going to be as good as or better than some cryptocurrency without argument.
No, I threw it out as a specific payment technology that supports online payments without giving payees an ability to impersonate payers. Am I wrong?
> Which is just your bias against cryptocurrency.
I think you may have misunderstood me.
That being said, "cryptocurrency" isn't a protected class. You can't be "cryptocurrencyist". However, I do tend to think that, like Jesus, a lot of cryptocurrency's biggest fans don't actually know how it works or what it's all about, and they tend to be among the loudest on online forums, sadly. ;)
People who really understand cryptocurrency don't espouse private payment systems.
Your misplaced smugness is extremely infuriating. I would appreciate it if you would never reply to me again.
I think regardless of the application, it is important to allow everyone to choose their own level redundancy. Crypto is bad for the environment because of blockchain's redundancy. Banning an application because of its redundancy sounds absurd to me.
A giant wordpress site isn’t necessarily more power efficient or even more secure than a distributed network of them.
Multiple tradeoffs.
I didn't even suggest banning crypto at all.
It is only inefficient if you do not consider freedom and independence to be valuable.
It's the silly proof of work race to sign transaction blocks that's inefficient.
As such, it is not itself the disaster, rather than the first unobstructed signal of some underlying cause (inflation).
It's one of the purest causes of energy consumption inflation in the world right now.
You might argue that's a useless waste of money and time, but when people are spending $500k+ on NFTs, I don't think that argument works. If anything, with the price of timber at the moment, this seems like a solid 40y investment. 100 2×4s in a 40 year tree, $100k payout on 100 trees (before costs or subsidies and warm fuzzies).
Let's put this proof-of-nonsense "currency" stuff behind us.
My question was specifically “why NFTs” not “why cryptographic ledgers”.
But we might as well look at the analogy with the art market - why do some people place high value on some art?
Part of the answer is "authenticity" and "provenace". These are about who created the artifact. Were they the actual creator of the artifact being stamped, or are they some random trying to cash in on someone else's work? If they weren't the original creator, but paid for the artifact via transaction from the creator, that's respected too.
Technically, sure, you can change a byte in an NFT and get a new one. But it's obvious to everyone doing diligence that you're claiming ownership of, and perhaps selling, a derivative.
After all there is a proof of the original out there, which differs by one byte and was stamped before yours. If there aren't the tools to detect this sort of thing yet, there will be soon. So don't think you can re-encode the original to work around this. SImilarity detection is a thing.
People, well some people anyway, will place a much higher value on an original compared with an altered derivative when both are available. They also place much higher value on something that can be traced to its creator, than something created by one person where another tries to claim it.
Perhaps there's an instinct at play here that causes (some) people to direct resources vaguely in the direction of artifact creators they respect, and to the halo of people around them.
I find it revealing what happens if you say "oh, well, if you're worried about pollution, let's do nuclear." The strange thing is, somehow it's still a problem for them. One begins to wonder if the real issue is not pollution, but simply using plentiful electricity for purposes the complainers don't approve of.
On top of that, nuclear is completely useless for addressing the BTC mining consumption problem. Even deluxe perfectly clean magic energy would not address it. Mining is a consumption competition with no upper limit, so will use up all the nuclear and other magic you can produce and still demand more from every other power source it can afford.
The people you are talking to know this, so course they are going to think you're not offering a solution, just a glib remark that doesn't begin to address the problem.
Every time I see this take, I am reminded of this comic: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
Take away Netflix, my car or social media from me, I don't care, I will live fine without them. But take away my Bitcoin and my life gets devastating, just like for other people who realized that their savings are done (I'm not afraid of Bitcoin going away though).
As for NFTs, sure, right now they are useless, but I see them as experiments for the future of digital ownership accounting in the future.
not that i believe in bitcoin, but why can't they equivalently claim that mining bitcoins would derive enjoyment? after all, enjoyment is subjective.
The problem with people claiming mining btc is a waste, is that they are attributing a set of moral and ethical rules that they themselves see as absolutely correct, and anyone who do not ascribe to those rules are scums.
Compare it with the power consumption of video gaming. They are not even in the same ballpark, not remotely.
It takes ~1.2 MWh to confirm a single transaction right now. My fridge at home consumes approx 300 kWh/year. Are you saying that a single BTC transaction verification provides anywhere near the utility as refrigerating food for four years?
Even comparing it to gaming, my desktop at home has a 650W PSU. It would take ~76 days of full power for that to consume as much energy as a single BTC transaction. There's orders of magnitude more energy being used by BTC, but I don't think there's orders of magnitude more benefits.
>but why can't they equivalently claim that mining bitcoins would derive enjoyment?
Got any evidence for that?
judging by the price, yes it does apparently.
And that's where your opinion differs from mine - i don't place a utility judgement on the use of energy. If somebody is willing to pay for their use of electricity, they deserve to use it. As an outsider, i don't get to police anyone else's use of their electricity they pay for, no matter what i think of the actual use.
Of course, this presumes that the cost of the electricity is not somewhat externalized. Unfortunately, that is not quite the case today.
>i don't place a utility judgement on the use of energy.
Attitudes like this are why staying under 2C of global warming is going to be a long shot at best.
>If somebody is willing to pay for their use of electricity, they deserve to use it.
A nice idea, but energy use affects us all. More fossil fuel burnt = more extreme climate change. For where I live, it means cyclones will hit land further away from the equator (and closer to larger population centres), overall rainfall will drop and bushfires will be more severe and frequent.
I feel justified in denigrating BTC because its colossal waste of power is a significant contribution to climate change. This has tangible harms to everyone on this planet.
Really? Then who are the people spending $512,000 on “Mars House” (or $69,000,000 on a Beeple NFT)?
In the past their portfolios were made of companies that... you know, do things; but now I see them with $500k of NFT minecraft tiles and they're more profitable than ever before and weep for humanity.
>Artists are harnessing NFTs to sell their work but ignoring the vast amount of fossil fuels needed to power them.
this article is FUD
> [...] while the rest of us are saddled with an environmental impact nobody can afford to bear. One can’t help but wonder if the proud new owner of Western Flag will think it was all worth it on some day, not so very far from now, when the coastal cities have drowned, the brackish water that comes from the tap needs to be boiled before it is safe to drink and climate refugees huddle in tent cities stretching to the horizon.