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Astonishingly low quality article for a publication as wonderful as Nautilus. For now I just want to comment on one piece, this meme that NFTs are killing the

Astonishingly low quality article for a publication as wonderful as Nautilus. For now I just want to comment on one piece, this meme that NFTs are killing the planet through consumption of insane amounts of energy is silly and falls apart with a moment's thought. All estimates of per-txn energy usage take the total number of transactions and divide by the total energy usage of the chain. However... bitcoin (and other chains) happily consume a lot of energy even when no transactions are being processed. The more important question is: when you make a transaction how much more energy is consumed than in a counterfactual world where you did not make that transaction. This number is very difficult to estimate, but seems to be at most 10kwh, or as much as driving your tesla ~30 miles, or running your dishwasher 5 times, or running your air conditioner for 5 hours, or doing any of a number of other things which people happily do every day without thinking twice. It would be nice if energy consumption was much lower, this is a non-trivial amount of energy, and multiple chains are working toward lowering it, but popular articles all seem to believe your NFT could power Berlin for a day if only you weren't being so selfish.

cmgxyz 5y ago
> This number is very difficult to estimate, but seems to be on the order of 10kwh, or as much as driving your tesla ~30 miles, or running your dishwasher 5 times, or running your air conditioner for 5 hours, or doing any of a number of other things which people happily do every day without thinking twice. It would be nice if energy consumption was even lower, and multiple chains are working toward lowering it, but popular articles all seem to believe your NFT could power Berlin for a day if only you weren't being so selfish. Those are all astonishingly energy consumptive tasks for something that, I agree with the article author, is pretty much bereft of any value. By contrast, you could make... what, five hundred thousand credit card transactions with that same energy? That's f**king insane.

cmgxyz 5y ago

> This number is very difficult to estimate, but seems to be on the order of 10kwh, or as much as driving your tesla ~30 miles, or running your dishwasher 5 times, or running your air conditioner for 5 hours, or doing any of a number of other things which people happily do every day without thinking twice. It would be nice if energy consumption was even lower, and multiple chains are working toward lowering it, but popular articles all seem to believe your NFT could power Berlin for a day if only you weren't being so selfish. Those are all astonishingly energy consumptive tasks for something that, I agree with the article author, is pretty much bereft of any value. By contrast, you could make... what, five hundred thousand credit card transactions with that same energy? That's f**king insane.