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In Summary:
1. The NFT doubles down on the worst of copyright, the property metaphor, & tries to impose old ideas of scarcity & exclusion on the digital realm, where both are obsolete.
I know it sounds catchy to say that NFTs are an ecological disaster, but that statement is sensational and not accurate.
NFTs do not cause carbon emissions themselves, just like you don't add carbon emissions by occupying a seat on a public transportation bus. The bus is doing its daily route and has a fixed amount of emissions per day whether it has any occupants or not. This analogy breaks quickly, so I wouldn't look too much into it.
Maybe a better analogy is to think of your WiFi router. Its energy use is (predominantly) static regardless of how many packets you route through it. So by browsing, you are not causing additional carbon emissions.
In more technical terms: more transactions do not cause more hashrate. Ethereum's CO2 footprint does not scale with transactional count. So asking people to use the network less will not cause the hashrate to go down. The only way you reduce energy consumption is by getting miners to mine less, which triggers the protocol to adjust the mining difficulty accordingly. As laid out above, this has nothing to do with how many transactions are happening on ETH, or whether NFTs are being minted on it.
More accurate would be to say that NFTs are additional fuel for the ecological disaster that is ETH.
Your analogy makes little sense in this context.
Mining hardware will always run at 100% capacity, regardless of the amount of transactions, unless mining becomes unprofitable.
The issue is, while the energy used by mining is not directly dependent on the amount of transactions, it is dependent on the amount of people and money invested into the network, which raises the price, which causes an expansion of mining effort. With more people investing, the amount of transactions also increases.
If NFTs were to become a popular thing, mining will obviously increase at an even faster rate
The energy used to secure PoW networks is indeed wasteful. But just a heads-up, Ethereum is currently transitioning to Proof of Stake consensus mechanism which will reduce electricity costs by an order of magnitude.
1) Eth2 has been "coming soon" for a long time, so it will never happen. (Yes progress has been slow, but it's happening, with phase 0 live now.)
2a) In PoS, the rich get richer. (Not true in a meaningful sense. Staking rewards are neutral with respect to economic inequality, since everyone has access to the same rate of return.)
2b) PoS is a social issue. Climate change is also a social issue. Therefore, a PoS is a climate issue. (This is a converse error.)
This argument has some flaws. So firstly, if nobody got on the bus, the number of buses on the route would be reduced, and depending on circumstances the route would be cancelled. Additionally, the weight of the passenger does slightly increase the power requirement. Ignoring that, while there's minimal direct effect of usage, ultimately the bus is only there due to demand.
Similarly, for block chains, mining only occurs when the thing being mined has value. NFTs would not be mined if people weren't using them. Therefore I would absolutely call them an ecological disaster.
> Similarly, for block chains, mining only occurs when the thing being mined has value. NFTs would not be mined if people weren't using them. Therefore I would absolutely call them an ecological disaster.
The point is that energy consumption due to mining on the Ethereum network does not scale with transaction count. So it does not matter if NFTs are issued ("minted") or not. They add no marginal energy cost in the mining process. That is why calling them an "ecological disaster" is a misnomer.
I’m less familiar with ETH than BTC but my understanding is that this is true:
1. Minting an NFT costs ETH in the form of “gas”
2. The miner who mines a block gets that ETH
Assuming both of these are true, each NFT minted on the ETH blockchain increases the amount they can profitability spend on energy in economic equilibrium.
Your understanding is correct, however ETH is moving sharply away from PoW to PoS systems which are significantly less demanding systems in terms of energy requirements. I believe the roadmap expects the full PoS transition to happen this year (a multistage launch that we are partway through).
On top of that, there's other more specialised NFT blockchains like flow which are becoming very popular.
What they're saying though is that if no one was using Ethereum (for NFTs or other purposes), there would be zero reason to mine them in the first place. It seems to follow to me that as demand goes up, the supply will increase in turn, since it's seen as a more attractive thing to mine.
Buying an NFT requires buying ETH which increases demand for ETH and pushes up the price, encouraging more people to mine ETH, which uses more electricity. Also another effect is pushing up gas fees as people compete to make transactions which again helps miners and encourages more new miners to rig up and join in.
The unique expression of ownership is novel, it really depends on how they're legally interpreted to conclude if they're bad.
If you interpret them literally they're a better form of copyright that what currently exists. It accepts that digital recreations are easy and doesn't seek to prevent them yet still provides scarcity and reward for the effort in producing it.
The NFT of Jack Dorsey's tweet is interpreted to captures some essence of the time, effort and manpower that went into creating twitter the platform.
> It accepts that digital recreations are easy and doesn't seek to prevent them yet still provides scarcity and reward for the effort in producing it.
I like this description quite a bit. Im obviously a believer already, but this is a good way to describe the value potential of blockchain based NFTs.
Slight digression, but personally I hate the way scarcity always makes its way into the conversation due to the obsessive discussion of deflation, but I think in the case of NFTs it fits well.
I'd rephrase your statement as saying that NFTs using blockchain protocols preserve the scarcity of owning an asset. Then extending that, digitally verifiable proof of the scarce resource (i.e. ownership) is the aspect that can create an economic incentive for ownership.
Exactly! Too many people in this thread are making huge judgements based off a very limited knowledge of what is going on in the blockchain space.
I agree with OPs inference that the art market is going to get over saturated, but ETH ecology is not an argument against NFTs. Plenty of alt-chains exist and interchain marketplaces are being built as we speak.
If all goes well, 2022 [0]. The transition will happen in multiple phases. IMHO it's very interesting from a software engineering perspective.
- The Beacon Chain is already live (since December last year). It's going to act as the coordinating entity in the PoS system. Future validators are already staking Ether on it.
- Shard chains support is expected to be launched later this year. The plan is to have 64 shards to improve scalability. Together with Layer 2 solutions (which are on the verge of becoming mainstream, e.g. Jack Dorsey's tweet was minted using a L2) that will bring the throughput to ~100-200k transactions per second.
- The last step is "docking" the old Ethereum Mainnet to the Beacon Chain as one of the shards of the new PoS system.
I don't use NFTs, but the author of the linked blog article said Proof of Stake avoids the ecological problem.
That author also does not engage meaningfully with the green energy side of the crypto ecosystem. Strong international and local regulations would go a long way in protecting the environment and local prices.
> tries to impose old ideas of scarcity & exclusion on the digital realm,
NFTs also impose the best aspects of physical goods. Namely that I can re-sell, trade, or borrow digital things as I wish. It’s an improvement on DRM in that sense.
GameStop can become a marketplace for NFT tokens for games. Better than Steam keys.
It's always good to remind oneself, that most dictators in history came to power through legal means. The Nazi's were democratically elected at first etc. Plus "Complying with a mandatory legal process" is a very relative thing for a multi-national giant corporation that pays very little taxes, hides most of its wealth offshore and is a leader in shaping the law through intensive lobbying.
Github, via extension of its owner Microsoft, is owned by some of the most regressive, monopolistic, oligarchic/kleptocratic, big-finance forces on the planet - the likes of Blackrock, Berkshire, Gates, etc. It is very much in their interest to centralize and control open source/free software (free as in freedom), and they have a well established track record of doing just that, by any means necessary. To say it more poignantly: Microsoft is a direct driver of perverse wealth inequality, endless wars and centralisation of power which effectively destroys any resemblance of democracy everywhere. Behind the clean corporate facade, they are just another mafia. If you support this system - by hosting your code on Github and buying MS products - you are de-facto supporting this techno-dictatorship.
It’s a decentralized version control system though! It seems tough to make the argument that M$ are trying to suppress free software speech through GitHub. Literally, a Git project can be redistributed immediately if it was ever taken down by GitHub so the argument that M$ is trying to control open source seems pretty soft.
The web is a decentralized hypertext information system. And yet, through IE and strategies leveraging their OS monopoly, Microsoft has put the web into the IE5.5/IE6 dark age. It's been a while - almost a decade. But those of us who have have witnessed Microsoft's Embrace, Extend & Extinguish strategy deployed several times (with lesser and greater success) are warey.
Specifically, the way GitHub "embraced and extended" git (even before the Microsoft acquisition) is to have quite a few things outside the repository - like issues. You can take your source anywhere you want, but a project with 30,000 issues is going to have trouble migrating those issues.
Microsoft are running Bartertown and and are doing a pretty good impression of Master Blaster. Ironically youtube-dl just got dragged into the thunder dome.
You can trade outside Bartertown but it’s going to have low visibility.
I can sort of buy that argument; but in that case it seems the problem is just that M$ is a company which many people dislike? Not that there are actual restrictiveness issues?
Rightfully dislike yes. They have a very long history of making the wrong decision almost universally, being a monopolist and abusive towards suppliers and customers.
People are afraid that they will do that again after relying on them as a foundation for their product or experience based on some trite promise of "we changed". So when something happens, the attribution and a hypothesis is already formed.
Unfortunately, based on my experiences attempting to fight their universal telemetry, the promise they made is invalid. So why should I trust any of their other promises? I think a lot of people are there too.
The problem is with people exploiting capitalism, not capitalism itself. There are many well-known flaws with capitalism, the most obvious being lack of accountability for external costs and the formation of monopolies. This is why we have laws to "correct" that. You don't get to be as big as Microsoft without some amount of corruption and exploitation to circumvent these measures.
To give an analogy, I think the Internet is great. But I dislike the individuals who exploit it to send spam and propagate worms etc.
It boils down to a certain competitive spirit that exists to varying degrees in different people, which is what drives them to push the limits of their field. If something wasn't good enough for Steve Jobs, he didn't accept it. Michael Jordan wouldn't accept someone being considered better than him. The champion / winning attitude is what has driven a lot of folks to invent, innovate and lift the standard of everyone around them through their own excellence. We all benefit from that kind of attitude.
Capitalism offers a reward for those who are willing to put in the work.
Microsoft has helped billions of people around the world find employment, build software, use a computer, save time, money, and achieve something or another across pretty much every field in existence. For that, the capitalist system lets them dominate the market and gain all kinds of advantages. They deserve it as far as I'm concerned.
Weaponising open source is a new low, even for this particularly clueless US regime. But this is really only meaningful in the short-term. In the mid-term (2030ish), the tech game is very likely to have drastically changed: Other countries will have taken the technological lead (china & co), while the US is still engaged in endless internal conflicts (in effect a mafia-state, akin to what happend in Russia after 1990). All the global talent that once powered the US tech innovation motor (droves of Chinese, Indian, Russian and European PhD students etc.) will have disappeared. At that point, we might see headlines along the lines of "Globally leading open source platform Gitea Blocked US Access". Personally, i would prefer to see yet another scenario, where the entire global Intellectual property market collapsed and was replace by "open source everything" - but that might be a more long term vision.
