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Commercial aviation makes up 918 million metric tons of carbon. Bitcoin mining makes up 22 million metric tons. I'm less worried about NFTs than I am air trav

Commercial aviation makes up 918 million metric tons of carbon. Bitcoin mining makes up 22 million metric tons. I'm less worried about NFTs than I am air travel.

mandmandam 5y ago
22 million metric tons is 22 million metric fucking tons. And there's no reason for it. None. There are better cryptocurrencies: ones with no mining, that use a fraction of the energy. Nano, for example, uses six million times less energy per transaction, and is mining free. It's fully operational, putting every Bitcoin maxi lie to shame.
hnbad 5y ago
In other words: a single cryptocurrency is generating 1/42th the carbon as all commercial aviation. The carbon generated by the two things is only one order of magnitude apart. If you consider that one of the two is (prior to COVID) used by a significant number of citizens of Western countries for vacations, business trips or visiting family, whereas the other is primarily used for financial speculation, money laundering and grey/black market financial transactions, this should be even more appalling. I don't know what makes you think you can put these two numbers side by side and have Bitcoin's carbon emissions look like the reasonable one. Especially when aviation is an established industry and has been the target of ecological regulations for years.
acdha 5y ago
Commercial aviation is at least useful: every year many millions of people travel for business, school, family, and pleasure needs which would be non-trivial to replace and aviation cargo is a key part of the global supply chain. If Bitcoin turned off tomorrow, some speculators would be very upset and nobody else would notice because 13 years in it still hasn't found something it can do competitively with alternatives which are significantly cheaper, easier to use, and less polluting.
- Zamicol 5y ago
  The current monetary system has absurd levels of hand wavy magic. Are you familiar with what is being done on these systems? Uniswap alone did $1 billion in fees last year, a distributed, permissionless, unstoppable exchange. Ethereum did $10 billion in fees last year. I know someone who bought their house with a loan from Dai, which is far less hand wavy magic than Wells Fargo. It took them 30 minutes and no permission for the powers that be was needed.
  - acdha 5y ago
    > Are you familiar with what is being done on these systems? Uniswap alone did $1 billion in fees last year, a distributed, permissionless, unstoppable exchange. Ethereum did $10 billion in fees last year. Consider whether bragging about the overhead fees for a system which statistically nobody uses is a great way to sell people on it. > I know someone who bought their house with a loan from Dai, which is far less hand wavy magic than Wells Fargo. It took them 30 minutes and no permission for the powers that be was needed. How often do you buy houses that giving up protections is an important selling point? Someone is going to be left holding the bag if they're not scrutinizing the borrower's ability to afford the property and its value.
    - Zamicol 5y ago
      Fees show obvious usage. "Statistically nobody uses" isn't fair. The fact that someone is paying interested on their house, a physical asset, to a blockchain application instead of Wells Fargo is a huge deal.
      - acdha 5y ago
        Fees show transactions in the system, not real-world impact — smart contracts, anonymization, pump-and-dump, etc. generate a ton of activity for what most people would think of as a single logical operation. What you really want to see are real-world impacts: how many people use the network? How many real business transactions occur daily? and, especially, how much real value is entering or leaving the system? If a bunch of early adopters are churning an NFT back and forth boosting its value, they're definitely paying fees but that's neither economically-useful activity nor popular adoption.
2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
This is a bad argument. Just because something we currently do is worse than something we want to do, doesn’t mean the new thing is good. Nor does it mean we should add to our current burden unnecessarily. It also ignores what we use the old thing for. Flight has enabled so much: fast response to disasters, faster shipping of goods, saving human lives. The entire planet can benefit from flight. Crypto is used by a small minority and seems pretty much fueled by speculation. The only legitimate use of crypto is as a currency in places where the economy is poor, or the state can too easily seize your assets etc.
- friendlydog 5y ago
  Aviation makes up only 1.9% of the big pie and bitcoin barely is a blip. It would be nice not to have those tons, but addressing big pollution first makes the most sense for triaging the problem. Personally I would enjoy the lower prices for graphics cards if bitcoin went away. No one said eliminate all air travel. Cutting it down to once a week for non-emergency use world wide would have a huge effect, but even then aviation is only 1.9% of the problem. Making tarrifs, even within the same country, on food grown by milage from consumption would reduce the transport and farming slice of the pie. Eat locally for the cheapest cost.
api 5y ago
Umm... commercial aviation is just a tad more useful...
perrygeo 5y ago
But air travel has tangible social and cultural value: visiting clients, friends, colleagues, and family. NFTs do not provide social value. That's the central argument to the article. Did you read it?
betterunix2 5y ago
Except that we do not have an alternative to jet airplanes that moves hundreds of times more passengers while emitting less carbon. We do have such an alternative to Bitcoin, in fact it predates Bitcoin by decades and is far more popular: Visa. Visa's total carbon emissions in 2020 for its data centers and offices (their ESG report also discusses emissions from employee commuting and business travel) is a whopping 14 thousand metric tons, over 1000 less than Bitcoin. That carbon was emitted as Visa processed 1700 transactions per second compared to only 7 transactions per second for Bitcoin. In other words, as an electronic payments system, Visa is roughly one million times less polluting than Bitcoin. So until NFTs are using a system at least as energy-efficient as Visa, I'll continue to worry...
thefz 5y ago
Still 22mln metric tons we could do without.

Commercial aviation makes up 918 million metric tons of carbon. Bitcoin mining makes up 22 million metric tons. I'm less worried about NFTs than I am air travel.

mandmandam 5y ago

22 million metric tons is 22 million metric fucking tons. And there's no reason for it. None. There are better cryptocurrencies: ones with no mining, that use a fraction of the energy. Nano, for example, uses six million times less energy per transaction, and is mining free. It's fully operational, putting every Bitcoin maxi lie to shame.

hnbad 5y ago

In other words: a single cryptocurrency is generating 1/42th the carbon as all commercial aviation. The carbon generated by the two things is only one order of magnitude apart. If you consider that one of the two is (prior to COVID) used by a significant number of citizens of Western countries for vacations, business trips or visiting family, whereas the other is primarily used for financial speculation, money laundering and grey/black market financial transactions, this should be even more appalling. I don't know what makes you think you can put these two numbers side by side and have Bitcoin's carbon emissions look like the reasonable one. Especially when aviation is an established industry and has been the target of ecological regulations for years.

acdha 5y ago

Commercial aviation is at least useful: every year many millions of people travel for business, school, family, and pleasure needs which would be non-trivial to replace and aviation cargo is a key part of the global supply chain. If Bitcoin turned off tomorrow, some speculators would be very upset and nobody else would notice because 13 years in it still hasn't found something it can do competitively with alternatives which are significantly cheaper, easier to use, and less polluting.

Zamicol 5y ago
The current monetary system has absurd levels of hand wavy magic. Are you familiar with what is being done on these systems? Uniswap alone did $1 billion in fees last year, a distributed, permissionless, unstoppable exchange. Ethereum did $10 billion in fees last year. I know someone who bought their house with a loan from Dai, which is far less hand wavy magic than Wells Fargo. It took them 30 minutes and no permission for the powers that be was needed.
- acdha 5y ago
  > Are you familiar with what is being done on these systems? Uniswap alone did $1 billion in fees last year, a distributed, permissionless, unstoppable exchange. Ethereum did $10 billion in fees last year. Consider whether bragging about the overhead fees for a system which statistically nobody uses is a great way to sell people on it. > I know someone who bought their house with a loan from Dai, which is far less hand wavy magic than Wells Fargo. It took them 30 minutes and no permission for the powers that be was needed. How often do you buy houses that giving up protections is an important selling point? Someone is going to be left holding the bag if they're not scrutinizing the borrower's ability to afford the property and its value.
  - Zamicol 5y ago
    Fees show obvious usage. "Statistically nobody uses" isn't fair. The fact that someone is paying interested on their house, a physical asset, to a blockchain application instead of Wells Fargo is a huge deal.
    - acdha 5y ago
      Fees show transactions in the system, not real-world impact — smart contracts, anonymization, pump-and-dump, etc. generate a ton of activity for what most people would think of as a single logical operation. What you really want to see are real-world impacts: how many people use the network? How many real business transactions occur daily? and, especially, how much real value is entering or leaving the system? If a bunch of early adopters are churning an NFT back and forth boosting its value, they're definitely paying fees but that's neither economically-useful activity nor popular adoption.

2muchcoffeeman 5y ago

This is a bad argument. Just because something we currently do is worse than something we want to do, doesn’t mean the new thing is good. Nor does it mean we should add to our current burden unnecessarily. It also ignores what we use the old thing for. Flight has enabled so much: fast response to disasters, faster shipping of goods, saving human lives. The entire planet can benefit from flight. Crypto is used by a small minority and seems pretty much fueled by speculation. The only legitimate use of crypto is as a currency in places where the economy is poor, or the state can too easily seize your assets etc.

friendlydog 5y ago
Aviation makes up only 1.9% of the big pie and bitcoin barely is a blip. It would be nice not to have those tons, but addressing big pollution first makes the most sense for triaging the problem. Personally I would enjoy the lower prices for graphics cards if bitcoin went away. No one said eliminate all air travel. Cutting it down to once a week for non-emergency use world wide would have a huge effect, but even then aviation is only 1.9% of the problem. Making tarrifs, even within the same country, on food grown by milage from consumption would reduce the transport and farming slice of the pie. Eat locally for the cheapest cost.

api 5y ago

Umm... commercial aviation is just a tad more useful...

perrygeo 5y ago

But air travel has tangible social and cultural value: visiting clients, friends, colleagues, and family. NFTs do not provide social value. That's the central argument to the article. Did you read it?

betterunix2 5y ago

Except that we do not have an alternative to jet airplanes that moves hundreds of times more passengers while emitting less carbon. We do have such an alternative to Bitcoin, in fact it predates Bitcoin by decades and is far more popular: Visa. Visa's total carbon emissions in 2020 for its data centers and offices (their ESG report also discusses emissions from employee commuting and business travel) is a whopping 14 thousand metric tons, over 1000 less than Bitcoin. That carbon was emitted as Visa processed 1700 transactions per second compared to only 7 transactions per second for Bitcoin. In other words, as an electronic payments system, Visa is roughly one million times less polluting than Bitcoin. So until NFTs are using a system at least as energy-efficient as Visa, I'll continue to worry...

thefz 5y ago

Still 22mln metric tons we could do without.