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> (Leaving aside the carbon emissions - let's assume everyone finally switches to Proof of Stake) I don't know how you get to defend something when you're side

> (Leaving aside the carbon emissions - let's assume everyone finally switches to Proof of Stake) I don't know how you get to defend something when you're sidestepping the biggest problem with NFTs. I'm fine with stupid and pointless things as long as your stupid and pointless things don't wreck the environment. If someone decides to poison the local water supply because it's an "art project" they still poisoned the fucking water supply.

andybak 6y ago
Well - Proof of Stake NFTs are already here: https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/ https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/ So all I'm doing is hoping everyone uses these instead.
- dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
  Thanks I've been looking for a PoS blockchain in production. Will check this out. Do you know any others? I really enjoy NFTs conceptually, much more than crypto in general actually, and I really don't get a lot of the hate. If you remove the emissions aspect (which is the non-starter for me), I think it's so cool that there is a way to create scarcity in the digital world, even if that scarcity is totally "meaningless." Yes, there are some goods with inherent value: food, shelter, heat sources. But NFTs are far from the first type of asset that has no inherent value, and that includes both the cyber and real worlds. Humans like to curate and collect, and NFTs are just an expression of that drive. What I wonder if why NFTs suddenly took off now. I remember hearing about them years ago.
  - dgellow 6y ago
    > I've been looking for a PoS blockchain in production Tezos, Cardano, Algorand just to mention a few of them. Example of creating an NFTs using Algorand: https://developer.algorand.org/tutorials/create-and-manage-non-fungible-asa-command-line-using-goal/ https://developer.algorand.org/tutorials/create-and-manage-n...
  - incrudible 6y ago
    Cardano is a production proof-of-stake blockchain. It has the fifth-largest market cap. However, Ethereum has virtually monopolized the DeFi space. It is supposed to move to PoS, especially considering that transaction fees are insanely high due to recent demand.
    - bathory 6y ago
      You can't even run a hello world on cardano yet. but it has that market cap, with the expectancy that all users who buy in now will become super rich soon (Tm)
  - jebeng 6y ago
    It's weird for me to read HN and see people speak of PoS as some kind of new cutting edge technology. Maybe some of the issues with it may or have may not been solved but it is so damn old now that it's 2021. Like the first live real money implementation of a PoS chain was done by SunnyKing back in like...I want to say 2012, but maybe 2013. SunnyKing was the same guy who went on to make the somewhat interesting PoW function via finding largest prime numbers(arguably somewhat useful PoW, certainly more than double SHA-256), Primecoin. Then in a larger scale there was NXT which was like 2013-2014ish, full PoS. I don't care about the merits of these particular chains, but PoS was one of the earliest innovations in blockchain tech. The lineage was roughly something like: 0. All the centralised pre-Bitcoin cypherpunk digital currency stuff from the mailing list like Bitgold, Chaumian ecash whatever. 1. Bitcoin 2. Namecoin(decentralized DNS) 3. Feathercoin/Litecoin(Bitcoin with 0.25 block target time and 4x total coins), arguably shouldn't be on the list for 'innovation' but Litecoin is successful(at some point they changed the PoW work function to scrypt so I guess it counts, there were other scam coins around this time too doing the same thing. So I don't necessarily mean Litecoin was 'third place' overall, just that it ended up rising from the pile of shit). 4. Different forms of PoW functions. ie Litecoin doing scrypt so people could still use their ATI Radeon 4xxx to mine and not order ASICs from shady companies), Cryptonight stuff maybe(lies about it being 'developed on the darknet for years and being related that cicada thing' before and such, hard to make an accurate timeline for that one(ended up forked off as Monero, possibly post-PoS tech)). 5. PoS, 2012-2014ish. Probably didn't come before different PoW functions but it might have switched with #4's place, hard to remember the exact timelines, but people were trolling and making fun of PoS ever since it was theorized. Probably because a true fully realized PoS that is superior to PoW is a threat to the massive investments one must put behind PoW systems, which also becomes the root of their 'nothing at stake' arguments against PoS, which certainly had merit back then with early PoS implementations. I wonder if those truly got solved. This was all like 2014 at the latest. Very old stuff but crypto is full of sales snakes(not targeted at you at all) who try to sell other peoples old open source tech as new modern innovations. It's a familiar pattern. People sold Bitcoin as private and anonymous for years...like way too long. I'm imagining now there will be a point when PoS is 10+ years old and people will acting like it's the newest thing on the block still.
- krupan 6y ago
  Are we assuming that no energy will be used to acquire coins in order to stake?
risho 6y ago
nft's don't poison the environment in and of themselves. First of all they don't NEED to exist on a proof of work blockchain, and second whether or not you make or trade nft's people are still going to be mining bitcoin and ethereum. your criticism here is of proof of work, not nft's. please don't conflate the 2. there are plenty of reasons that nft's are silly, but proof of work isn't one of them.
- vvanders 6y ago
  Until NFTs move away from proof of work I'll continue to criticize them. It's like expecting good intentions and then being surprised when a few bad actors ruin things for the larger group. Tragedy of the commons is exactly why stuff like this should be called out, each and every single time.
  - andybak 6y ago
    Which is why I tried to limit my discussion to PoS. Which (I'll repeat myself here) already are being used for NFTs.
runeks 6y ago
> I'm fine with stupid and pointless things as long as your stupid and pointless things don't wreck the environment. I hang up decorative lights around Christmas time. Is that not okay with you, or do you not find it pointless?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- vvanders 6y ago
  If your Christmas lights used the same amount of electricity as the whole town? Maybe. Thankfully we have an amazing new technology called Light Emitting Diodes so we don't have to worry about that theoretical problem.
  - krupan 6y ago
    LEDs still use electricity. Are you in charge of setting the limit on how much use is acceptable?
- Twisell 6y ago
  I think in 1-2 generations people will look back and wonder about how dumb we were about our energy consumption regarding the environmental challenges we were facing. Most of ou current Christmas folklore is pretty pointless lights being a pretty recent invention when compared to christian religion timespan. Same as for Christmas trees, they were pretty much on point when everybody had a wood stove to throw them in after Christmas and warm the house. Pretty pointless nowaday when you live in a flat...
madrox 6y ago
Do you play video games, then? Because arguably it isn’t NFTs that consume power...it’s the GPUs. GPUs do way more than NFTs, and there is data that shows that gaming consumes way more than blockchain. If my mom is any indicator, many consider video games stupid and pointless. Value is in the eye of the beholder.
- hatboxreappoint 6y ago
  > there is data that shows that gaming consumes way more than blockchain Source?
  - andybak 6y ago
    If I had to bet I would probably bet that "all the gamers in the world" are using more power than "all the crypto miners in the world". I can't think of a way to immediately gather any evidence for this either way but it seems like a plausible position to take. (However - I think the value > utility chain is easier to argue for with gaming. I'm not making the same argument as the parent post.)
  - madrox 6y ago
    These are the sources I've used when I've gone looking, but it doesn't help that we don't actually do industry-by-industry energy consumption comparisons. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257768246_Electrici https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257768246_Electrici... - US energy consumption by video game consoles in the US alone was 16 TWh in 2010 [2] https://grist.org/article/video-games-consume-more-electrici https://grist.org/article/video-games-consume-more-electrici... - Globally, PC gaming (not console gaming) was estimated at 75 TWh in 2018
- mouldysammich 6y ago
  Maybe this is a the case, however there are, I would guess at least a billion people on earth who play games. there is nothing even close to that using blockchains. If blockchain energy usage is even vaguely in the range of games it can still be considered an enormous --possibly-- unnecessary usage of power
kvz 6y ago
Ethereum is switching over to proof of stake this year which will pretty much solve the environmental issue
- krupan 6y ago
  You seem to assume that very little energy will be spent to acquire coins for staking. If there is real interest in ether and stiff competition to stake (and there better be for proof of stake to work), I'm afraid that won't be the case.
  - solveit 6y ago
    At that point that's just energy spent on acquiring money though.
    - krupan 6y ago
      So that won't harm the environment, but bitcoin proof of work will?
      - solveit 6y ago
        It will harm the environment, but no less than the rest of our economy. There are two problems being conflated here. In basically all of society, people harm the environment in order to acquire resources. In proof of work, you go one step further and proceed to destroy the resources you just acquired. This is because destroying resources via reversing hashes is a costly signal that cannot be faked and is hence not susceptible to a Sybil attack. Proof of Stake doesn't have this problem. The mere act of owning a coin does not entail the destruction of value. In proof of stake, you just make money, probably harming the environment along the way as you do, and buy the coin. That's it. The resources you obtained are not destroyed, they are passed on to whoever you bought the coins from.
        krupan 6y ago
        In both proof of work and proof of stake people are doing work (using energy) in order to obtain money. In proof of work you work to obtain mining equipment and electricity and then use that to perform the work of securing the network (nothing is “destroyed”). You are then paid for doing that work. The more work you do relative to other miners, the more you will get paid. In proof of stake you work to obtain eth (for example) which then grants you the privilege to run validators. The more you stake, the more validating you can do. You are paid money for successfully validating, and charged money for failing to validate. You will need to do more work to replenish money spent on unsuccessful validation. Ultimately, the more work you do relative to other stakers, the more you will get paid. It’s going to be a little more difficult than it is for proof of work to measure how much total energy is used by proof of stake, but it still should be doable. Maybe it will be less than the energy used by proof of work, but maybe not.
brandonmenc 6y ago
> I don't know how you get to defend something when you're sidestepping the biggest problem with NFTs. Does crypto have a (significantly) larger carbon footprint than video games? Probably not. I think video games (and crypto) are pointless. ymmv.
- Symbiote 6y ago
  Per entertained / occupied (whatever) person, crypto has an orders-of-magnitude bigger footprint.

andybak 6y ago

Well - Proof of Stake NFTs are already here: https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/ https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/ So all I'm doing is hoping everyone uses these instead.

dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
Thanks I've been looking for a PoS blockchain in production. Will check this out. Do you know any others? I really enjoy NFTs conceptually, much more than crypto in general actually, and I really don't get a lot of the hate. If you remove the emissions aspect (which is the non-starter for me), I think it's so cool that there is a way to create scarcity in the digital world, even if that scarcity is totally "meaningless." Yes, there are some goods with inherent value: food, shelter, heat sources. But NFTs are far from the first type of asset that has no inherent value, and that includes both the cyber and real worlds. Humans like to curate and collect, and NFTs are just an expression of that drive. What I wonder if why NFTs suddenly took off now. I remember hearing about them years ago.
- dgellow 6y ago
  > I've been looking for a PoS blockchain in production Tezos, Cardano, Algorand just to mention a few of them. Example of creating an NFTs using Algorand: https://developer.algorand.org/tutorials/create-and-manage-non-fungible-asa-command-line-using-goal/ https://developer.algorand.org/tutorials/create-and-manage-n...
- incrudible 6y ago
  Cardano is a production proof-of-stake blockchain. It has the fifth-largest market cap. However, Ethereum has virtually monopolized the DeFi space. It is supposed to move to PoS, especially considering that transaction fees are insanely high due to recent demand.
  - bathory 6y ago
    You can't even run a hello world on cardano yet. but it has that market cap, with the expectancy that all users who buy in now will become super rich soon (Tm)
- jebeng 6y ago
  It's weird for me to read HN and see people speak of PoS as some kind of new cutting edge technology. Maybe some of the issues with it may or have may not been solved but it is so damn old now that it's 2021. Like the first live real money implementation of a PoS chain was done by SunnyKing back in like...I want to say 2012, but maybe 2013. SunnyKing was the same guy who went on to make the somewhat interesting PoW function via finding largest prime numbers(arguably somewhat useful PoW, certainly more than double SHA-256), Primecoin. Then in a larger scale there was NXT which was like 2013-2014ish, full PoS. I don't care about the merits of these particular chains, but PoS was one of the earliest innovations in blockchain tech. The lineage was roughly something like: 0. All the centralised pre-Bitcoin cypherpunk digital currency stuff from the mailing list like Bitgold, Chaumian ecash whatever. 1. Bitcoin 2. Namecoin(decentralized DNS) 3. Feathercoin/Litecoin(Bitcoin with 0.25 block target time and 4x total coins), arguably shouldn't be on the list for 'innovation' but Litecoin is successful(at some point they changed the PoW work function to scrypt so I guess it counts, there were other scam coins around this time too doing the same thing. So I don't necessarily mean Litecoin was 'third place' overall, just that it ended up rising from the pile of shit). 4. Different forms of PoW functions. ie Litecoin doing scrypt so people could still use their ATI Radeon 4xxx to mine and not order ASICs from shady companies), Cryptonight stuff maybe(lies about it being 'developed on the darknet for years and being related that cicada thing' before and such, hard to make an accurate timeline for that one(ended up forked off as Monero, possibly post-PoS tech)). 5. PoS, 2012-2014ish. Probably didn't come before different PoW functions but it might have switched with #4's place, hard to remember the exact timelines, but people were trolling and making fun of PoS ever since it was theorized. Probably because a true fully realized PoS that is superior to PoW is a threat to the massive investments one must put behind PoW systems, which also becomes the root of their 'nothing at stake' arguments against PoS, which certainly had merit back then with early PoS implementations. I wonder if those truly got solved. This was all like 2014 at the latest. Very old stuff but crypto is full of sales snakes(not targeted at you at all) who try to sell other peoples old open source tech as new modern innovations. It's a familiar pattern. People sold Bitcoin as private and anonymous for years...like way too long. I'm imagining now there will be a point when PoS is 10+ years old and people will acting like it's the newest thing on the block still.
krupan 6y ago
Are we assuming that no energy will be used to acquire coins in order to stake?

risho 6y ago

nft's don't poison the environment in and of themselves. First of all they don't NEED to exist on a proof of work blockchain, and second whether or not you make or trade nft's people are still going to be mining bitcoin and ethereum. your criticism here is of proof of work, not nft's. please don't conflate the 2. there are plenty of reasons that nft's are silly, but proof of work isn't one of them.

vvanders 6y ago
Until NFTs move away from proof of work I'll continue to criticize them. It's like expecting good intentions and then being surprised when a few bad actors ruin things for the larger group. Tragedy of the commons is exactly why stuff like this should be called out, each and every single time.
- andybak 6y ago
  Which is why I tried to limit my discussion to PoS. Which (I'll repeat myself here) already are being used for NFTs.

runeks 6y ago

> I'm fine with stupid and pointless things as long as your stupid and pointless things don't wreck the environment. I hang up decorative lights around Christmas time. Is that not okay with you, or do you not find it pointless?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
vvanders 6y ago
If your Christmas lights used the same amount of electricity as the whole town? Maybe. Thankfully we have an amazing new technology called Light Emitting Diodes so we don't have to worry about that theoretical problem.
- krupan 6y ago
  LEDs still use electricity. Are you in charge of setting the limit on how much use is acceptable?
Twisell 6y ago
I think in 1-2 generations people will look back and wonder about how dumb we were about our energy consumption regarding the environmental challenges we were facing. Most of ou current Christmas folklore is pretty pointless lights being a pretty recent invention when compared to christian religion timespan. Same as for Christmas trees, they were pretty much on point when everybody had a wood stove to throw them in after Christmas and warm the house. Pretty pointless nowaday when you live in a flat...

madrox 6y ago

Do you play video games, then? Because arguably it isn’t NFTs that consume power...it’s the GPUs. GPUs do way more than NFTs, and there is data that shows that gaming consumes way more than blockchain. If my mom is any indicator, many consider video games stupid and pointless. Value is in the eye of the beholder.

hatboxreappoint 6y ago
> there is data that shows that gaming consumes way more than blockchain Source?
- andybak 6y ago
  If I had to bet I would probably bet that "all the gamers in the world" are using more power than "all the crypto miners in the world". I can't think of a way to immediately gather any evidence for this either way but it seems like a plausible position to take. (However - I think the value > utility chain is easier to argue for with gaming. I'm not making the same argument as the parent post.)
- madrox 6y ago
  These are the sources I've used when I've gone looking, but it doesn't help that we don't actually do industry-by-industry energy consumption comparisons. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257768246_Electrici https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257768246_Electrici... - US energy consumption by video game consoles in the US alone was 16 TWh in 2010 [2] https://grist.org/article/video-games-consume-more-electrici https://grist.org/article/video-games-consume-more-electrici... - Globally, PC gaming (not console gaming) was estimated at 75 TWh in 2018
mouldysammich 6y ago
Maybe this is a the case, however there are, I would guess at least a billion people on earth who play games. there is nothing even close to that using blockchains. If blockchain energy usage is even vaguely in the range of games it can still be considered an enormous --possibly-- unnecessary usage of power

kvz 6y ago

Ethereum is switching over to proof of stake this year which will pretty much solve the environmental issue

krupan 6y ago
You seem to assume that very little energy will be spent to acquire coins for staking. If there is real interest in ether and stiff competition to stake (and there better be for proof of stake to work), I'm afraid that won't be the case.
- solveit 6y ago
  At that point that's just energy spent on acquiring money though.
  - krupan 6y ago
    So that won't harm the environment, but bitcoin proof of work will?
    - solveit 6y ago
      It will harm the environment, but no less than the rest of our economy. There are two problems being conflated here. In basically all of society, people harm the environment in order to acquire resources. In proof of work, you go one step further and proceed to destroy the resources you just acquired. This is because destroying resources via reversing hashes is a costly signal that cannot be faked and is hence not susceptible to a Sybil attack. Proof of Stake doesn't have this problem. The mere act of owning a coin does not entail the destruction of value. In proof of stake, you just make money, probably harming the environment along the way as you do, and buy the coin. That's it. The resources you obtained are not destroyed, they are passed on to whoever you bought the coins from.
      - krupan 6y ago
        In both proof of work and proof of stake people are doing work (using energy) in order to obtain money. In proof of work you work to obtain mining equipment and electricity and then use that to perform the work of securing the network (nothing is “destroyed”). You are then paid for doing that work. The more work you do relative to other miners, the more you will get paid. In proof of stake you work to obtain eth (for example) which then grants you the privilege to run validators. The more you stake, the more validating you can do. You are paid money for successfully validating, and charged money for failing to validate. You will need to do more work to replenish money spent on unsuccessful validation. Ultimately, the more work you do relative to other stakers, the more you will get paid. It’s going to be a little more difficult than it is for proof of work to measure how much total energy is used by proof of stake, but it still should be doable. Maybe it will be less than the energy used by proof of work, but maybe not.

brandonmenc 6y ago

> I don't know how you get to defend something when you're sidestepping the biggest problem with NFTs. Does crypto have a (significantly) larger carbon footprint than video games? Probably not. I think video games (and crypto) are pointless. ymmv.

Symbiote 6y ago
Per entertained / occupied (whatever) person, crypto has an orders-of-magnitude bigger footprint.