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I'm no fan of NFTs, but the argument that > it's bad for the environment just doesn't make sense to me. There are far, far more energy intensive operations th

I'm no fan of NFTs, but the argument that > it's bad for the environment just doesn't make sense to me. There are far, far more energy intensive operations that we do daily. Think about how much energy is 'wasted' playing video games, yet nobody balks at that.

angio 5y ago
It also ignores chains like Tezos that don't use proof of work.
lwansbrough 5y ago
> There are far, far more energy intensive operations that we do daily. Virtually all of the things you could mention have some net benefit to society.
mumphster 5y ago
Are you saying that people playing video games are more energy intensive than literal warehouses full of GPU's running 24/7 mining ethereum? Nobody talks about that because it's a horrible comparison.
- nyolfen 5y ago
  it is literally the exact same thing distributed over a larger area. at least miners are incentivized to use cheap renewable sources.
  - lwansbrough 5y ago
    Miners are incentivized to maximize their energy consumption. The fact that they're able to extract more value with energy efficiency is irrelevant.
    - nyolfen 5y ago
      miners pay energy bills, ergo seek out cheap energy. the cheapest energy is usually hydro. the efficiency directly impacts their bottom line.
      - lwansbrough 5y ago
        Miners make a profit, otherwise they wouldn’t do it. If you can suddenly double your hash rate without changing your power consumption there’s no reason why you wouldn’t do that. You’re incentivized to maintain or grow your power consumption to make more or the same amount of crypto per kWh.
    - hrhrhrhrhr 5y ago
      That's like saying that cab drivers are incentivized to maximize their gas consumption. No, miners are actually incentivized to minimize their energy consumption while maximizing output.
      - lwansbrough 5y ago
        If you’re a miner, and you’re able to halve your power consumption without sacrificing any hash rate, you’re absolutely going to double your processing capacity to maintain your original power consumption, because it makes you more money. A cab driver can’t do twice as much driving if they double their vehicle’s energy consumption.
  - blondin 5y ago
    i am interested in this comparison. my gut feeling is that the blockchain is more energy intensive. but i am curious how much energy is consumed by a global online multiplayer game like fortnite or similar.
  - ljm 5y ago
    Does one person playing a game on their PS5 for a few hours a day really have the same footprint as one crypto miner running a swarm of several hundred or even thousands of GPUs for the same period of time (ignoring the reality that those things are mining 24/7)? I don't really know how you can equate the two and also say that an individual person has no incentive to keep their househould energy costs at a minimum. Especially when you consider the socioeconomic status of the average gamer or their family, compared to the average owner of a crypto mining enterprise.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      One-on-one I have no idea which is bigger energy cost, but last time I tried to do a Fermi estimate, it looked like gaming collectively was similar to crypto collectively. But I agree with you that individual gamers have the same general incentives from a need to reduce household electricity bills.
    - samtheprogram 5y ago
      Do you think there are more GPUs running Ethereum than the total addressable market of gamers multiplied by hours played? There are thousands of Ethereum nodes. It was as high as 12.5k earlier this year estimated [1]. Meanwhile, on November 29th, there were 27 million simultaneous people playing on Steam alone [2]. Even if you multiply the peak number of Ethereum nodes by every hour in the entire year, that still only hits ~100,000. [1]: https://ethernodes.org/history https://ethernodes.org/history [2]: https://www.archyde.com/steam-exceeds-27-million-simultaneous-players/ https://www.archyde.com/steam-exceeds-27-million-simultaneou...
      - ljm 5y ago
        The comparison changes when you look at them in aggregate, so if we want to see how they stack up in terms of energy consumption, it would probably be useful to see how many gamers it would roughly take to use the same amount of energy as the person running a full scale crypto mining operation. After that there is the subjective analysis about what we get out of those in terms of value since, externalities aside, you can't compare gaming as an activity vs. the activities that require crypto. I'm sure there are plenty out there who would claim that video games are a net loss to society the same way many folks think that about crypto. Personally I think this is just the next in what will be a long line of trends as wealth consolidates upwards and the people attaining it keep looking for new and novel ways to spend or invest.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    Eh, I don't think it's the same. People don't run games on warehouses of GPUs 24x7. They boot up games for a couple of hours and then turn them off. A big reason why these comparisons fall flat is because the only way people can make gaming and crypto energy use look the same is by comparing a niche activity to a mainstream one. Gaming overall takes up a lot of energy because a lot of people do it. When we ignore that fact and only compare the global numbers then NFTs look a bit better than they should, they look like they're maybe competitive by some metrics. But that's because they're an incredibly niche product with double-digit transaction fees that people don't really spend much time interacting with. When we break things apart into a per-person comparison, there's basically no way I've been able to find to make proof-of-work energy usage look good. Just think about it from a purely physical perspective, every transaction on the blockchain uses GPU time spread across multiple actors. Of course that uses more power than a single person's GPU running for their own personal gaming system. Distributed systems pretty much always use more power because they duplicate work. We know this, it's the entire foundation of proof-of-work systems, they're impossible for a single actor to keep up with and that's why they have security guarantees. But the other side of that is that a distributed network of multiple GPUs that needs to be run for every chunk of transactions on the chain is of course going to be more expensive per-transaction then the equivalent "play-session" of an individual playing a game. Maybe if everyone did their gaming on Google Stadia the comparison would be more accurate (although even there I bet Google's less-decentralized system would still probably be more efficient than a network of GPUs duplicating the same work). But that's not the case right now, most GPU work for graphics for games are happening locally, and those GPUs get powered down afterwards. There's no way someone playing a Switch for an hour is using the same amount of energy as an NFT transaction.
    - hrhrhrhrhr 5y ago
      Transactions don't consume energy. If everyone suddenly stopped making transactions, miners would still be there, running their machines to mine empty blocks. So thinking in terms of "energy per transaction" is wrong, you should look at total consumed energy by mining industry as a whole and compare it to other industries energy usage also as a whole.
onion2k 5y ago
The fact that other activities waste energy doesn't mean NFTs aren't wasteful. It means that there are two wasteful activities. You cannot argue that the relative merits of two bad things makes one of them good, or even "not bad". That's not how anything works. Objectively bad things are always going to be bad no matter what else happens.
- hrhrhrhrhr 5y ago
  Energy usage of ETH would've been exactly the same whether those artists or anyone else created NFTs. So the comparison with gaming is not really correct. Playing PS5 consumes energy in a direct way. Creating an ETH transaction doesn't consume much more energy than vising a website.
thot_experiment 5y ago
Money laundering, speculation, pyramid schemes and pushing terrible ideas about ownership can be achieved without crunching a bunch of numbers to find low hashes or whatever. The kind of video gaming that has you burning 300W with your GPU is hard to achieve in a different way. It is a weak argument though and I think it's frustrating how prominently people make it rather than the much more important "it's bad to propagate scarcity based ownership structures to a domain where scarcity need not exist".
- theturtletalks 5y ago
  This is the cost of decentralization (proving ownership through solving hashes). A central authority being the source of truth will be cheaper since only one entity needs to verify. Will the cost of proving ownership through decentralization ever be cheaper than 1 single authority doing it?
  - hnbad 5y ago
    The question then becomes if "decentralization" in the sense that blockchains provide them currently is worth this cost.
    - theturtletalks 5y ago
      Exactly, but there is a cost to find out if "blockchain decentralization" is worth the cost. Right now, proving ownership through decentralization costs more than one single entity doing it. But if decentralization systems proliferate, then we can see if the extra cost of decentralization is worth it. In industries where this extra cost is not worth it, decentralization probably won't exist. In industries where one single authority has too much say and power, users will be willing to pay the cost of decentralization. Payments, in my opinion, is the best example since Mastercard and Visa have such a stronghold on how you can make or take payments online. In an industry like that, users will pay a premium.
      - thot_experiment 5y ago
jbirer 5y ago
Plus there are PoS chains like Binance, Avalanche etc that require very little energy consumption for nodes. I am talking about Raspberry Pi's.
anaganisk 5y ago
It is one thing to say a car creates pollution while moving passengers for x km and another thing to say, we wasted time, money and lot of computing power that are required by lot of computers competing to update a boolean flag in a database.
rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
The environment argument is technically incorrect, and typically used by ignorant people as it is a good emotional argument. There could be 1 or 10000000 NFTs, it makes no difference to the energy usage of the Ethereum network. The energy usage is in the production of Proof of Work blocks. These blocks could be empty or full, and this makes no difference to the amount of energy used to produce them. NFTs are dumb, a grift, etc etc.. but they themselves use no energy beyond that required to create, sign and broadcast the transaction. It is dishonest to say "NFTs use a lot of energy". They dont. You can blame ethereum, you can blame PoW, you can blame the miners -- but the existence of the NFT contract and transactions makes no difference.
- SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
  They increase the usage and attractiveness of the Ethereum network. So while they don't directly cost energy, the Ethereum network expands to use all available energy priced less than the current token price (as all Proof of Work schemes do). Anything that increases the token price of Ethereum indirectly increases the energy use of the Ethereum network.
  - rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
    That is a second order effect at best. The loose fiat monetary policy of States also drives the price of cryptocurrencies -- far more so. Is this also to blame for the energy usage of Proof of Work? I would say it has a bigger effect on fixed emission cryptocurrencies than stupid tokens. Cut the money printing, save the environment?
    - specialp 5y ago
      The price of cryptocurrencies seems to have almost no relationship to stability and inflation of fiat currency. One would expect when bad inflation reports come out, and the stock market declines, cryptocurrencies would benefit from being an inflation hedge. But they don't. They often decline as well. It appears the rise and fall of cryptocurrencies correlate with the overall market's appetite for risk and speculation.
rileyphone 5y ago
https://encryptobiography.com/2021/12/15/ethereum-transaction-energy-use-equals-2-5-miles-in-a-tesla-model-3-report/ https://encryptobiography.com/2021/12/15/ethereum-transactio... According to this article a single Ethereum transaction takes 30 kwh of electricity. It’s disingenuous to say that is nothing compared to playing video games or other ordinary activities, which consume far less as they aren’t dictated by game theoretical escalatory mechanics. We make a big fuss about changing 60w light bulbs to 5w led equivalents when the amount of energy that saves in a month is spent on the minting of another artless NFT. And sure, maybe that power is coming from renewable sources, but that doesn’t make it free, rather as an opportunity cost that may have been spent on something almost certainly more productive.
- rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
  Its also wrong, and measuring the wrong thing. A single ethereum tx costs a few watts of CPU time to generate and sign the transaction (less even), and a few watts to broadcast to the mempool via your internet connection. Maybe add a few watts extra to factor propagation of the transaction to the network. This is all done in <500ms, probably less. It's next to nothing. It uses much less power than the LCD that renders the jpeg. It is easy to make a fake emotional argument if you don't technically understand how systems work.
  - rileyphone 5y ago
    That’s like saying all it takes to win the lottery is a few dollars to buy a ticket, then you get a hundred million dollars. You’re ignoring the true costs with appeals to a clear technical process, but that fails to capture the collective behavior that the proof of work systems like Ethereum exhibit. In any case, dismissing my argument as “fake” and “emotional” shows that you are either engaging in bad faith or have a remedial grasp on argumentation. Please do better in the future.

angio 5y ago

It also ignores chains like Tezos that don't use proof of work.

lwansbrough 5y ago

> There are far, far more energy intensive operations that we do daily. Virtually all of the things you could mention have some net benefit to society.

mumphster 5y ago

Are you saying that people playing video games are more energy intensive than literal warehouses full of GPU's running 24/7 mining ethereum? Nobody talks about that because it's a horrible comparison.

nyolfen 5y ago
it is literally the exact same thing distributed over a larger area. at least miners are incentivized to use cheap renewable sources.
- lwansbrough 5y ago
  Miners are incentivized to maximize their energy consumption. The fact that they're able to extract more value with energy efficiency is irrelevant.
  - nyolfen 5y ago
    miners pay energy bills, ergo seek out cheap energy. the cheapest energy is usually hydro. the efficiency directly impacts their bottom line.
    - lwansbrough 5y ago
      Miners make a profit, otherwise they wouldn’t do it. If you can suddenly double your hash rate without changing your power consumption there’s no reason why you wouldn’t do that. You’re incentivized to maintain or grow your power consumption to make more or the same amount of crypto per kWh.
  - hrhrhrhrhr 5y ago
    That's like saying that cab drivers are incentivized to maximize their gas consumption. No, miners are actually incentivized to minimize their energy consumption while maximizing output.
    - lwansbrough 5y ago
      If you’re a miner, and you’re able to halve your power consumption without sacrificing any hash rate, you’re absolutely going to double your processing capacity to maintain your original power consumption, because it makes you more money. A cab driver can’t do twice as much driving if they double their vehicle’s energy consumption.
- blondin 5y ago
  i am interested in this comparison. my gut feeling is that the blockchain is more energy intensive. but i am curious how much energy is consumed by a global online multiplayer game like fortnite or similar.
- ljm 5y ago
  Does one person playing a game on their PS5 for a few hours a day really have the same footprint as one crypto miner running a swarm of several hundred or even thousands of GPUs for the same period of time (ignoring the reality that those things are mining 24/7)? I don't really know how you can equate the two and also say that an individual person has no incentive to keep their househould energy costs at a minimum. Especially when you consider the socioeconomic status of the average gamer or their family, compared to the average owner of a crypto mining enterprise.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    One-on-one I have no idea which is bigger energy cost, but last time I tried to do a Fermi estimate, it looked like gaming collectively was similar to crypto collectively. But I agree with you that individual gamers have the same general incentives from a need to reduce household electricity bills.
  - samtheprogram 5y ago
    Do you think there are more GPUs running Ethereum than the total addressable market of gamers multiplied by hours played? There are thousands of Ethereum nodes. It was as high as 12.5k earlier this year estimated [1]. Meanwhile, on November 29th, there were 27 million simultaneous people playing on Steam alone [2]. Even if you multiply the peak number of Ethereum nodes by every hour in the entire year, that still only hits ~100,000. [1]: https://ethernodes.org/history https://ethernodes.org/history [2]: https://www.archyde.com/steam-exceeds-27-million-simultaneous-players/ https://www.archyde.com/steam-exceeds-27-million-simultaneou...
    - ljm 5y ago
      The comparison changes when you look at them in aggregate, so if we want to see how they stack up in terms of energy consumption, it would probably be useful to see how many gamers it would roughly take to use the same amount of energy as the person running a full scale crypto mining operation. After that there is the subjective analysis about what we get out of those in terms of value since, externalities aside, you can't compare gaming as an activity vs. the activities that require crypto. I'm sure there are plenty out there who would claim that video games are a net loss to society the same way many folks think that about crypto. Personally I think this is just the next in what will be a long line of trends as wealth consolidates upwards and the people attaining it keep looking for new and novel ways to spend or invest.
- danShumway 5y ago
  Eh, I don't think it's the same. People don't run games on warehouses of GPUs 24x7. They boot up games for a couple of hours and then turn them off. A big reason why these comparisons fall flat is because the only way people can make gaming and crypto energy use look the same is by comparing a niche activity to a mainstream one. Gaming overall takes up a lot of energy because a lot of people do it. When we ignore that fact and only compare the global numbers then NFTs look a bit better than they should, they look like they're maybe competitive by some metrics. But that's because they're an incredibly niche product with double-digit transaction fees that people don't really spend much time interacting with. When we break things apart into a per-person comparison, there's basically no way I've been able to find to make proof-of-work energy usage look good. Just think about it from a purely physical perspective, every transaction on the blockchain uses GPU time spread across multiple actors. Of course that uses more power than a single person's GPU running for their own personal gaming system. Distributed systems pretty much always use more power because they duplicate work. We know this, it's the entire foundation of proof-of-work systems, they're impossible for a single actor to keep up with and that's why they have security guarantees. But the other side of that is that a distributed network of multiple GPUs that needs to be run for every chunk of transactions on the chain is of course going to be more expensive per-transaction then the equivalent "play-session" of an individual playing a game. Maybe if everyone did their gaming on Google Stadia the comparison would be more accurate (although even there I bet Google's less-decentralized system would still probably be more efficient than a network of GPUs duplicating the same work). But that's not the case right now, most GPU work for graphics for games are happening locally, and those GPUs get powered down afterwards. There's no way someone playing a Switch for an hour is using the same amount of energy as an NFT transaction.
  - hrhrhrhrhr 5y ago
    Transactions don't consume energy. If everyone suddenly stopped making transactions, miners would still be there, running their machines to mine empty blocks. So thinking in terms of "energy per transaction" is wrong, you should look at total consumed energy by mining industry as a whole and compare it to other industries energy usage also as a whole.

onion2k 5y ago

The fact that other activities waste energy doesn't mean NFTs aren't wasteful. It means that there are two wasteful activities. You cannot argue that the relative merits of two bad things makes one of them good, or even "not bad". That's not how anything works. Objectively bad things are always going to be bad no matter what else happens.

hrhrhrhrhr 5y ago
Energy usage of ETH would've been exactly the same whether those artists or anyone else created NFTs. So the comparison with gaming is not really correct. Playing PS5 consumes energy in a direct way. Creating an ETH transaction doesn't consume much more energy than vising a website.

thot_experiment 5y ago

Money laundering, speculation, pyramid schemes and pushing terrible ideas about ownership can be achieved without crunching a bunch of numbers to find low hashes or whatever. The kind of video gaming that has you burning 300W with your GPU is hard to achieve in a different way. It is a weak argument though and I think it's frustrating how prominently people make it rather than the much more important "it's bad to propagate scarcity based ownership structures to a domain where scarcity need not exist".

theturtletalks 5y ago
This is the cost of decentralization (proving ownership through solving hashes). A central authority being the source of truth will be cheaper since only one entity needs to verify. Will the cost of proving ownership through decentralization ever be cheaper than 1 single authority doing it?
- hnbad 5y ago
  The question then becomes if "decentralization" in the sense that blockchains provide them currently is worth this cost.
  - theturtletalks 5y ago
    Exactly, but there is a cost to find out if "blockchain decentralization" is worth the cost. Right now, proving ownership through decentralization costs more than one single entity doing it. But if decentralization systems proliferate, then we can see if the extra cost of decentralization is worth it. In industries where this extra cost is not worth it, decentralization probably won't exist. In industries where one single authority has too much say and power, users will be willing to pay the cost of decentralization. Payments, in my opinion, is the best example since Mastercard and Visa have such a stronghold on how you can make or take payments online. In an industry like that, users will pay a premium.
    - thot_experiment 5y ago

jbirer 5y ago

Plus there are PoS chains like Binance, Avalanche etc that require very little energy consumption for nodes. I am talking about Raspberry Pi's.

anaganisk 5y ago

It is one thing to say a car creates pollution while moving passengers for x km and another thing to say, we wasted time, money and lot of computing power that are required by lot of computers competing to update a boolean flag in a database.

rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago

The environment argument is technically incorrect, and typically used by ignorant people as it is a good emotional argument. There could be 1 or 10000000 NFTs, it makes no difference to the energy usage of the Ethereum network. The energy usage is in the production of Proof of Work blocks. These blocks could be empty or full, and this makes no difference to the amount of energy used to produce them. NFTs are dumb, a grift, etc etc.. but they themselves use no energy beyond that required to create, sign and broadcast the transaction. It is dishonest to say "NFTs use a lot of energy". They dont. You can blame ethereum, you can blame PoW, you can blame the miners -- but the existence of the NFT contract and transactions makes no difference.

SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
They increase the usage and attractiveness of the Ethereum network. So while they don't directly cost energy, the Ethereum network expands to use all available energy priced less than the current token price (as all Proof of Work schemes do). Anything that increases the token price of Ethereum indirectly increases the energy use of the Ethereum network.
- rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
  That is a second order effect at best. The loose fiat monetary policy of States also drives the price of cryptocurrencies -- far more so. Is this also to blame for the energy usage of Proof of Work? I would say it has a bigger effect on fixed emission cryptocurrencies than stupid tokens. Cut the money printing, save the environment?
  - specialp 5y ago
    The price of cryptocurrencies seems to have almost no relationship to stability and inflation of fiat currency. One would expect when bad inflation reports come out, and the stock market declines, cryptocurrencies would benefit from being an inflation hedge. But they don't. They often decline as well. It appears the rise and fall of cryptocurrencies correlate with the overall market's appetite for risk and speculation.

rileyphone 5y ago

https://encryptobiography.com/2021/12/15/ethereum-transaction-energy-use-equals-2-5-miles-in-a-tesla-model-3-report/ https://encryptobiography.com/2021/12/15/ethereum-transactio... According to this article a single Ethereum transaction takes 30 kwh of electricity. It’s disingenuous to say that is nothing compared to playing video games or other ordinary activities, which consume far less as they aren’t dictated by game theoretical escalatory mechanics. We make a big fuss about changing 60w light bulbs to 5w led equivalents when the amount of energy that saves in a month is spent on the minting of another artless NFT. And sure, maybe that power is coming from renewable sources, but that doesn’t make it free, rather as an opportunity cost that may have been spent on something almost certainly more productive.

rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
Its also wrong, and measuring the wrong thing. A single ethereum tx costs a few watts of CPU time to generate and sign the transaction (less even), and a few watts to broadcast to the mempool via your internet connection. Maybe add a few watts extra to factor propagation of the transaction to the network. This is all done in <500ms, probably less. It's next to nothing. It uses much less power than the LCD that renders the jpeg. It is easy to make a fake emotional argument if you don't technically understand how systems work.
- rileyphone 5y ago
  That’s like saying all it takes to win the lottery is a few dollars to buy a ticket, then you get a hundred million dollars. You’re ignoring the true costs with appeals to a clear technical process, but that fails to capture the collective behavior that the proof of work systems like Ethereum exhibit. In any case, dismissing my argument as “fake” and “emotional” shows that you are either engaging in bad faith or have a remedial grasp on argumentation. Please do better in the future.