8 ms·

Crypto and NFTs are a absolute disaster for so many more reasons than ecological

79 points by gitrog 6y ago

faeyanpiraat 6y ago
This article is not about crypto, but cryptoart, and I couldn’t determine what that is by skimming the article, and not sure I want to care about it. Is this worth looking into?
- yrgulation 6y ago
  Not really. But the gist of it is that you can "sell art" encapsulated in NFT tokens. Something like you would encode an image into such a token and then it's "forever" stored in the chain and can't be replicated. At least that's how I understand it.
- cinntaile 6y ago
  Most of his argument is based on the ecological impact. His other complaints are stated as facts and lack arguments. It's about how he's against the tokenization of art, which happens on the public ethereum blockchain. Tokenization brings uniqueness to digital goods, because it allows you to prove ownership if all parties involved accept the blockchain as a source of truth. Edit: I see I am getting downvoted for simply stating facts again. Perhaps you could try and debate instead?
  - meepmorp 6y ago
    FWIW, I downvoted you for complaining about downvotes.
    - cinntaile 6y ago
      That's fine, you state why you downvote. Now there's something to discuss at least, that's not the type of downvote that is deleterious for discussions. Not saying anything and just downvoting is simply silencing people you disagree with and that's why I mentioned it.
      - faeyanpiraat 6y ago
        I don’t get the downvote system, sometimes I get downvoted for no reason, sometimes I get downvoted for asking on legit but grey comments without comments why it got downvoted, etc.. Downvoting without providing a reason is indeed demoralizing and toxic imho.
- gitrog 6y ago
  There is a subtheme about crypto, in that he kind of argues it isn't really useful enough as a financial instrument to warrant the ecological cost (my words, not his). That's an opinion - one I tend to share - so feel free to disagree.
DrinkWater 6y ago
No matter how much i read into NFTs, i cant wrap my head around the idea. It just sounds like a scam.
- coldcode 6y ago
  As a digital artist I find them highly intriguing to consider. As a person I still can't figure out why people would be paying me for a hash and not actually get anything.
  - iamacyborg 6y ago
    Yeah, I just don't understand why people would pay tens of thousands of pounds for a .jpg or .gif
    - AlwaysBCoding 6y ago
      1. Money Laundering: If you made money from a pump and dump or something otherwise nefarious that you want to convert back to USD and explain away, a good way is to mint digital art and sell it to yourself. Then when you report it to the IRS you made $100,000 from selling digital artwork to an anonymous buyer instead of from insider trading a low market cap coin. This is not so different from how art works in meatspace (see Mark Rothko). 2. Charity: It's hard to really grok this if you don't live in the crypto world but people make insane amounts of money from Ethereum. I know multiple people who are under 30 and have each made upwards of $500,000,000 from buying ETH in the presale / insider trading in bull markets. Generally someone who bought into the ETH presale is a mega crypto bull and keeps a large percentage of their net worth in crypto. It's trivial for them to support artists by buying their artwork for a minuscule fraction of the money they've made. What sounds like "buying a .jpg for thousands of dollars" to someone not in this world, is more like the crypto equivalent of tipping a live streamer a bit on twitch.
    - throwaway744678 6y ago
      I don't understand it either, but they actually pay for a certificate of ownership of a .jpg or .gif, whatever this means.
mnskym 6y ago
People are making money and I'm mad about it: the post
- cbozeman 6y ago
  Thank you for the laugh this morning.
  - mnskym 6y ago
    You're welcome ;) I don't get HN sometimes, people seem to have a stick up their ass and always way too serious in comments
    - cbozeman 6y ago
      Every time I read a thread on Bitcoin / cryptocurrencies, its filled with assmad people who talk about how it destroys the environment, solves a problem no one has/had (moving $50 million for $1.00 in under an hour is, I guess, admittedly a problem very few people have), sucks up their precious GPUs that they would be using to train a deep learning model that identifies the most handsome pigeons in Central Park, etc. so forth. I always enjoy the few people like yourself who call it like it actually is.
Tenoke 6y ago
Despite acknowledging PoS, the author keeps hammering on PoW. Their actual problem is with PoW and has little to do with NFTs. If you are worried about the environmental impact (which for 1 minting is fairly small) just use the PoS options available today and rant about ETH generally using PoW instead.
- lmm 6y ago
  > which for 1 minting is fairly small The article makes specific claims to the contrary > just use the PoS options available today Does PoS actually work today? AFAICS it's vaporware.
  - lima 6y ago
    > Does PoS actually work today? AFAICS it's vaporware. Yes. PoS chains using real practical byzantine fault tolerance like Cosmos Hub, using Tendermint consensus, have been running since 2018.
  - Tenoke 6y ago
    >The article makes specific claims to the contrary Which are unsubstantiated. One minting is basically one (largish) transaction. Transactions arent quite that expensive, it costs maybe $50-100 and you definitely don't put months of electricity to earn that little as a miner. I don't have the numbers but it doesn't check out. >Does PoS actually work today? AFAICS it's vaporware. Yes, it's worked for a while.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  I think until NFTs can actually be minted and distributed via PoS, PoS doesn't matter. It's been "coming soon" for ages. I eagerly await Ethereum's transition to PoS but today when you sell crypto art it's PoW.
  - Tenoke 6y ago
    >I think until NFTs can actually be minted and distributed via PoS, PoS doesn't matter. It's been "coming soon" for ages It's been coming soon on ETH. Again, you can use PoS options today outside of ETH. Tezos is a popular one, and even the biggest ETH marketplace (opensea) is adding Tezos as an option right now.
wayoutthere 6y ago
I’ve come full circle on crypto. Crypto is an example of capitalism eating itself. When the value of crypto is high, large amounts of economic output are funneled into crypto at the expense of other opportunities. NVidia expects supply shortages of its newest line of video cards (released in December and going for $1500+ on eBay from an MSRP of $700) to extend into 2022. Oh yeah, and this happens every time a new generation of chips is released. Hope you didn’t need any to train ML models.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  The "problem" is with the people who missed out on Bitcoin and can't compete with Chinese miners. I started out mining BTC on a Core2Duo laptop from 2006, in 2010. I upgraded to a Butterfly Labs Jalapeno miner. Then I started to realize Chinese miners were soaking up the mining equipment and many of them were getting industrial power rates. Then people who couldn't afford / acquire BTC ASIC miners made more ridiculous alt-coins that they could mine with GPUs. Cryptocurrency isn't the problem, people butthurt about missing out and wanting to make their own coin are the problem.
  - wayoutthere 6y ago
    The problem is the industrial Chinese miners. These companies soak up enormous amounts of resources while producing... nothing. It’s horrible for the environment, and it’s a net drain on the economy for what I believe to be ephemeral value largely driven by low interest rates and a lack of high-growth investment options.
    - cbozeman 6y ago
      > what I believe to be ephemeral value largely driven by low interest rates This is part of the story, the other part would be central banks printing money nonstop, or in common parlance, "money printer go brrr". Bitcoin can only exist in a post-2008-financial-crash world. Prior to that, there was no reason to consider anything other than the US Dollar. Bitcoin, however, is a solution to only one part of an overarching problem, or at least this is what I think: financial services need to be reigned back in if we have any hope as a species of surviving. Continued worldwide crashes caused by financiers engaging in riskier and riskier behavior in the name of enormous profits will eventually result in a war when one of the nations on the "losing end" decides they've had enough.
asdev 6y ago
people don't realize we will soon be able to harvest the heat from PoW into renewable energy. Research is being done on thermoelectric materials. Yelling about the environmental impact is a cop out, no technology started out its life as performant, sustainable and carbon neutral.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  A future where the environmental impact of PoW is minimized sounds like a great future. That future does nothing to slow the ongoing climate crisis today and it does nothing for the vulnerable people in coastal areas, hot climates, etc tomorrow. If we were talking about 'NFTs once PoW is not environmentally hazardous' that would be great, but we're talking about NFTs today.
  - asdev 6y ago
    Bitcoin mining is low on the list in terms of problems that need fixing in order solve climate crisis today. Bitcoin haters just love to harp on that fact.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
teterphiel 6y ago
The environmental issues with crypto need no more solving than the environmental issues associated mining gold (much worse), producing aluminum, and in a wider sense humans doing things on earth need solving --- which is not to say that they don't, but to single out bitcoin is disingenuous, uninformed, or just plain neophobic.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  The article addresses this. In summary: both things are bad, but it would be nice to not make them worse. Expanding the power spent mining crypto makes them worse, with how things are right now at least. Also, NFTs are generally based on Ethereum, not Bitcoin. Did you read the article?
- jsiepkes 6y ago
  Gold, bauxite, etc. are all used to produce things with an application such electronics. Name a single thing we produce with Bitcoin.
  - teterphiel 6y ago
    and these applications give people a fuzzy warm feeling that lasts for about a month before it recedes and attention shifts elsewhere. I have it on good authority that owning bitcoin gives people a very similar kind of feeling and there is nothing wrong with that. humans doing human things. of course now there's plenty of arbiters of what constitutes proper warm fuzziness, and apparently a new BMW made from aluminium and steel is AAA+, but buying 0.1 of a bitcoin is not.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - akdor1154 6y ago
      The environmental cost of the beemer is not linked to its dollar value. As tfa demonstrates, this is not true of the 0.1 bitcoin.
Hendrikto 6y ago
> the difficultly of mining blocks in the blockchain is designed to increase over time. This is because as the network grows, the relative rate of new coins mined stays stable (for Bitcoin, about 1 coin is mined every 10 minutes). This is not correct. About 1 block is mined every 10 minutes, while block rewards decrease over time. The one block per 10 minutes is also what is kept stable, and the reason mining difficulty increases over time. There is nothing in BTC mandating the difficulty to increase, and indeed it does decrease sometimes.
incrudible 6y ago
Is there any evidence that cryptocurrency actually had a significant impact on real CO2 emissions? The idea that raising energy usage somewhere commensurately increases emissions based on the "energy mix" that predated that extra usage is an oversimplification. Most of the mining happening in China, for instance, is happening near non-CO2 emitting plants (hydropower, wind) where energy is virtually free most of the time. The increased demand for energy that is otherwise of little value may in fact be financing a rollout for renewable energy. The primary problem with renewables like wind power today is not production capacity, it is storage. It stands to reason that at least some mining temporarily leads to increased CO2 emissions due to revenue exceeding the cost of fossil fuels. However, this only happens in the short term, because of difficulty adjusting revenue to the point where only the very cheapest energy sources remain competitive, and these are not fossil fuels. Furthermore, the increased demand for more efficient semiconductors finances the R&D required to lower the power usage of all computing into the indefinite future.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  The post addresses this question in detail. In brief summary, extracting "green" energy from the grid (most mining occurs on the grid) means that the energy available on the grid is more likely to be from CO2-generating sources. The amount of demand for that grid power is partially non-negotiable (things like street lamps, life support equipment in hospitals, etc) and partially negotiable (if the cost goes up enough people might stop using tv or indoor lighting, I guess?), but ultimately if demand spikes there will just be more coal and gas getting burned to provide power on the grid. Also, the green power generation requires the manufacturing and distribution of things like solar panels, which is not currently CO2-neutral and has other environmental impacts. There are also theoretical (if not real) limits to how much you can actually expand grid capacity. Mining already even in conservative estimates consumes a lot of power, and unless PoS is fully rolled out it will continue to consume more and more, which will put increasing strain on local power grids.
  - lmm 6y ago
    > (most mining occurs on the grid) The post you were replying to is disagreeing with this. Power made available for extremely low cost next door to a hydroelectric dam etc. might be technically "on the grid" in that there is some connection between that town and the rest of the grid, but if the long-distance transmission lines are already at maximum capacity (which is usually the case, otherwise power wouldn't be any cheaper in those towns than anywhere else) then that surplus power is de facto not available to the rest of the grid.
PebblesRox 6y ago
"I’m sure you’re seeing the problem here- there is not a schema that doesn’t reward those who already are already wealthy, who are already bought in, who already have excess capital or access to outsized computational power. Almost universally they grant power to the already powerful." Now I'm imagining a crypto currency that just gets awarded randomly to any person on the planet in a world-wide lottery. Or it could get distributed evenly like UBI to everyone.
- felipeccastro 6y ago
  I like this crypto UBI idea! But without the early movers incentive to increase the coin value, how could that work?
  - sofetch 6y ago
    > But without the early movers incentive to increase the coin value, how could that work? Are you seriously asking how having the value distributed out to a large number of people could ever have utility without oligarchs to "set the value" to some "proper" value?
    - felipeccastro 6y ago
      I’m seriously asking for new ideas. This space is new and free to rethink incentives in all sorts of ways, it doesn’t need to repeat the same mistakes as fiat.
    - Ensorceled 6y ago
      Yes. If we split all the bitcoins up into 7.8 billion pieces and distributed them to everyone on the planet ... what do you think bitcoins would suddenly be worth? Would each slice still be worth ~$100 or would the market simply collapse?
    - jordan_curve 6y ago
      That seems like a legitimate question although you’ve rephrased it somewhat uncharitably.
lmm 6y ago
> Digital files don’t have that much going for them. They store monumentally less information than say, a piece of paper- which contains the artwork on it as well as inscribed histories of hand, pen, ink, pulp, forest- a dense connected materiality that unfolds forever. A digital file is a pauper in comparison. A file breaks down to requisite ones and zeros well before one can reach the atomic composition of the materials in a physical drawing. > Digital files also require power to access and maintain, and are incredibly unstable over time as new operating systems, plugins and standards render things unviewable- often within a decade. They are also vulnerable to bitrot and physical degradation of storage media- the stable shelf life of a CD-ROM, for instance, is less than 20 years. This is pretty much nonsense. The actual artwork on a piece of paper will typically be lower fidelity than a digital version of it, and paper degrades faster than CD-roms. I've dug out a CD full of photos that spent 10 years in a damp attic, and the photos are as good as the day they were taken - try that with photos printed on physical paper. Furthemore, while an NFT is by design not copyable in some sense, it's certainly not vulnerable to degradation of physical media.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  There are books printed on paper that have survived dozens if not hundreds of years under the correct archival conditions. We do not currently have a means to do the equivalent with CDs. Just ask the people working at places like the Internet Archive.
- averynicepen 6y ago
  Both sides of this have pretty good counterexamples. There's an experimental way to encode data on crystals (using lasers, I recall?) that last a very very long time. The more feasible example though would be archival tapes used in long term cold storage, that also do quite well. For physical medium, given the right storage conditions, you can store film for quite a while, and that technically has infinite resolution in comparison to a digital copy.
- at_ 6y ago
  >The actual artwork on a piece of paper will typically be lower fidelity than a digital version of it, and paper degrades faster than CD-roms. I think the post does a nice job of countering this; a physical object will always contain much more information (in the Shannonian sense) than any digital alternative could, and that goes far beyond things like DPI.
eru 6y ago
Slightly off-topic, or perhaps more general. The solution to proof of work using too much energy is not proof of work. It's fractional reserve bitcoins / ethereum / etc. To explain: For game theoretic / economic reasons, people will spend as much effort mining as there are mining rewards to be claimed. If move to a system that doesn't hand out mining rewards, you still have to hand out the coins on some basis. So people will do the activity of that basis as much as there are rewards. I will talk about bitcoin for simplicity. It behaves very much like gold in a lot of respects. If bitcoin sees wider adoption as cash, that means it will have to support a larger amount of spending in real terms and also a larger demand for real balances held in 'cash'. Since the total nominal amount of bitcoins is fixed, you can only get the latter via an increase in the real value of each bitcoin. But, here's the solution: gold was (and is) also hard to mine, but even when gold was money, you didn't actually need physical gold coins to serve most of your cash needs. Bank notes and 'checkable' deposits fill this very need: they allow to expand the effective money supply without needing to mine more gold. The same will work for bitcoin. (Of course, only that the banknotes will be electronic, of course.) We already see some signs of that eg in bitcoin futures. The only way to get investment exposure to bitcoin used to be buying physical bitcoins. But nowadays you can buy (and roll over) bitcoin futures instead. Of course, every future needs a counter party that's taking the opposite side of that exposure. If you think about it, that's pretty much the same thing that banks do. Selling futures is very similar to offering time deposits: With a time deposit, the bank incurs an obligation to pay a certain amount of money later. They could hedge that obligation by just holding on to physical money, but more typically, they invest in assets like bonds and loans, and hope to be able to exchange them for money when they have to pay back the time deposit. That's basically the same economic exposure as being short a bitcoin future and going long a bond future. To end the long rant, even if your base currency is gold or bitcoin, you can support lots more money than that.
niahmiah 6y ago
What a pile of horseshit. This article had as much ecological impact as whatever he in whining about.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  What is your basis for the ecological impact of this article? A static html file can be served to thousands of users by a single ARM-based PC in a datacenter or on a home connection, probably drawing less than 100W if not less than 20W.
eoo 6y ago
TL;DR: Ethereum uses a lot of energy, we shouldn't use it for anything non essential because it wastes energy. Contrary to the article title, 90% of the arguments exposed are just rehashing why energy waste os bad, and why we shouldn't make use of it for NFTs. 10% of the article ("the many other reasons") is a critique of the art circuit and imho, a little ranty about how hard it is to get rich from art. The actually interesting part of the article is at the end, but its just an enumeration of the ways in which cryptoart world: * Cryptoart creates artificial scarcity for digital objects, creating an “original” which can be owned * Cryptoart recreates the some of the worst aspects of existing art markets * Cryptoart offers no intellectual property protection and there is no regulatory structure in place to keep copyrighted materials from being minted into and sold as NFTs * Cryptoart smart contracts offer no legal protection, and any talk of contracts baked into the NFT “requiring resales to cut in the artist” or “compensate gallery workers” depend entirely on the goodwill of the purchaser. The rest 4500 words are a repetition of how bad it is to waste energy, woth a note at the end about how the author was "never as bored with a subject to write 5000 words about it", which to me is pretty passionate. edit: formatting
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  That's a pretty long TL;DR ...
  - eoo 6y ago
    It's a pretty long article
qez 6y ago
So this is just the author's personal gripes? "proof of state is against social justice," and "I like the non-rivalry of Internet art." No one if forcing you to use crypto art. > Cryptoart lets a few artist early adopters get rich from a system made to reward investors, not artists. This is true in the same way as Da Vinci pieces are expensive because Da Vinci was an "early adopter" (one of the first great artists)
- kevingadd 6y ago
  If you read the title of the article or some of the opening paragraphs, you will see that it is intended to answer common questions from people who are less familiar with crypto or NFTs. This is explicitly not an issue of "someone is forcing you to use crypto art." Though you could certainly ask whether you are being forced to tolerate the environmental impacts of crypto art through things like rising temperatures, that's hard to prove trivially (the article tries)
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  No one is forcing me to burn coal or hunt rhinos to extinction but I'm against both of those things too.
olalonde 6y ago
We all have different opinions on what activities we consider "wasteful". Some people see value in cryptocurrencies while others don't. What we really need is to price externalities (e.g. carbon emissions) and let the market decide. Or we could keep posting 20 articles a day that bash about cryptocurrencies being bad for the environment.
- throwaway744678 6y ago
  "We" don't "need" to do anything, and are very much allowed to write all the blog posts "we" like. Promoters of the tech actually need to price externalities and whatever to improve it, if they want us to use it.
willtemperley 6y ago
These arguments are always pointless, as there is nothing that can be done about it, short of a global ban on computers and the internet. Why not ask the question: "how can we incentivise usage of clean over dirty energy?". How is it the fault of Bitcoin that someone realised burning brown coal to create hashes is economically viable? That's a failure of the state, not the software.
- gitrog 6y ago
  Why is that a failure of the state? Which state?
  - willtemperley 6y ago
    Whichever state or jurisdiction the power station burning coal is based in.
    - willtemperley 6y ago
      Ah sorry lots of Americans here, in global English we use "state" to mean a sovereign state, not an arbitrary subdivision like Delaware
      - gitrog 6y ago
        No I took you to mean "country" as I'm also not American, I just don't understand how you expect governments to foresee and restrict every possible new technology that affects energy consumption to such a large degree. I also think that these kind of insights are what would be needed for states to act on technologies that pose these threats, though I believe if regulation is applied there will be a lot, and I mean a lot, of backlash.
        willtemperley 6y ago
        All I'm arguing is that governments can stop carbon being burned on their soil but they cannot stop PoW existing. So let's focus on the former.
pjfin123 6y ago
> Ethereum “has been moving” to proof of stake for almost as long as it has existed. It has been so long that “Eth 2.0 PoS Coming Soon!” is something of a running joke. Ethereum seems to very much be in the process is switching to proof of stake but we should ignore that because of the author's gut feeling it's a "joke"?
PebblesRox 6y ago
"Fundamentally, cryptocurrency AND cryptoart are valuable because they burn energy." I think a better way to put this would be to say that cryptocurrency and cryptoart cannot maintain value without maintaining scarcity, which they do by burning energy. The value doesn't come from the energy burning in itself, but in the current NFT system, that energy burn is a necessary component to preserve value. An attempt to change this would require finding a different way to produce scarcity.
blockyhead 6y ago
The greatest irony here is that protection against socialist ideologues like the author of this article is one of the main motivations for using cryptocurrencies. Maybe if they would fix their ideology, people wouldn't have to resort to decentralized solutions. As for the actual content, I plainly don't trust the calculations of the anti-crypto crowd. And while I also had lost faith in Proof of Stakes ever making it into Ethereum (unfortunately also selling all my Ethereum when I gave up on them), they have now activated the PoS chain and run it in parallel to PoW, with the goal to switch completely. The stuff about "social justice" is also nonsense, at least with respect to mining in PoS: it is not that much Eth you need to participate, and if you don't want to invest as much, you can join a mining pool. Everybody can participate, if they want to. It is also not "unjust" if people who invest (or stake) more receive higher rewards. The opposite would be unjust.
- gitrog 6y ago
  How is it the fault of an ideology that decentralised solutions are required? Is there something inherent in Socialist ideology that you can point me to?
  - blockyhead 6y ago
    Socialists want to create a government that controls every detail of the citizens lives, and ensures they can not accumulate any wealth. That is a centralized threat to people's wealth.
    - gitrog 6y ago
      That is definitely not what "Socialists" want. I apologise on behalf of any Socialist that gave you that impression.
      - blockyhead 6y ago
        Of course it is. Name any socialist policy that does not work towards that goal. Any policy that is not a constraint on freedom. The motivating force behind socialism is envy. Nobody is allowed to have something that somebody else doesn't have. Good intentions (like free healthcare or basic income or rent controls) don't prevent the inevitable outcome. Ultimately Socialism wants to do with individual property and have everybody work for the common good, not for their personal gain. It is extremely anti-freedom, and of course anti-wealth.
G3rn0ti 6y ago
From the article > a financial network that uses more energy than Argentina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici... Just for context: Argentina used about 3% of the energy consumed by the US alone in 2018. And only a fraction of that amount consumed by G8 in total. However, the number does not tell us how this energy was produced and, hence, can not provide an insight into the environmental impact of Cryptos. If it came mostly from renewable sources, the carbon footprint of Bitcoin and other cryptos would be quite reasonable, I believe.
PebblesRox 6y ago
"But climate justice must mean giving leadership and power to those who will bear the worst effects of climate catastrophe...." I guess this claim depends on the definition of "climate justice." But if we broaden that "climate fixing" (which is how I initially took it, before going back to the original quote and noticing the word justice), what has to happen is that those in power need to care about the problem and know what to do to fix it. This can happen by putting power into the hands of those who care and know what to do and it can happen by changing the goals and know-how of those who currently have power. Neither option is easy!
fabiofzero 6y ago
Whenever anyone brings the CO2 cost of blockchain on HackerNews the comment section becomes a mental gymnastics competition filled with techbro clones of Ben Shapiro.
actuallyrizzn 6y ago
This is incorrect anti crypto propaganda

79 points by gitrog 6y ago

This article is not about crypto, but cryptoart, and I couldn’t determine what that is by skimming the article, and not sure I want to care about it. Is this worth looking into?

yrgulation 6y ago
Not really. But the gist of it is that you can "sell art" encapsulated in NFT tokens. Something like you would encode an image into such a token and then it's "forever" stored in the chain and can't be replicated. At least that's how I understand it.
cinntaile 6y ago
Most of his argument is based on the ecological impact. His other complaints are stated as facts and lack arguments. It's about how he's against the tokenization of art, which happens on the public ethereum blockchain. Tokenization brings uniqueness to digital goods, because it allows you to prove ownership if all parties involved accept the blockchain as a source of truth. Edit: I see I am getting downvoted for simply stating facts again. Perhaps you could try and debate instead?
- meepmorp 6y ago
  FWIW, I downvoted you for complaining about downvotes.
  - cinntaile 6y ago
    That's fine, you state why you downvote. Now there's something to discuss at least, that's not the type of downvote that is deleterious for discussions. Not saying anything and just downvoting is simply silencing people you disagree with and that's why I mentioned it.
    - faeyanpiraat 6y ago
      I don’t get the downvote system, sometimes I get downvoted for no reason, sometimes I get downvoted for asking on legit but grey comments without comments why it got downvoted, etc.. Downvoting without providing a reason is indeed demoralizing and toxic imho.
gitrog 6y ago
There is a subtheme about crypto, in that he kind of argues it isn't really useful enough as a financial instrument to warrant the ecological cost (my words, not his). That's an opinion - one I tend to share - so feel free to disagree.

DrinkWater 6y ago

No matter how much i read into NFTs, i cant wrap my head around the idea. It just sounds like a scam.

coldcode 6y ago
As a digital artist I find them highly intriguing to consider. As a person I still can't figure out why people would be paying me for a hash and not actually get anything.
- iamacyborg 6y ago
  Yeah, I just don't understand why people would pay tens of thousands of pounds for a .jpg or .gif
  - AlwaysBCoding 6y ago
    1. Money Laundering: If you made money from a pump and dump or something otherwise nefarious that you want to convert back to USD and explain away, a good way is to mint digital art and sell it to yourself. Then when you report it to the IRS you made $100,000 from selling digital artwork to an anonymous buyer instead of from insider trading a low market cap coin. This is not so different from how art works in meatspace (see Mark Rothko). 2. Charity: It's hard to really grok this if you don't live in the crypto world but people make insane amounts of money from Ethereum. I know multiple people who are under 30 and have each made upwards of $500,000,000 from buying ETH in the presale / insider trading in bull markets. Generally someone who bought into the ETH presale is a mega crypto bull and keeps a large percentage of their net worth in crypto. It's trivial for them to support artists by buying their artwork for a minuscule fraction of the money they've made. What sounds like "buying a .jpg for thousands of dollars" to someone not in this world, is more like the crypto equivalent of tipping a live streamer a bit on twitch.
  - throwaway744678 6y ago
    I don't understand it either, but they actually pay for a certificate of ownership of a .jpg or .gif, whatever this means.

mnskym 6y ago

People are making money and I'm mad about it: the post

cbozeman 6y ago
Thank you for the laugh this morning.
- mnskym 6y ago
  You're welcome ;) I don't get HN sometimes, people seem to have a stick up their ass and always way too serious in comments
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    Every time I read a thread on Bitcoin / cryptocurrencies, its filled with assmad people who talk about how it destroys the environment, solves a problem no one has/had (moving $50 million for $1.00 in under an hour is, I guess, admittedly a problem very few people have), sucks up their precious GPUs that they would be using to train a deep learning model that identifies the most handsome pigeons in Central Park, etc. so forth. I always enjoy the few people like yourself who call it like it actually is.

Tenoke 6y ago

Despite acknowledging PoS, the author keeps hammering on PoW. Their actual problem is with PoW and has little to do with NFTs. If you are worried about the environmental impact (which for 1 minting is fairly small) just use the PoS options available today and rant about ETH generally using PoW instead.

lmm 6y ago
> which for 1 minting is fairly small The article makes specific claims to the contrary > just use the PoS options available today Does PoS actually work today? AFAICS it's vaporware.
- lima 6y ago
  > Does PoS actually work today? AFAICS it's vaporware. Yes. PoS chains using real practical byzantine fault tolerance like Cosmos Hub, using Tendermint consensus, have been running since 2018.
- Tenoke 6y ago
  >The article makes specific claims to the contrary Which are unsubstantiated. One minting is basically one (largish) transaction. Transactions arent quite that expensive, it costs maybe $50-100 and you definitely don't put months of electricity to earn that little as a miner. I don't have the numbers but it doesn't check out. >Does PoS actually work today? AFAICS it's vaporware. Yes, it's worked for a while.
kevingadd 6y ago
I think until NFTs can actually be minted and distributed via PoS, PoS doesn't matter. It's been "coming soon" for ages. I eagerly await Ethereum's transition to PoS but today when you sell crypto art it's PoW.
- Tenoke 6y ago
  >I think until NFTs can actually be minted and distributed via PoS, PoS doesn't matter. It's been "coming soon" for ages It's been coming soon on ETH. Again, you can use PoS options today outside of ETH. Tezos is a popular one, and even the biggest ETH marketplace (opensea) is adding Tezos as an option right now.

wayoutthere 6y ago

I’ve come full circle on crypto. Crypto is an example of capitalism eating itself. When the value of crypto is high, large amounts of economic output are funneled into crypto at the expense of other opportunities. NVidia expects supply shortages of its newest line of video cards (released in December and going for $1500+ on eBay from an MSRP of $700) to extend into 2022. Oh yeah, and this happens every time a new generation of chips is released. Hope you didn’t need any to train ML models.

cbozeman 6y ago
The "problem" is with the people who missed out on Bitcoin and can't compete with Chinese miners. I started out mining BTC on a Core2Duo laptop from 2006, in 2010. I upgraded to a Butterfly Labs Jalapeno miner. Then I started to realize Chinese miners were soaking up the mining equipment and many of them were getting industrial power rates. Then people who couldn't afford / acquire BTC ASIC miners made more ridiculous alt-coins that they could mine with GPUs. Cryptocurrency isn't the problem, people butthurt about missing out and wanting to make their own coin are the problem.
- wayoutthere 6y ago
  The problem is the industrial Chinese miners. These companies soak up enormous amounts of resources while producing... nothing. It’s horrible for the environment, and it’s a net drain on the economy for what I believe to be ephemeral value largely driven by low interest rates and a lack of high-growth investment options.
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    > what I believe to be ephemeral value largely driven by low interest rates This is part of the story, the other part would be central banks printing money nonstop, or in common parlance, "money printer go brrr". Bitcoin can only exist in a post-2008-financial-crash world. Prior to that, there was no reason to consider anything other than the US Dollar. Bitcoin, however, is a solution to only one part of an overarching problem, or at least this is what I think: financial services need to be reigned back in if we have any hope as a species of surviving. Continued worldwide crashes caused by financiers engaging in riskier and riskier behavior in the name of enormous profits will eventually result in a war when one of the nations on the "losing end" decides they've had enough.

asdev 6y ago

people don't realize we will soon be able to harvest the heat from PoW into renewable energy. Research is being done on thermoelectric materials. Yelling about the environmental impact is a cop out, no technology started out its life as performant, sustainable and carbon neutral.

kevingadd 6y ago
A future where the environmental impact of PoW is minimized sounds like a great future. That future does nothing to slow the ongoing climate crisis today and it does nothing for the vulnerable people in coastal areas, hot climates, etc tomorrow. If we were talking about 'NFTs once PoW is not environmentally hazardous' that would be great, but we're talking about NFTs today.
- asdev 6y ago
  Bitcoin mining is low on the list in terms of problems that need fixing in order solve climate crisis today. Bitcoin haters just love to harp on that fact.
deleted 6y ago
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teterphiel 6y ago

The environmental issues with crypto need no more solving than the environmental issues associated mining gold (much worse), producing aluminum, and in a wider sense humans doing things on earth need solving --- which is not to say that they don't, but to single out bitcoin is disingenuous, uninformed, or just plain neophobic.

kevingadd 6y ago
The article addresses this. In summary: both things are bad, but it would be nice to not make them worse. Expanding the power spent mining crypto makes them worse, with how things are right now at least. Also, NFTs are generally based on Ethereum, not Bitcoin. Did you read the article?
jsiepkes 6y ago
Gold, bauxite, etc. are all used to produce things with an application such electronics. Name a single thing we produce with Bitcoin.
- teterphiel 6y ago
  and these applications give people a fuzzy warm feeling that lasts for about a month before it recedes and attention shifts elsewhere. I have it on good authority that owning bitcoin gives people a very similar kind of feeling and there is nothing wrong with that. humans doing human things. of course now there's plenty of arbiters of what constitutes proper warm fuzziness, and apparently a new BMW made from aluminium and steel is AAA+, but buying 0.1 of a bitcoin is not.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - akdor1154 6y ago
    The environmental cost of the beemer is not linked to its dollar value. As tfa demonstrates, this is not true of the 0.1 bitcoin.

Hendrikto 6y ago

> the difficultly of mining blocks in the blockchain is designed to increase over time. This is because as the network grows, the relative rate of new coins mined stays stable (for Bitcoin, about 1 coin is mined every 10 minutes). This is not correct. About 1 block is mined every 10 minutes, while block rewards decrease over time. The one block per 10 minutes is also what is kept stable, and the reason mining difficulty increases over time. There is nothing in BTC mandating the difficulty to increase, and indeed it does decrease sometimes.

incrudible 6y ago

Is there any evidence that cryptocurrency actually had a significant impact on real CO2 emissions? The idea that raising energy usage somewhere commensurately increases emissions based on the "energy mix" that predated that extra usage is an oversimplification. Most of the mining happening in China, for instance, is happening near non-CO2 emitting plants (hydropower, wind) where energy is virtually free most of the time. The increased demand for energy that is otherwise of little value may in fact be financing a rollout for renewable energy. The primary problem with renewables like wind power today is not production capacity, it is storage. It stands to reason that at least some mining temporarily leads to increased CO2 emissions due to revenue exceeding the cost of fossil fuels. However, this only happens in the short term, because of difficulty adjusting revenue to the point where only the very cheapest energy sources remain competitive, and these are not fossil fuels. Furthermore, the increased demand for more efficient semiconductors finances the R&D required to lower the power usage of all computing into the indefinite future.

kevingadd 6y ago
The post addresses this question in detail. In brief summary, extracting "green" energy from the grid (most mining occurs on the grid) means that the energy available on the grid is more likely to be from CO2-generating sources. The amount of demand for that grid power is partially non-negotiable (things like street lamps, life support equipment in hospitals, etc) and partially negotiable (if the cost goes up enough people might stop using tv or indoor lighting, I guess?), but ultimately if demand spikes there will just be more coal and gas getting burned to provide power on the grid. Also, the green power generation requires the manufacturing and distribution of things like solar panels, which is not currently CO2-neutral and has other environmental impacts. There are also theoretical (if not real) limits to how much you can actually expand grid capacity. Mining already even in conservative estimates consumes a lot of power, and unless PoS is fully rolled out it will continue to consume more and more, which will put increasing strain on local power grids.
- lmm 6y ago
  > (most mining occurs on the grid) The post you were replying to is disagreeing with this. Power made available for extremely low cost next door to a hydroelectric dam etc. might be technically "on the grid" in that there is some connection between that town and the rest of the grid, but if the long-distance transmission lines are already at maximum capacity (which is usually the case, otherwise power wouldn't be any cheaper in those towns than anywhere else) then that surplus power is de facto not available to the rest of the grid.

PebblesRox 6y ago

"I’m sure you’re seeing the problem here- there is not a schema that doesn’t reward those who already are already wealthy, who are already bought in, who already have excess capital or access to outsized computational power. Almost universally they grant power to the already powerful." Now I'm imagining a crypto currency that just gets awarded randomly to any person on the planet in a world-wide lottery. Or it could get distributed evenly like UBI to everyone.

felipeccastro 6y ago
I like this crypto UBI idea! But without the early movers incentive to increase the coin value, how could that work?
- sofetch 6y ago
  > But without the early movers incentive to increase the coin value, how could that work? Are you seriously asking how having the value distributed out to a large number of people could ever have utility without oligarchs to "set the value" to some "proper" value?
  - felipeccastro 6y ago
    I’m seriously asking for new ideas. This space is new and free to rethink incentives in all sorts of ways, it doesn’t need to repeat the same mistakes as fiat.
  - Ensorceled 6y ago
    Yes. If we split all the bitcoins up into 7.8 billion pieces and distributed them to everyone on the planet ... what do you think bitcoins would suddenly be worth? Would each slice still be worth ~$100 or would the market simply collapse?
  - jordan_curve 6y ago
    That seems like a legitimate question although you’ve rephrased it somewhat uncharitably.

lmm 6y ago

> Digital files don’t have that much going for them. They store monumentally less information than say, a piece of paper- which contains the artwork on it as well as inscribed histories of hand, pen, ink, pulp, forest- a dense connected materiality that unfolds forever. A digital file is a pauper in comparison. A file breaks down to requisite ones and zeros well before one can reach the atomic composition of the materials in a physical drawing. > Digital files also require power to access and maintain, and are incredibly unstable over time as new operating systems, plugins and standards render things unviewable- often within a decade. They are also vulnerable to bitrot and physical degradation of storage media- the stable shelf life of a CD-ROM, for instance, is less than 20 years. This is pretty much nonsense. The actual artwork on a piece of paper will typically be lower fidelity than a digital version of it, and paper degrades faster than CD-roms. I've dug out a CD full of photos that spent 10 years in a damp attic, and the photos are as good as the day they were taken - try that with photos printed on physical paper. Furthemore, while an NFT is by design not copyable in some sense, it's certainly not vulnerable to degradation of physical media.

kevingadd 6y ago
There are books printed on paper that have survived dozens if not hundreds of years under the correct archival conditions. We do not currently have a means to do the equivalent with CDs. Just ask the people working at places like the Internet Archive.
averynicepen 6y ago
Both sides of this have pretty good counterexamples. There's an experimental way to encode data on crystals (using lasers, I recall?) that last a very very long time. The more feasible example though would be archival tapes used in long term cold storage, that also do quite well. For physical medium, given the right storage conditions, you can store film for quite a while, and that technically has infinite resolution in comparison to a digital copy.
at_ 6y ago
>The actual artwork on a piece of paper will typically be lower fidelity than a digital version of it, and paper degrades faster than CD-roms. I think the post does a nice job of countering this; a physical object will always contain much more information (in the Shannonian sense) than any digital alternative could, and that goes far beyond things like DPI.

eru 6y ago

Slightly off-topic, or perhaps more general. The solution to proof of work using too much energy is not proof of work. It's fractional reserve bitcoins / ethereum / etc. To explain: For game theoretic / economic reasons, people will spend as much effort mining as there are mining rewards to be claimed. If move to a system that doesn't hand out mining rewards, you still have to hand out the coins on some basis. So people will do the activity of that basis as much as there are rewards. I will talk about bitcoin for simplicity. It behaves very much like gold in a lot of respects. If bitcoin sees wider adoption as cash, that means it will have to support a larger amount of spending in real terms and also a larger demand for real balances held in 'cash'. Since the total nominal amount of bitcoins is fixed, you can only get the latter via an increase in the real value of each bitcoin. But, here's the solution: gold was (and is) also hard to mine, but even when gold was money, you didn't actually need physical gold coins to serve most of your cash needs. Bank notes and 'checkable' deposits fill this very need: they allow to expand the effective money supply without needing to mine more gold. The same will work for bitcoin. (Of course, only that the banknotes will be electronic, of course.) We already see some signs of that eg in bitcoin futures. The only way to get investment exposure to bitcoin used to be buying physical bitcoins. But nowadays you can buy (and roll over) bitcoin futures instead. Of course, every future needs a counter party that's taking the opposite side of that exposure. If you think about it, that's pretty much the same thing that banks do. Selling futures is very similar to offering time deposits: With a time deposit, the bank incurs an obligation to pay a certain amount of money later. They could hedge that obligation by just holding on to physical money, but more typically, they invest in assets like bonds and loans, and hope to be able to exchange them for money when they have to pay back the time deposit. That's basically the same economic exposure as being short a bitcoin future and going long a bond future. To end the long rant, even if your base currency is gold or bitcoin, you can support lots more money than that.

niahmiah 6y ago

What a pile of horseshit. This article had as much ecological impact as whatever he in whining about.

kevingadd 6y ago
What is your basis for the ecological impact of this article? A static html file can be served to thousands of users by a single ARM-based PC in a datacenter or on a home connection, probably drawing less than 100W if not less than 20W.

eoo 6y ago

TL;DR: Ethereum uses a lot of energy, we shouldn't use it for anything non essential because it wastes energy. Contrary to the article title, 90% of the arguments exposed are just rehashing why energy waste os bad, and why we shouldn't make use of it for NFTs. 10% of the article ("the many other reasons") is a critique of the art circuit and imho, a little ranty about how hard it is to get rich from art. The actually interesting part of the article is at the end, but its just an enumeration of the ways in which cryptoart world: * Cryptoart creates artificial scarcity for digital objects, creating an “original” which can be owned * Cryptoart recreates the some of the worst aspects of existing art markets * Cryptoart offers no intellectual property protection and there is no regulatory structure in place to keep copyrighted materials from being minted into and sold as NFTs * Cryptoart smart contracts offer no legal protection, and any talk of contracts baked into the NFT “requiring resales to cut in the artist” or “compensate gallery workers” depend entirely on the goodwill of the purchaser. The rest 4500 words are a repetition of how bad it is to waste energy, woth a note at the end about how the author was "never as bored with a subject to write 5000 words about it", which to me is pretty passionate. edit: formatting

Ensorceled 6y ago
That's a pretty long TL;DR ...
- eoo 6y ago
  It's a pretty long article

qez 6y ago

So this is just the author's personal gripes? "proof of state is against social justice," and "I like the non-rivalry of Internet art." No one if forcing you to use crypto art. > Cryptoart lets a few artist early adopters get rich from a system made to reward investors, not artists. This is true in the same way as Da Vinci pieces are expensive because Da Vinci was an "early adopter" (one of the first great artists)

kevingadd 6y ago
If you read the title of the article or some of the opening paragraphs, you will see that it is intended to answer common questions from people who are less familiar with crypto or NFTs. This is explicitly not an issue of "someone is forcing you to use crypto art." Though you could certainly ask whether you are being forced to tolerate the environmental impacts of crypto art through things like rising temperatures, that's hard to prove trivially (the article tries)
Ensorceled 6y ago
No one is forcing me to burn coal or hunt rhinos to extinction but I'm against both of those things too.

olalonde 6y ago

We all have different opinions on what activities we consider "wasteful". Some people see value in cryptocurrencies while others don't. What we really need is to price externalities (e.g. carbon emissions) and let the market decide. Or we could keep posting 20 articles a day that bash about cryptocurrencies being bad for the environment.

throwaway744678 6y ago
"We" don't "need" to do anything, and are very much allowed to write all the blog posts "we" like. Promoters of the tech actually need to price externalities and whatever to improve it, if they want us to use it.

willtemperley 6y ago

These arguments are always pointless, as there is nothing that can be done about it, short of a global ban on computers and the internet. Why not ask the question: "how can we incentivise usage of clean over dirty energy?". How is it the fault of Bitcoin that someone realised burning brown coal to create hashes is economically viable? That's a failure of the state, not the software.

gitrog 6y ago
Why is that a failure of the state? Which state?
- willtemperley 6y ago
  Whichever state or jurisdiction the power station burning coal is based in.
  - willtemperley 6y ago
    Ah sorry lots of Americans here, in global English we use "state" to mean a sovereign state, not an arbitrary subdivision like Delaware
    - gitrog 6y ago
      No I took you to mean "country" as I'm also not American, I just don't understand how you expect governments to foresee and restrict every possible new technology that affects energy consumption to such a large degree. I also think that these kind of insights are what would be needed for states to act on technologies that pose these threats, though I believe if regulation is applied there will be a lot, and I mean a lot, of backlash.
      - willtemperley 6y ago
        All I'm arguing is that governments can stop carbon being burned on their soil but they cannot stop PoW existing. So let's focus on the former.

pjfin123 6y ago

> Ethereum “has been moving” to proof of stake for almost as long as it has existed. It has been so long that “Eth 2.0 PoS Coming Soon!” is something of a running joke. Ethereum seems to very much be in the process is switching to proof of stake but we should ignore that because of the author's gut feeling it's a "joke"?

PebblesRox 6y ago

"Fundamentally, cryptocurrency AND cryptoart are valuable because they burn energy." I think a better way to put this would be to say that cryptocurrency and cryptoart cannot maintain value without maintaining scarcity, which they do by burning energy. The value doesn't come from the energy burning in itself, but in the current NFT system, that energy burn is a necessary component to preserve value. An attempt to change this would require finding a different way to produce scarcity.

blockyhead 6y ago

The greatest irony here is that protection against socialist ideologues like the author of this article is one of the main motivations for using cryptocurrencies. Maybe if they would fix their ideology, people wouldn't have to resort to decentralized solutions. As for the actual content, I plainly don't trust the calculations of the anti-crypto crowd. And while I also had lost faith in Proof of Stakes ever making it into Ethereum (unfortunately also selling all my Ethereum when I gave up on them), they have now activated the PoS chain and run it in parallel to PoW, with the goal to switch completely. The stuff about "social justice" is also nonsense, at least with respect to mining in PoS: it is not that much Eth you need to participate, and if you don't want to invest as much, you can join a mining pool. Everybody can participate, if they want to. It is also not "unjust" if people who invest (or stake) more receive higher rewards. The opposite would be unjust.

gitrog 6y ago
How is it the fault of an ideology that decentralised solutions are required? Is there something inherent in Socialist ideology that you can point me to?
- blockyhead 6y ago
  Socialists want to create a government that controls every detail of the citizens lives, and ensures they can not accumulate any wealth. That is a centralized threat to people's wealth.
  - gitrog 6y ago
    That is definitely not what "Socialists" want. I apologise on behalf of any Socialist that gave you that impression.
    - blockyhead 6y ago
      Of course it is. Name any socialist policy that does not work towards that goal. Any policy that is not a constraint on freedom. The motivating force behind socialism is envy. Nobody is allowed to have something that somebody else doesn't have. Good intentions (like free healthcare or basic income or rent controls) don't prevent the inevitable outcome. Ultimately Socialism wants to do with individual property and have everybody work for the common good, not for their personal gain. It is extremely anti-freedom, and of course anti-wealth.

G3rn0ti 6y ago

From the article > a financial network that uses more energy than Argentina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici... Just for context: Argentina used about 3% of the energy consumed by the US alone in 2018. And only a fraction of that amount consumed by G8 in total. However, the number does not tell us how this energy was produced and, hence, can not provide an insight into the environmental impact of Cryptos. If it came mostly from renewable sources, the carbon footprint of Bitcoin and other cryptos would be quite reasonable, I believe.

PebblesRox 6y ago

"But climate justice must mean giving leadership and power to those who will bear the worst effects of climate catastrophe...." I guess this claim depends on the definition of "climate justice." But if we broaden that "climate fixing" (which is how I initially took it, before going back to the original quote and noticing the word justice), what has to happen is that those in power need to care about the problem and know what to do to fix it. This can happen by putting power into the hands of those who care and know what to do and it can happen by changing the goals and know-how of those who currently have power. Neither option is easy!

fabiofzero 6y ago

Whenever anyone brings the CO2 cost of blockchain on HackerNews the comment section becomes a mental gymnastics competition filled with techbro clones of Ben Shapiro.

actuallyrizzn 6y ago

This is incorrect anti crypto propaganda