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>A Twitter thread by Molly White, creator of Web3 Is Going Great, documented how exorbitant fees affected people buying NFTs from different projects, often outs

>A Twitter thread by Molly White, creator of Web3 Is Going Great, documented how exorbitant fees affected people buying NFTs from different projects, often outstripping the underlying asset: a $3,500 fee for a $500 NFT, a $3,800 fee for a $270 NFT, a $3,950 transaction fee for a $260 NFT, and a $3,300 transaction fee for a $25 NFT were just some of the many ridiculous trades executed during the gas war caused by Otherdeed's NFT launch. Instead of talking about these "gas fees" in terms of their monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire. I'm 100% serious. All of this, over gifs, jpgs and fake land in a theoretically infinite digital universe that was probably procedurally generated anyway.

jameshart 5y ago
When's the President going to do something to fix these gas prices? Anyway, I thought crypto currencies were meant to be inflation-proof.
fartcannon 5y ago
It's kind of like trying to outwit other traders in the stock market, isn't it? Just a bunch of people building elaborate systems to gamble.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Stock market trading is actually super efficient energy wise, comparatively, due to its centralized nature in a trusted environment. No need for proof of work or proof of stake, so no need to spin cycles for crypto trust theater (because you can still be prosecuted and sued if you steal crypto and it’s worth someone’s time to obtain justice; code as law until the cuffs are on or wallets are blacklisted at exchanges). In this example, Ethereum is this enormous, slow distributed runtime moving image receipts and tokens around.
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    You can expand and contract the 'stock market' to whatever shape and energy density your argument requires. Does it include all the energy required to keep alive the people who work to sustain it? Does it include investors, the wealth it generates and all the super yachts bought with it? Or on the othet side, is it just the near energy free idea of what the stock market is?
    - bduerst 5y ago
      If ethereum ever achieved adoption even close to a fraction of what stock trading has, then you'd have the same problems and overhead. As it stands, the apples to apples comparison has any centralized, trusted network being more efficient than [attempted] trustless, proof of work like ethereum.
    - cuteboy19 5y ago
      There are already a hundred different crypto exchanges (more than regular ones, possibly) We do not count the people working on these exchanges as a part of crypto energy cost. So your argument is wrong, actually.
      - fartcannon 5y ago
        That's because you don't need the same scale of people to run a cryptocoin. It does it itself, more or less, with some maintainers. You can trade value with anyone anywhere in the world without all those banks and people. So in this case, it's an extremely important point.
    - micromacrofoot 5y ago
      etherium solves 0 of those problems so it’s a moot point
  - phkahler 5y ago
    >> No need for proof of work or proof of stake Yeah, I mean naked shorts and all.
    - vkou 5y ago
      1. Naked shorts are illegal except in very special circumstances for a market maker. 2. You don't need naked shorts for a stock to be >100% shorted. We'd all have been better off if people took the GME frenzy as an opportunity to better understand how stock trades work, as opposed to an opportunity to reinforce their pre-existing misunderstanding.
      - phkahler 5y ago
        Naked shorts are not possible with crypto unless I'm very mistaken. You could do it in some secondary market, but the blockchain AFAICT only works on "real" assets.
        cuteboy19 5y ago
        Which is irrelevant, we should judge things as they are and not as they "should be". Exchanges are part and parcel of the crypto ecosystem. We cannot ignore them in this discussion. Naked shorts do exist in the crypto market and they do affect the prices of those currencies. But of course why would anyone do that when there are a hundred easier ways to manipulate the crypto market? Buy a few influencers and UFC athletes to shill your crypto and you get a much better return on investment.
    - cuteboy19 5y ago
      Naked shorts can and do exist on crypto exchanges
      - phkahler 5y ago
        On an exchange, but not on a blockchain. Exchanges are a convenience, and go against the entire concept of a distributed ledger. That part of what makes the whole thing a joke.
  - m00dy 5y ago
    >.. a trusted environment .. There is a term called circuit-breaker. How would it possible to trust a system if it has a "feature" called circuit-breaker ?
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      Crypto proponents and libertarians taking issue with the rules of the capital markets is different than the system having no trust. The US capital markets are some of the most regulated, trusted markets in the world; it’s why capital flows into it (versus say, Russia, China, LATAM, etc). Some poorly written smart contract isn’t going to nuke their (potentially hundreds of millions of dollars) capital on a whim, and if there is an issue, there is a resolution path through industry, government, and the courts. That is “revealed trust” if you will. Importantly, the belief of an individual can be drastically different than the consensus of market participants. Based on the capital allocation in US capital markets (tens of trillions of dollars), what does that signal regarding trust? https://www.sifma.org/resources/research/fact-book/ https://www.sifma.org/resources/research/fact-book/
    - thorncorona 5y ago
      You could instead lose $625M to poorly written code [0]. Crypto is just rediscovering the reason we have financial regulations, at a higher speed. https://crypto.news/axie-infinity-ronin-network-hack-625m-usd-eth/ https://crypto.news/axie-infinity-ronin-network-hack-625m-us...
      - lupire 5y ago
        Knight lost $400m due to a code bug in traffic.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - adoxyz 5y ago
      what's wrong with having a circuit-breaker? My house has many and they come in handy. Same with the stock market, it helps slow down emotional trading and limit certain attacks.
hombre_fatal 5y ago
Meh, we "waste" all sorts of energy, and what constitutes as waste is something to be debated and something that probably hits philosophical/ethical bedrock much like talking about, say, meat consumption.
- warent 5y ago
  We're not talking about abstract metaphysics here. These are objectively measured metrics that correlate to direct physical impact on the planet.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    Yes, so does meat eating. Nobody said anything about metaphysics, but whether something is wasteful is a normative question.
    - warent 5y ago
      There is research demonstrating that the lowest-impact meat produces significantly more greenhouse gas than the worst, highest-impact vegetable. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216 If you're arguing that excess greenhouse gas emissions is not a waste product, then it seems like you're either embracing climate change or you know something about greenhouse gasses that nobody else knows.
      - whimsicalism 5y ago
        > There is research demonstrating that the lowest-impact meat produces significantly more greenhouse gas than the worst, highest-impact vegetable. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216 Yes, that is my point. > either embracing climate change I'm making the very basic claim that all of these are based on normative facts, not metaphysics.
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  "Murder isn't a problem because people die all the time."
haswell 5y ago
I'm admittedly not very knowledgeable about the Web3/Crypto space beyond the basics - are all of these fees also publicly visible on a ledger? It seems like someone could build a pretty sobering dashboard that shows exactly what you describe if this data is readily available. I've wanted to dabble in the space purely so I could understand it more deeply, but am not really interested in the hype. However, building visualizations to help people understand the insanity...sounds like an interesting project.
- rglullis 5y ago
  Yes, it is publicly available. The blockchain keeps a record of every transaction, which includes how much gas was spent.
- joshcryer 5y ago
  The gas fees don't really correlate to any energy usage. They're actually a fee for computation on the block. It's no different than the Bitcoin miner fee, except it's based upon how much code is being included and the current network demand. It still blows my mind people think it is acceptable that the network eat their transaction fee if the transaction doesn't go through, especially when these fees are so high (as if now it can cost $2k to do any sort of NFT stuff). Imagine sending $100 to your mom with your bank and then the bank charges you $2,000 and then the transaction doesn't go through because someone sneezed on the keyboard at the bank and forgot to press send and then the bank keeps the $2000 and your mom doesn't get the $100. Only in this case they didn't sneeze on the keyboard, the transaction calculation actively changed to be $3000 and if only you had $3000 in your account your transaction would've gone through so it's your fault your bank didn't have enough money to send your mom $100.
  - iostream24 5y ago
    Or more like someone is depositing millions into their bank account in small coins and it’s occupied all the tellers in the bank and no one is available to deposit your granny’s 20€ check
  - GaylordTuring 5y ago
frgtpsswrdlame 5y ago
Even if you think the main reason crypto is bad is the environmental damage I think it's probably more convincing to normal people to talk about how stupid it is ala these fees than to talk about the environmental damage.
Razengan 5y ago
ajmurmann 5y ago
The best way to get people to care about carbon emissions as a cost is to tax carbon emissions. But unfortunately, we live in a world where increasing gas prices immediately cause calls for gas subsidies even from supposedly progressives.
- rank0 5y ago
  People get upset because it effectively becomes a regressive tax structure. The end game of taxing carbon has poorer people spending a larger percentage of their income paying taxes...even if they're consuming the same amount of resources as the rich. So when Exxon gets hit with a carbon tax, what do you think happens? Gas and Oil prices stay the same? Absolutely not! They increase, and consumers end up paying the difference. This doesn't just affect residential energy prices either. Production and distribution prices increase for every good/service consumed. Normal every day citizens end up footing the bill for corporations.
  - thebradbain 5y ago
    …and those citizens would be incentivized to pursue alternatives: car-pooling, biking, public transit, walking, EVs, along with the public/private investment in those modes. Making it costlier for consumers and corporations to pollute the environment so that they change their practices to more sustainable options is the whole point of the carbon tax.
    - rank0 5y ago
      You're missing the point. It would deeply widen the already large gap between the upper and lower classes. And the worst part: it still wouldn't fix the problem. The really carbon expensive aspects of society come from industrialization. Fossil fuels are not "optional". Without them none of the global supply chains would function. VERY few would have electricity in their homes. Building infrastructure would be insanely expensive to build with a carbon tax.
  - IanCal 5y ago
    Which is why the most suggested thing I've seen is taxing carbon and then distributing that evenly to all citizens. Anyone using less than the mean would benefit (which would cover the lowest earners because they're least likely to have cars and high energy use), while also having everyone incentivised to lower usage (which also means you can set the rates even higher). > Normal every day citizens end up footing the bill for corporations. Corporations are made of people. It's all just people doing things. Taxing anything is always taxing people which is a non-interesting statement.
_6hmp 5y ago
I'm not a fan of Yuga or "land" sales on blockchains, but this argument comes out every time there is something even tangentially related to proof of work blockchains. There is not a significant marginal expenditure of electricity per nft minted or transferred. The same order of magnitude of energy is expended to ensure the security of the blockchain whether a large NFT mint happens or not so long as the blockchain exists. What really happened here was that the company that launched this did it in a way that congested the ethereum network and an auction essentially occurred in "gas" to use the network for this purpose for a couple hours. Instead, the company should have pre-allocated guaranteed minting on a lottery basis so it didn't devolve into a "gas" auction or, increased supply to match demand, which they knew in advance (like you said, limits here are artificial).
- theturtletalks 5y ago
  A better way to look at the gas price is that is the cost of decentralization. One single entity being the source of truth will always be cheaper than a blockchain verifying a transaction. The caveat is if that cost is worth it. For buying tangible goods, the gas price might be worth it since Visa/MC control what you can sell online and payment processors can be circumvented using crypto. That is a pain point. For intangible goods, the gas price is simply not worth it. What pain point exists for owning digital goods that would require decentralization? In my opinion, none.
  - ec109685 5y ago
    Something like BOYC couldn't have been build in a traditional centralized manner. 4 founders had the idea of this club and were able to build it up on the back of Ethereum without any permission needed or their own infrastructure. It might not be worth it, but that's something unique that hasn't been possible before.
    - jasonshaev 5y ago
      Serious question: what did they actually build? They create images and sell them on someone else's network. I could list a JPG on eBay without having to run any infrastructure either.
xur17 5y ago
> Instead of talking about these "gas fees" in terms of their monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire. I'm 100% serious. That's.. not how this works. The miner receives a block reward which is a combination of a fixed reward (2 ETH right now) + tips from people trying to get their transaction (typically ~0.2 ETH) [0]. The rest of the transaction fees are burned by the network. In effect this means that miners are motivated to mine (and hence use CO2) based upon the block rewards. During periods of high network usage, they aren't magically procurring more miners, and hence they aren't actually using more electricity. And since the vast majority of the reward is burnt anyways, during high periods of usage, the miner reward doesn't actually go up that much. Regardless of all of that, Ethereum will be on proof of stake within a year (wouldn't be surprised if it's 3 or 4 months at this point), at which point the CO2 argument will go away altogether). [0] https://etherscan.io/block/14700751 https://etherscan.io/block/14700751
- mccorrinall 5y ago
  > And regardless of all of that, Ethereum will be on proof of stake within a year I’ve been hearing this since 2017. I won’t believe it until I see it.
  - delecti 5y ago
    Yup. > The ultimate goal of the Ethereum Foundation for 2017 is to follow the vision of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and make a move from a proof of work to a proof of stake protocol https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereums-2017-roadmap-flexibility-pow-to-pos-improving-ecosystem https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereums-2017-roadmap-flexib...
  - Entwickler 5y ago
    There's a site made to track the details of what needs to happen before the merge. https://wenmerge.com/ https://wenmerge.com/ it still lacks specific date commitments. The focus is on "when it's ready" given that ~0.5 trillion dollars are in the system.
thorncorona 5y ago
Perhaps instead of all of these feel-good blaming the end user for systemic issues we could actually solve of the low hanging fruit surrounding climate change? I'm tired of the blaming of regular people for not composting or recycling instead of the corporations who routinely behave poorly on a global scale. Instead of CO2 generated by computers we could talk about CO2 generated by heavy industry? Which is actually a large emitter? Or maybe we could talk about regulating corporate giants who routinely abuse environmental regulations by doing them in the 3rd world such as Conagra, Shell, or Dupont? These are companies which release untested chemicals and incentivize rainforest burning and yet we give them a free pass to focus on trivialities.
- iostream24 5y ago
  Is crypto mining heavy industry? All those poor miners with black lung and cave-ins and such…
- hkt 5y ago
  CO2 generated by Facebook and Amazon would be interesting to see. Worldwide computing usage too. Fair point though: companies should be embargoed for wrecking the environment at this point. Even a handful of big western countries doing it would likely make waves, even without the US.
- cuteboy19 5y ago
  0.1 % of the world's energy is used by this, and growing. It is no longer ignorable. And anyways most mining is inaccessible to regular people. It is gigantic corporations doing all the mining these days. Etherium runs mostly on AWS. E: AWS claims that 25% of ETH workloads run on AWS https://aws.amazon.com/blockchain/ https://aws.amazon.com/blockchain/
  - thorncorona 5y ago
    > The industrial sector accounts for 30% of global emissions and roughly 37% of global energy consumption. This huge share of climate-changing emissions from one sector is an equally huge opportunity for emissions reduction on a global scale. It's quite literally a rounding error. You're focusing on trivialities compared to actual polluters. It doesn't really matter whether it's accessible to regular people. Container ships aren't exactly accessible to regular people either. Eth most definitely doesn't run off AWS. Way too expensive lol. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/decarbonizing-heavy-industry-industrial-clusters/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/decarbonizing-heavy-i...
varenc 5y ago
An increase in gas fees doesn't correspond to an increase in energy consumed/CO2 produced. The network was chugging along at its usual hash rate like always, but this sudden demand for transactions creates a bidding war for the existing gas (computation) available. The fact that the gas rates rose so high shows that the network's energy consumption didn't increase. Of course, in the long term, exorbitant gas fees produce some incentive for more miners to join and burn more CO2.
mgraczyk 5y ago
This is wrong though. During the sale, the fees were much higher, but the CO2 emissions remained constant. It's just not the case that you can "talk about gas fees in terms of tons of CO2". You should talk about the CO2 emissions of the Ethereum network. It's not 1:1 with fees in any sensible way.
SubiculumCode 5y ago
This is a temporary state of things due to proof of work. Proof of stake is coming, and already bored apes et al should be running on a Layer 2 like Polygon. Harping on the environmental consequences is a bit disingenuous.
vmception 5y ago
Blockchains use the same energy whether there are transactions or not. This bolsters the anti Proof of Work/blockchain argument if you understood it. Which ironically means understanding blockchains instead of just finding the nearest convenient reason to not bother understanding them.
basisword 5y ago
>> Instead of talking about these "gas fees" in terms of their monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire. I'm 100% serious. We don’t do it with anything else, so why do it with this? Other than to virtue signal of course.
- tick_tock_tick 5y ago
  We do with tons of stuff? Articles have been written about CO2 costs for literally every aspect of life at this point. That being said Proof of Work is a slightly different beast because the consumption of resources is the goal in and of itself. Efficiency gains are antithesis to it as the cost is what keeps the network safe.
  - basisword 5y ago
    Yes, but we don’t do it and ignore monetary value. We can and do discuss both.
  - aunty_helen 5y ago
    When was the last time you read an article about the CO2 output of the finance industry? I can first hand assure you there are a lot of very expensive CPU cores sitting in datacenters all over the world shuffling money back and forward for fractions of cents on the dollar.
    - johnny22 5y ago
      huh? people talk about it all the time on this very site in the past. ALthough it's usually about how much VISA and mastercard uses, or how much is used by money flowing through the american banks.
fosk 5y ago
> Instead of talking about these "gas fees" in terms of their monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire. I'm 100% serious. I am so annoyed by this argument. The question we should be asking ourselves is how electricity is being generated in the first place. Fighting crypto is the wrong fight for environmentalists: the right fight is transitioning to healthier and cleaner source of energy in a world that will inevitably consume more and more electricity as part of our organic progress, with or without crypto. If anything, use crypto and electric cars as a driver to enact these changes, not as blockers, since they drive more electric consumption and therefore they help making a stronger case for cleaner source of energy.
- iostream24 5y ago
  That’s like saying drunk drivers are actually lobbyists for funding more police sobriety checkpoints.
  - fosk 5y ago
    No. It's like saying that we need more food (and technology to produce it) to sustain an ever growing population, rather than saying we should mass-murder our population to bring it back within an acceptable boundary. This will bring investments, technology advancements, and trigger a race to generate energy in a better way. We will always consume more energy (and food!) as our civilization progresses, I am embracing that without blocking that. Also, even without crypto we still need to find better energy sources anyways, so what's the pushback all about? We are just kicking the can down the road with no action other than "criminalizing" crypto.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- cuteboy19 5y ago
  The incentives don't match. No matter how efficient we make our power generation, PoW will simply scale up and consume more, making those gains moot. It will use up cheaper renewable energy and force everyone else to keep relying on fossil fuels. Of course I should not forget to mention the e waste which is a concern regardless of how much greenwashing is done
MichaelBurge 5y ago
> we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire. The marginal cost of a transaction is zero. For example, if half the block was used, and half was completely empty, it would cost nothing extra to the environment to fill the empty half with random noise, NFTs, or Cryptokitty spam. Maybe long-term the storage, but nothing extra to mine that block like you're saying.
ra0x3 5y ago
This comment is a good example of trolling. How did this get to the top of the thread? > All of this, over gifs, jpgs and fake land in a theoretically infinite digital universe No good faith here. Can we flag this?
CryptoPunk 5y ago
Equating CO2 emission with Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire is deliberately inflammatory and grossly misleading.
- wyager 5y ago
  If anything, higher atmospheric CO2 is probably locally better for the Amazon.
smiddereens 5y ago
RGamma 5y ago
There's no reasoning about (lack of) fundamentals or e-waste with crypto loyalists. Just let it play out naturally: let the scammers scam, the gamblers gamble, the bag holders hold bags and the vanity coins go boom and bust. Can't do a thing about it; accepting this is much better for your sanity. And well, all the electronics that are wasted on digital La-La land? It's a tell tale sign of the decadence of our times. That too will come to an end, when earth finally forces us to get our priorities straight. It can only continue for so long...
bogomipz 5y ago
>"All of this, over gifs, jpgs and fake land in a theoretically infinite digital universe that was probably procedurally generated anyway." Sorry if this a naive question but what does "procedurally generated" mean here?
- Fomite 5y ago
  The "world" is algorithmically generated, rather than being deliberately designed.
- GalahiSimtam 5y ago
  Implying low quality art-wise, probably. Borrowed from videogames industry, where Elden Ring reviews outperformed No Man's Sky, but not only because the latter had 2^64 different planets, one for each seed value, while the former had the world pretty much handcrafted. In fact there are good games with procedural generation, too.

jameshart 5y ago

When's the President going to do something to fix these gas prices? Anyway, I thought crypto currencies were meant to be inflation-proof.

fartcannon 5y ago

It's kind of like trying to outwit other traders in the stock market, isn't it? Just a bunch of people building elaborate systems to gamble.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
Stock market trading is actually super efficient energy wise, comparatively, due to its centralized nature in a trusted environment. No need for proof of work or proof of stake, so no need to spin cycles for crypto trust theater (because you can still be prosecuted and sued if you steal crypto and it’s worth someone’s time to obtain justice; code as law until the cuffs are on or wallets are blacklisted at exchanges). In this example, Ethereum is this enormous, slow distributed runtime moving image receipts and tokens around.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  You can expand and contract the 'stock market' to whatever shape and energy density your argument requires. Does it include all the energy required to keep alive the people who work to sustain it? Does it include investors, the wealth it generates and all the super yachts bought with it? Or on the othet side, is it just the near energy free idea of what the stock market is?
  - bduerst 5y ago
    If ethereum ever achieved adoption even close to a fraction of what stock trading has, then you'd have the same problems and overhead. As it stands, the apples to apples comparison has any centralized, trusted network being more efficient than [attempted] trustless, proof of work like ethereum.
  - cuteboy19 5y ago
    There are already a hundred different crypto exchanges (more than regular ones, possibly) We do not count the people working on these exchanges as a part of crypto energy cost. So your argument is wrong, actually.
    - fartcannon 5y ago
      That's because you don't need the same scale of people to run a cryptocoin. It does it itself, more or less, with some maintainers. You can trade value with anyone anywhere in the world without all those banks and people. So in this case, it's an extremely important point.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    etherium solves 0 of those problems so it’s a moot point
- phkahler 5y ago
  >> No need for proof of work or proof of stake Yeah, I mean naked shorts and all.
  - vkou 5y ago
    1. Naked shorts are illegal except in very special circumstances for a market maker. 2. You don't need naked shorts for a stock to be >100% shorted. We'd all have been better off if people took the GME frenzy as an opportunity to better understand how stock trades work, as opposed to an opportunity to reinforce their pre-existing misunderstanding.
    - phkahler 5y ago
      Naked shorts are not possible with crypto unless I'm very mistaken. You could do it in some secondary market, but the blockchain AFAICT only works on "real" assets.
      - cuteboy19 5y ago
        Which is irrelevant, we should judge things as they are and not as they "should be". Exchanges are part and parcel of the crypto ecosystem. We cannot ignore them in this discussion. Naked shorts do exist in the crypto market and they do affect the prices of those currencies. But of course why would anyone do that when there are a hundred easier ways to manipulate the crypto market? Buy a few influencers and UFC athletes to shill your crypto and you get a much better return on investment.
  - cuteboy19 5y ago
    Naked shorts can and do exist on crypto exchanges
    - phkahler 5y ago
      On an exchange, but not on a blockchain. Exchanges are a convenience, and go against the entire concept of a distributed ledger. That part of what makes the whole thing a joke.
- m00dy 5y ago
  >.. a trusted environment .. There is a term called circuit-breaker. How would it possible to trust a system if it has a "feature" called circuit-breaker ?
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Crypto proponents and libertarians taking issue with the rules of the capital markets is different than the system having no trust. The US capital markets are some of the most regulated, trusted markets in the world; it’s why capital flows into it (versus say, Russia, China, LATAM, etc). Some poorly written smart contract isn’t going to nuke their (potentially hundreds of millions of dollars) capital on a whim, and if there is an issue, there is a resolution path through industry, government, and the courts. That is “revealed trust” if you will. Importantly, the belief of an individual can be drastically different than the consensus of market participants. Based on the capital allocation in US capital markets (tens of trillions of dollars), what does that signal regarding trust? https://www.sifma.org/resources/research/fact-book/ https://www.sifma.org/resources/research/fact-book/
  - thorncorona 5y ago
    You could instead lose $625M to poorly written code [0]. Crypto is just rediscovering the reason we have financial regulations, at a higher speed. https://crypto.news/axie-infinity-ronin-network-hack-625m-usd-eth/ https://crypto.news/axie-infinity-ronin-network-hack-625m-us...
    - lupire 5y ago
      Knight lost $400m due to a code bug in traffic.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - adoxyz 5y ago
    what's wrong with having a circuit-breaker? My house has many and they come in handy. Same with the stock market, it helps slow down emotional trading and limit certain attacks.

hombre_fatal 5y ago

Meh, we "waste" all sorts of energy, and what constitutes as waste is something to be debated and something that probably hits philosophical/ethical bedrock much like talking about, say, meat consumption.

warent 5y ago
We're not talking about abstract metaphysics here. These are objectively measured metrics that correlate to direct physical impact on the planet.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Yes, so does meat eating. Nobody said anything about metaphysics, but whether something is wasteful is a normative question.
  - warent 5y ago
    There is research demonstrating that the lowest-impact meat produces significantly more greenhouse gas than the worst, highest-impact vegetable. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216 If you're arguing that excess greenhouse gas emissions is not a waste product, then it seems like you're either embracing climate change or you know something about greenhouse gasses that nobody else knows.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      > There is research demonstrating that the lowest-impact meat produces significantly more greenhouse gas than the worst, highest-impact vegetable. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216 Yes, that is my point. > either embracing climate change I'm making the very basic claim that all of these are based on normative facts, not metaphysics.
jonny_eh 5y ago
"Murder isn't a problem because people die all the time."

haswell 5y ago

I'm admittedly not very knowledgeable about the Web3/Crypto space beyond the basics - are all of these fees also publicly visible on a ledger? It seems like someone could build a pretty sobering dashboard that shows exactly what you describe if this data is readily available. I've wanted to dabble in the space purely so I could understand it more deeply, but am not really interested in the hype. However, building visualizations to help people understand the insanity...sounds like an interesting project.

rglullis 5y ago
Yes, it is publicly available. The blockchain keeps a record of every transaction, which includes how much gas was spent.
joshcryer 5y ago
The gas fees don't really correlate to any energy usage. They're actually a fee for computation on the block. It's no different than the Bitcoin miner fee, except it's based upon how much code is being included and the current network demand. It still blows my mind people think it is acceptable that the network eat their transaction fee if the transaction doesn't go through, especially when these fees are so high (as if now it can cost $2k to do any sort of NFT stuff). Imagine sending $100 to your mom with your bank and then the bank charges you $2,000 and then the transaction doesn't go through because someone sneezed on the keyboard at the bank and forgot to press send and then the bank keeps the $2000 and your mom doesn't get the $100. Only in this case they didn't sneeze on the keyboard, the transaction calculation actively changed to be $3000 and if only you had $3000 in your account your transaction would've gone through so it's your fault your bank didn't have enough money to send your mom $100.
- iostream24 5y ago
  Or more like someone is depositing millions into their bank account in small coins and it’s occupied all the tellers in the bank and no one is available to deposit your granny’s 20€ check
- GaylordTuring 5y ago

frgtpsswrdlame 5y ago

Even if you think the main reason crypto is bad is the environmental damage I think it's probably more convincing to normal people to talk about how stupid it is ala these fees than to talk about the environmental damage.

Razengan 5y ago

ajmurmann 5y ago

The best way to get people to care about carbon emissions as a cost is to tax carbon emissions. But unfortunately, we live in a world where increasing gas prices immediately cause calls for gas subsidies even from supposedly progressives.

rank0 5y ago
People get upset because it effectively becomes a regressive tax structure. The end game of taxing carbon has poorer people spending a larger percentage of their income paying taxes...even if they're consuming the same amount of resources as the rich. So when Exxon gets hit with a carbon tax, what do you think happens? Gas and Oil prices stay the same? Absolutely not! They increase, and consumers end up paying the difference. This doesn't just affect residential energy prices either. Production and distribution prices increase for every good/service consumed. Normal every day citizens end up footing the bill for corporations.
- thebradbain 5y ago
  …and those citizens would be incentivized to pursue alternatives: car-pooling, biking, public transit, walking, EVs, along with the public/private investment in those modes. Making it costlier for consumers and corporations to pollute the environment so that they change their practices to more sustainable options is the whole point of the carbon tax.
  - rank0 5y ago
    You're missing the point. It would deeply widen the already large gap between the upper and lower classes. And the worst part: it still wouldn't fix the problem. The really carbon expensive aspects of society come from industrialization. Fossil fuels are not "optional". Without them none of the global supply chains would function. VERY few would have electricity in their homes. Building infrastructure would be insanely expensive to build with a carbon tax.
- IanCal 5y ago
  Which is why the most suggested thing I've seen is taxing carbon and then distributing that evenly to all citizens. Anyone using less than the mean would benefit (which would cover the lowest earners because they're least likely to have cars and high energy use), while also having everyone incentivised to lower usage (which also means you can set the rates even higher). > Normal every day citizens end up footing the bill for corporations. Corporations are made of people. It's all just people doing things. Taxing anything is always taxing people which is a non-interesting statement.

_6hmp 5y ago

I'm not a fan of Yuga or "land" sales on blockchains, but this argument comes out every time there is something even tangentially related to proof of work blockchains. There is not a significant marginal expenditure of electricity per nft minted or transferred. The same order of magnitude of energy is expended to ensure the security of the blockchain whether a large NFT mint happens or not so long as the blockchain exists. What really happened here was that the company that launched this did it in a way that congested the ethereum network and an auction essentially occurred in "gas" to use the network for this purpose for a couple hours. Instead, the company should have pre-allocated guaranteed minting on a lottery basis so it didn't devolve into a "gas" auction or, increased supply to match demand, which they knew in advance (like you said, limits here are artificial).

theturtletalks 5y ago
A better way to look at the gas price is that is the cost of decentralization. One single entity being the source of truth will always be cheaper than a blockchain verifying a transaction. The caveat is if that cost is worth it. For buying tangible goods, the gas price might be worth it since Visa/MC control what you can sell online and payment processors can be circumvented using crypto. That is a pain point. For intangible goods, the gas price is simply not worth it. What pain point exists for owning digital goods that would require decentralization? In my opinion, none.
- ec109685 5y ago
  Something like BOYC couldn't have been build in a traditional centralized manner. 4 founders had the idea of this club and were able to build it up on the back of Ethereum without any permission needed or their own infrastructure. It might not be worth it, but that's something unique that hasn't been possible before.
  - jasonshaev 5y ago
    Serious question: what did they actually build? They create images and sell them on someone else's network. I could list a JPG on eBay without having to run any infrastructure either.

xur17 5y ago

> Instead of talking about these "gas fees" in terms of their monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire. I'm 100% serious. That's.. not how this works. The miner receives a block reward which is a combination of a fixed reward (2 ETH right now) + tips from people trying to get their transaction (typically ~0.2 ETH) [0]. The rest of the transaction fees are burned by the network. In effect this means that miners are motivated to mine (and hence use CO2) based upon the block rewards. During periods of high network usage, they aren't magically procurring more miners, and hence they aren't actually using more electricity. And since the vast majority of the reward is burnt anyways, during high periods of usage, the miner reward doesn't actually go up that much. Regardless of all of that, Ethereum will be on proof of stake within a year (wouldn't be surprised if it's 3 or 4 months at this point), at which point the CO2 argument will go away altogether). [0] https://etherscan.io/block/14700751 https://etherscan.io/block/14700751

mccorrinall 5y ago
> And regardless of all of that, Ethereum will be on proof of stake within a year I’ve been hearing this since 2017. I won’t believe it until I see it.
- delecti 5y ago
  Yup. > The ultimate goal of the Ethereum Foundation for 2017 is to follow the vision of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and make a move from a proof of work to a proof of stake protocol https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereums-2017-roadmap-flexibility-pow-to-pos-improving-ecosystem https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereums-2017-roadmap-flexib...
- Entwickler 5y ago
  There's a site made to track the details of what needs to happen before the merge. https://wenmerge.com/ https://wenmerge.com/ it still lacks specific date commitments. The focus is on "when it's ready" given that ~0.5 trillion dollars are in the system.

thorncorona 5y ago

Perhaps instead of all of these feel-good blaming the end user for systemic issues we could actually solve of the low hanging fruit surrounding climate change? I'm tired of the blaming of regular people for not composting or recycling instead of the corporations who routinely behave poorly on a global scale. Instead of CO2 generated by computers we could talk about CO2 generated by heavy industry? Which is actually a large emitter? Or maybe we could talk about regulating corporate giants who routinely abuse environmental regulations by doing them in the 3rd world such as Conagra, Shell, or Dupont? These are companies which release untested chemicals and incentivize rainforest burning and yet we give them a free pass to focus on trivialities.

iostream24 5y ago
Is crypto mining heavy industry? All those poor miners with black lung and cave-ins and such…
hkt 5y ago
CO2 generated by Facebook and Amazon would be interesting to see. Worldwide computing usage too. Fair point though: companies should be embargoed for wrecking the environment at this point. Even a handful of big western countries doing it would likely make waves, even without the US.
cuteboy19 5y ago
0.1 % of the world's energy is used by this, and growing. It is no longer ignorable. And anyways most mining is inaccessible to regular people. It is gigantic corporations doing all the mining these days. Etherium runs mostly on AWS. E: AWS claims that 25% of ETH workloads run on AWS https://aws.amazon.com/blockchain/ https://aws.amazon.com/blockchain/
- thorncorona 5y ago
  > The industrial sector accounts for 30% of global emissions and roughly 37% of global energy consumption. This huge share of climate-changing emissions from one sector is an equally huge opportunity for emissions reduction on a global scale. It's quite literally a rounding error. You're focusing on trivialities compared to actual polluters. It doesn't really matter whether it's accessible to regular people. Container ships aren't exactly accessible to regular people either. Eth most definitely doesn't run off AWS. Way too expensive lol. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/decarbonizing-heavy-industry-industrial-clusters/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/decarbonizing-heavy-i...

varenc 5y ago

An increase in gas fees doesn't correspond to an increase in energy consumed/CO2 produced. The network was chugging along at its usual hash rate like always, but this sudden demand for transactions creates a bidding war for the existing gas (computation) available. The fact that the gas rates rose so high shows that the network's energy consumption didn't increase. Of course, in the long term, exorbitant gas fees produce some incentive for more miners to join and burn more CO2.

mgraczyk 5y ago

This is wrong though. During the sale, the fees were much higher, but the CO2 emissions remained constant. It's just not the case that you can "talk about gas fees in terms of tons of CO2". You should talk about the CO2 emissions of the Ethereum network. It's not 1:1 with fees in any sensible way.

SubiculumCode 5y ago

This is a temporary state of things due to proof of work. Proof of stake is coming, and already bored apes et al should be running on a Layer 2 like Polygon. Harping on the environmental consequences is a bit disingenuous.

vmception 5y ago

Blockchains use the same energy whether there are transactions or not. This bolsters the anti Proof of Work/blockchain argument if you understood it. Which ironically means understanding blockchains instead of just finding the nearest convenient reason to not bother understanding them.

basisword 5y ago

>> Instead of talking about these "gas fees" in terms of their monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire. I'm 100% serious. We don’t do it with anything else, so why do it with this? Other than to virtue signal of course.

tick_tock_tick 5y ago
We do with tons of stuff? Articles have been written about CO2 costs for literally every aspect of life at this point. That being said Proof of Work is a slightly different beast because the consumption of resources is the goal in and of itself. Efficiency gains are antithesis to it as the cost is what keeps the network safe.
- basisword 5y ago
  Yes, but we don’t do it and ignore monetary value. We can and do discuss both.
- aunty_helen 5y ago
  When was the last time you read an article about the CO2 output of the finance industry? I can first hand assure you there are a lot of very expensive CPU cores sitting in datacenters all over the world shuffling money back and forward for fractions of cents on the dollar.
  - johnny22 5y ago
    huh? people talk about it all the time on this very site in the past. ALthough it's usually about how much VISA and mastercard uses, or how much is used by money flowing through the american banks.

fosk 5y ago

> Instead of talking about these "gas fees" in terms of their monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire. I'm 100% serious. I am so annoyed by this argument. The question we should be asking ourselves is how electricity is being generated in the first place. Fighting crypto is the wrong fight for environmentalists: the right fight is transitioning to healthier and cleaner source of energy in a world that will inevitably consume more and more electricity as part of our organic progress, with or without crypto. If anything, use crypto and electric cars as a driver to enact these changes, not as blockers, since they drive more electric consumption and therefore they help making a stronger case for cleaner source of energy.

iostream24 5y ago
That’s like saying drunk drivers are actually lobbyists for funding more police sobriety checkpoints.
- fosk 5y ago
  No. It's like saying that we need more food (and technology to produce it) to sustain an ever growing population, rather than saying we should mass-murder our population to bring it back within an acceptable boundary. This will bring investments, technology advancements, and trigger a race to generate energy in a better way. We will always consume more energy (and food!) as our civilization progresses, I am embracing that without blocking that. Also, even without crypto we still need to find better energy sources anyways, so what's the pushback all about? We are just kicking the can down the road with no action other than "criminalizing" crypto.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
cuteboy19 5y ago
The incentives don't match. No matter how efficient we make our power generation, PoW will simply scale up and consume more, making those gains moot. It will use up cheaper renewable energy and force everyone else to keep relying on fossil fuels. Of course I should not forget to mention the e waste which is a concern regardless of how much greenwashing is done

MichaelBurge 5y ago

> we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire. The marginal cost of a transaction is zero. For example, if half the block was used, and half was completely empty, it would cost nothing extra to the environment to fill the empty half with random noise, NFTs, or Cryptokitty spam. Maybe long-term the storage, but nothing extra to mine that block like you're saying.

ra0x3 5y ago

This comment is a good example of trolling. How did this get to the top of the thread? > All of this, over gifs, jpgs and fake land in a theoretically infinite digital universe No good faith here. Can we flag this?

CryptoPunk 5y ago

Equating CO2 emission with Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire is deliberately inflammatory and grossly misleading.

wyager 5y ago
If anything, higher atmospheric CO2 is probably locally better for the Amazon.

smiddereens 5y ago

RGamma 5y ago

There's no reasoning about (lack of) fundamentals or e-waste with crypto loyalists. Just let it play out naturally: let the scammers scam, the gamblers gamble, the bag holders hold bags and the vanity coins go boom and bust. Can't do a thing about it; accepting this is much better for your sanity. And well, all the electronics that are wasted on digital La-La land? It's a tell tale sign of the decadence of our times. That too will come to an end, when earth finally forces us to get our priorities straight. It can only continue for so long...

bogomipz 5y ago

>"All of this, over gifs, jpgs and fake land in a theoretically infinite digital universe that was probably procedurally generated anyway." Sorry if this a naive question but what does "procedurally generated" mean here?

Fomite 5y ago
The "world" is algorithmically generated, rather than being deliberately designed.
GalahiSimtam 5y ago
Implying low quality art-wise, probably. Borrowed from videogames industry, where Elden Ring reviews outperformed No Man's Sky, but not only because the latter had 2^64 different planets, one for each seed value, while the former had the world pretty much handcrafted. In fact there are good games with procedural generation, too.