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Regardless of what you think of NFTs, you have to recognize that the author's only counterargument against NFTs is that they're bad for the "rest of us" due to

by ajiang 6y ago

Regardless of what you think of NFTs, you have to recognize that the author's only counterargument against NFTs is that they're bad for the "rest of us" due to externalities that everyone else has to pay. The "rest of us" don't pay for the electricity use. The ETH miners are paying for it directly. And creators and buyers are paying for it indirectly through ETH usage. It isn't an externality. That's like saying the physical art world shouldn't exist because it uses physical real estate, electricity, and raw materials to be made on -- and the rest of us pay for those things. Is it a good use of electricity? Maybe, maybe not. That's for people to decide individually, unless we'd want to go down the moral rabbit hole of judging every single use of electricity.

bagels 6y ago
The externality of the electricity use is the pollution, and increased prices due to demand.
- ajiang 6y ago
  That's an argument for a different question, which is "should we allow people to waste electricity if they pay for it?". If your answer is that we should regulate what people are allowed to use electricity for, then we'll need to change the laws in this country. It is very difficult to start being the moral judge for every single use of electricity. Instead, we let the free market decide in most situations. And when there are true externalities (meaning costs that borne by the broader population, e.g. car emissions) we do impose regulations to reduce those externalities.
  - drdeca 6y ago
    right, we should just tax carbon emissions by just enough to pay for removing those emissions, and then use said taxes to remove said emissions.
chaostheory 6y ago
Isn’t his argument moot due to ethereum’s eventual transition to proof of stake
- arcticbull 6y ago
  I’m sure Vitalik will deliver we just have to wait (skeleton meme). That is to say I’ll believe it when I see it.
  - chaostheory 6y ago
    What hasn't he delivered on? Does he have any track record of delivering what's been promised? If I recall correctly, proof of stake already started to roll out this year.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      To date? A scalable payment network with low transaction fees and a small environmental footprint.
      - chaostheory 6y ago
        That’s a bit disingenuous. Ethereum isn’t as static as bitcoin; they’ve been making steady progress. Proof of stake also has started rolling out already
        arcticbull 6y ago
        The question as I interpreted it is "what has he not yet delivered on" - not "what has he promised to deliver on and appears to be making progress on, and has started rolling out, but is not yet broadly available" :)
        chaostheory 6y ago
        Yes, let's rely on word play to make it seem that ethereum isn't being actively upgraded as we speak ;) Kidding aside, I would think that most people understand "what has he not yet delivered on" as "he's completely broken his promise and he's no longer working on it". I didn't have a "yet" in that sentence.
sollewitt 6y ago
"This is bad because of externalities, the externalities are big and will grow" is exactly why we don't have general nuclear power, saying it's the only argument doesn't make it a weak argument.
- ajiang 6y ago
  When the cost is directly paid by the actor, it isn't an externality. It is the literal opposite of what externality means.
  - drdeca 6y ago
    carbon emissions aren't currently paid for by the person paying for and using the electricity?
  - detaro 6y ago
    And pollution is usually not, or only partially, paid for by neither the energy producer nor the consumer. Thus it's an externality.
purple_ferret 6y ago
> you have to recognize that the author's only counterargument against NFTs is that they're bad for the "rest of us No, I think he makes a valid point that they're intentionally misleading and a scheme to sucker someone out of money. Let's look at Jack Dorsey's 'minted' first tweet.[0] This is in no way gives to exclusivity to 'owning' this tweet. It literally is just 'owning' the rights to 'Valuable's' NFT of this tweet (if they even are committing, legally, to never create another NFT of it). There are no limit of companies that can do exactly what they are doing and 'selling' this tweet in the same way, nor is Jack Dorsey committing never to accept those 'sales'. To me, it seems like an outright scam that anybody but Twitter is trying to do this. [0]https://v.cent.co/tweet/20 https://v.cent.co/tweet/20
- exporectomy 6y ago
  Same for art though. You don't own a copyright. You own only the bragging right as well as the useless physical canvas and paint. All artful beauty it has can be copied much more cheaply than the original painting's price.
Hammershaft 6y ago
Until the price of carbon is accounted for in the price of electricity, using ridiculous amounts of electricity for such trivial uses is externalizing the costs of these transactions onto all of us. We are facing a climate crisis that is projected to accelerate a mass extinction crisis and create tens of millions of displaced refugees and yet we are spending 200 KgCO2 of wasted compute on a 'digital ownership token' on this: http://cryptoart.wtf/#https://superrare.co/artwork-v2/the-fourth-estate-alien-supremacy-15007 http://cryptoart.wtf/#https://superrare.co/artwork-v2/the-fo...
- worik 6y ago
  Not sure I care about the price. How much for the whole world?
jrmg 6y ago
The "rest of us" don't pay for the electricity use. The ETH miners are paying for it directly. And creators and buyers are paying for it indirectly through ETH usage. It isn't an externality. That's like saying the physical art world shouldn't exist because it uses physical real estate, electricity, and raw materials to be made on -- and the rest of us pay for those things. Negative environmental consequences with costs imposed upon society are literally externalities. All the things you list are textbook examples.
megameter 6y ago
The electricity argument loses weight when you look at the world allocation of GPUs. Although mining has cut into supply, they're also being used for gaming, workstation, and cloud compute tasks. One way or another all of that chip supply would be sold, and then it is a case of benchmarking the social value, load and efficiency of the different uses to some utilitarian optimum. Much easier to cut off the framing early and declare "all crypto is bad and has no value", which is what the contra side is leaning towards. It's easily embraced by authoritarian-left ideologues, since their inclination is to reject market solutions anyway. My suspicion is that we'll all be surprised in eighteen months. The "boom" will be gone, but an unalterable trend will have taken hold regardless, and the platforms will have largely moved on to proof of stake, closing the environmental argument. The thing of cryptocurrency is that at the end of the day, all you have is a file of a few hundred gigabytes that somehow represents hundreds of billions of dollars of market value. That value means that an absolutely huge number of eyeballs are scrutinizing it, looking for a way to protect their investment. They can't "turn off" the system and make sweeping changes. The hypotheses of anything-goes "assassination markets" have not panned out - crypto has become a sector with a civic outlook.
- distances 6y ago
  > One way or another all of that chip supply would be sold, and then it is a case of benchmarking the social value, load and efficiency of the different uses to some utilitarian optimum. I disagree. Cryptomining created a new market that increased the demand. There's no reason to assume the same numbers of GPUs with the same utilisation rate would be in use if we didn't have crypto. Thus, it does have direct environmental consequences. Not all of that electricity use is a total waste: a friend of mine uses part of his mining heat to warm up the apartment in the winter. It's an expensive heater though.
mattigames 6y ago
>The "rest of us" don't pay for the electricity use; No but the rest of are paying it with the overheating of the planet which is way way worse
3131s 6y ago
You should try looking up what an "externality" is again, because this is almost a canonical example of one.

by ajiang 6y ago

bagels 6y ago

The externality of the electricity use is the pollution, and increased prices due to demand.

ajiang 6y ago
That's an argument for a different question, which is "should we allow people to waste electricity if they pay for it?". If your answer is that we should regulate what people are allowed to use electricity for, then we'll need to change the laws in this country. It is very difficult to start being the moral judge for every single use of electricity. Instead, we let the free market decide in most situations. And when there are true externalities (meaning costs that borne by the broader population, e.g. car emissions) we do impose regulations to reduce those externalities.
- drdeca 6y ago
  right, we should just tax carbon emissions by just enough to pay for removing those emissions, and then use said taxes to remove said emissions.

chaostheory 6y ago

Isn’t his argument moot due to ethereum’s eventual transition to proof of stake

arcticbull 6y ago
I’m sure Vitalik will deliver we just have to wait (skeleton meme). That is to say I’ll believe it when I see it.
- chaostheory 6y ago
  What hasn't he delivered on? Does he have any track record of delivering what's been promised? If I recall correctly, proof of stake already started to roll out this year.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    To date? A scalable payment network with low transaction fees and a small environmental footprint.
    - chaostheory 6y ago
      That’s a bit disingenuous. Ethereum isn’t as static as bitcoin; they’ve been making steady progress. Proof of stake also has started rolling out already
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        The question as I interpreted it is "what has he not yet delivered on" - not "what has he promised to deliver on and appears to be making progress on, and has started rolling out, but is not yet broadly available" :)
        chaostheory 6y ago
        Yes, let's rely on word play to make it seem that ethereum isn't being actively upgraded as we speak ;) Kidding aside, I would think that most people understand "what has he not yet delivered on" as "he's completely broken his promise and he's no longer working on it". I didn't have a "yet" in that sentence.

sollewitt 6y ago

"This is bad because of externalities, the externalities are big and will grow" is exactly why we don't have general nuclear power, saying it's the only argument doesn't make it a weak argument.

ajiang 6y ago
When the cost is directly paid by the actor, it isn't an externality. It is the literal opposite of what externality means.
- drdeca 6y ago
  carbon emissions aren't currently paid for by the person paying for and using the electricity?
- detaro 6y ago
  And pollution is usually not, or only partially, paid for by neither the energy producer nor the consumer. Thus it's an externality.

purple_ferret 6y ago

> you have to recognize that the author's only counterargument against NFTs is that they're bad for the "rest of us No, I think he makes a valid point that they're intentionally misleading and a scheme to sucker someone out of money. Let's look at Jack Dorsey's 'minted' first tweet.[0] This is in no way gives to exclusivity to 'owning' this tweet. It literally is just 'owning' the rights to 'Valuable's' NFT of this tweet (if they even are committing, legally, to never create another NFT of it). There are no limit of companies that can do exactly what they are doing and 'selling' this tweet in the same way, nor is Jack Dorsey committing never to accept those 'sales'. To me, it seems like an outright scam that anybody but Twitter is trying to do this. [0]https://v.cent.co/tweet/20 https://v.cent.co/tweet/20

exporectomy 6y ago
Same for art though. You don't own a copyright. You own only the bragging right as well as the useless physical canvas and paint. All artful beauty it has can be copied much more cheaply than the original painting's price.

Hammershaft 6y ago

Until the price of carbon is accounted for in the price of electricity, using ridiculous amounts of electricity for such trivial uses is externalizing the costs of these transactions onto all of us. We are facing a climate crisis that is projected to accelerate a mass extinction crisis and create tens of millions of displaced refugees and yet we are spending 200 KgCO2 of wasted compute on a 'digital ownership token' on this: http://cryptoart.wtf/#https://superrare.co/artwork-v2/the-fourth-estate-alien-supremacy-15007 http://cryptoart.wtf/#https://superrare.co/artwork-v2/the-fo...

worik 6y ago
Not sure I care about the price. How much for the whole world?

jrmg 6y ago

The "rest of us" don't pay for the electricity use. The ETH miners are paying for it directly. And creators and buyers are paying for it indirectly through ETH usage. It isn't an externality. That's like saying the physical art world shouldn't exist because it uses physical real estate, electricity, and raw materials to be made on -- and the rest of us pay for those things. Negative environmental consequences with costs imposed upon society are literally externalities. All the things you list are textbook examples.

megameter 6y ago

The electricity argument loses weight when you look at the world allocation of GPUs. Although mining has cut into supply, they're also being used for gaming, workstation, and cloud compute tasks. One way or another all of that chip supply would be sold, and then it is a case of benchmarking the social value, load and efficiency of the different uses to some utilitarian optimum. Much easier to cut off the framing early and declare "all crypto is bad and has no value", which is what the contra side is leaning towards. It's easily embraced by authoritarian-left ideologues, since their inclination is to reject market solutions anyway. My suspicion is that we'll all be surprised in eighteen months. The "boom" will be gone, but an unalterable trend will have taken hold regardless, and the platforms will have largely moved on to proof of stake, closing the environmental argument. The thing of cryptocurrency is that at the end of the day, all you have is a file of a few hundred gigabytes that somehow represents hundreds of billions of dollars of market value. That value means that an absolutely huge number of eyeballs are scrutinizing it, looking for a way to protect their investment. They can't "turn off" the system and make sweeping changes. The hypotheses of anything-goes "assassination markets" have not panned out - crypto has become a sector with a civic outlook.

distances 6y ago
> One way or another all of that chip supply would be sold, and then it is a case of benchmarking the social value, load and efficiency of the different uses to some utilitarian optimum. I disagree. Cryptomining created a new market that increased the demand. There's no reason to assume the same numbers of GPUs with the same utilisation rate would be in use if we didn't have crypto. Thus, it does have direct environmental consequences. Not all of that electricity use is a total waste: a friend of mine uses part of his mining heat to warm up the apartment in the winter. It's an expensive heater though.

mattigames 6y ago

>The "rest of us" don't pay for the electricity use; No but the rest of are paying it with the overheating of the planet which is way way worse

3131s 6y ago

You should try looking up what an "externality" is again, because this is almost a canonical example of one.