The Unreasonable Ecological Cost of CryptoArt
memoakten.medium.com
memoakten.medium.com
What we need is a very heavy tax on CO2eq, or on all pollution/ resource waste. A tax so heavy that we can lower other taxes as a result.
This way some products and services become more expensive in relation to others: the market will optimize low-pollution.
Eco-shaming is just sand in our eyes. Ban the plastic straws! Are you eating an avocado, seriously? This will not solve anything except for some people to have something to whine about.
I think it's a mistake to single out crypto as a unique actor in this growing issue, and that we should look for solutions that will generalize across all industries. Because all industries are contributing to the modern ecological crisis.
And I'll add, crypto does not care if energy becomes more scarce. What crypto cares about is that energy is equally scarce for attackers and defenders. If, due to regulation of production, the cost of energy goes up, crypto will use proportionally less energy and keep chugging away quite happily.
The idea that cryptocurrency is beyond government control is fundamentally wrong. Most people don't want to be criminals.
The energy consumed to power cryptocurrencies contributes nothing to society. It's literally destroying the environment in order to run as many SHA256 hashes as possible per second.
> The energy consumed to power cryptocurrencies contributes nothing to society.
This is simply false. The energy spent guarantees the integrity of the decentralized ledgers that power cryptocurrencies. Perhaps there are better solutions out there but it's wrong to say that the energy consumption produces no value.
> Of course even these figures — and anything an individual does — are a drop in the ocean of global emissions (~50 billion tonnes CO2e).
There are much higher priority targets for carbon footprint reduction. Eventually cryptocurrencies will use different less expensive algorithms and electricity generation and storage will be a lot friendlier to the environment.
This is not of anywhere near sufficient value to society to justify the obscene amount of resources consumed for it. Personally, I would say that it, in fact, contributes nothing to society.
You could say that the system is inefficient. I agree with that. It's not just energy consumption and carbon emissions either. Users literally pay the cost in the form of ridiculously expensive transaction processing fees. It must change in order to be more efficient and less expensive to use.
I don't agree that it doesn't offer sufficient value to society. It's extremely valuable technology that is currently being limited by high costs. We need to drive the costs down.
> there is no way to tax them
You put a heavy tax on power consumption. Done.
> just move to somewhere with less environmental controls
Crypto isn't the first industry to take advantage of tax arbitrage. By this logic, few businesses should run in the US.. and yet the only ones commonly taking advantage of havens and tax arb are larger orgs with the resources to structure.
Business and money are fluid, but not that fluid.
Manufacturing and moving physical goods is not fluid, but creating and transferring a fungible, pseudonymous asset is. It would be possible for a country to block or put a tariff on imported goods from a country that didn’t do enough to curb carbon emissions, but it wouldn’t be possible to block imports of crypto without overstepping.
The only reason anyone cares about this stuff is that you can sell it to the next sucker for real money. Make that unappealingly expensive, and the retail investors will go away.
In theory, if the world had a high energy PoW blockchain solely powered by solar energy, that would be ecologically harmless.
Solar panels that could otherwise be used to replace fossil fuels.
Yes, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that, because supply isn't constrained.
For any good (or service) for which there is sufficient supply elasticity, when demand increases prices increase temporarily, but that's then followed by an increase in supply to meet that demand.
The inflation adjusted price of high-end GPUs has been basically flat since 2000 -> https://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/103399-inflation-adjust.... Insofar as there has been variation, it has largely been due to other confounding variables.
In other words, solar panels will be used to replace fossil fuels no matter what. As long as there's a carbon tax, all crypto mining does is stimulate the demand for solar panels. Right now, I stand to gain a lot of money by starting a solar panel manufacturing company (because of crypto), but the net result (fully developed solar panel supply chains) is still good for humanity no matter what. That only happens if we have targeted environmental policy that magnifies that incentive.
Disclaimer: I am not subscribing to the climate alarmism, but I see that there is a majority now which does, so I at least demand efficient solutions and not more bureaucracy and cronyism.
First and foremost the ban has hurt segments of the disabled community that need easily manipulable straws in order to be able to eat. And then to add insult to injury, according to https://earth.stanford.edu/news/do-plastic-straws-really-mak... plastic straws make up less than one-percent of ocean pollution.
That disparity between consumer and environmental impact underlines why measures that rely on individual actions are doomed to fail: They are a minuscule improvement per person with nowhere long enough a tail to get close to the impact of the top polluting companies and sectors. Add on top of this the complacency that passing an over-hyped bill generates and how it paints all environmentalists as controlling jerks, and you have a bad situation all around.
I expect that the counterpoint to this would be that shaming doesn't convince people. Well, I'm not so sure about that. It's not like there's a happier substitute. These things are not fun. We are spending our planet. We need to tighten our extravagances. It isn't fun.
It does not. It pits the common people against each other while billionaires have jets, rockets and fully stocked houses they do not live it.
We need to fix something big here, and saying that tax will not happen is simply giving up a lot of species on earth (possibly humans as well).
> I expect that the counterpoint to this would be that shaming doesn't convince people.
:) It might convince one here and there, but that will add just one whiner to team whiny-whine. Ecosystems are suffering under the exploitation of human's profit maximization. Only a super heavy de-incentifizing tax can truly save us. And the reason that tax in not possible is the reason a revolution will be inevitable.
Curious, why do you feel this way? From where I sit, carbon pricing has been slowly (but surely) making its way into policy all around the world: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/02/climate/prici...
"Canada currently has one of the most ambitious carbon pricing programs in the world. Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Liberal government has enacted a nationwide tax on oil, coal and gas that starts at $15 per ton of carbon dioxide this year and will rise to $38 per ton by 2022. Most of the revenue will be refunded to Canadians on their tax bills; the government estimates that these refunds will offset higher energy costs for about 70 percent of people."
"With Congress largely gridlocked on climate policy, the main carbon pricing efforts in the United States have unfolded at the state level.
In the Northeast, nine states currently participate in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-trade system that auctions to power plants a steadily dwindling supply of carbon pollution permits. Carbon prices under this system have been fairly modest to date, and it is unclear how much the prices themselves have driven emissions reductions in the region. But states have used the money raised by the auctions to invest in efficiency and clean energy programs.
California, meanwhile, has enacted its own cap-and-trade program that goes beyond power plants and also covers manufacturers, refineries, and other polluters. Here, too, carbon prices under the system have remained modest to date, in part because the initial cap was set fairly high, and most of California’s emissions cuts to date have come as a result of other climate policies. Those include the state’s efficiency standards for buildings, and aggressive renewable power targets. State officials are now struggling to tighten the cap so that it drives bigger cuts in future years.
There are some signs that carbon pricing could expand further in the states. Virginia and New Jersey are making moves to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, and several Northeastern states are planning a similar program for cars and trucks that would put a price on transportation fuels and invest in mass transit, electric buses or other low-carbon solutions."
"Since 2011, China has been experimenting with cap-and-trade programs in several pilot cities, including Shanghai and Shenzhen. The country plans to gradually roll out a nationwide cap-and-trade program starting in 2020, with several years of testing before expanding to major sectors like electricity, steel and concrete.
If China manages to follow through, it will have created the largest carbon-pricing program in the world. But the government has not yet finalized key details, like how high it will set the overall emissions cap. Chinese officials have been talking with representatives from California and the European Union, trying to learn from their often-rocky experiences in designing cap-and-trade programs."
It hasn't been without its hiccups and we haven't reached maturity yet, but it's clear which way the political winds are blowing. The same can be said for crypto, funnily enough.
You get people thinking banning plastic straws is fixing things when it doesn't do much and what we need to fix warming is more like a $100 carbon price.
Even if POS doesn't replace POW, I'm curious whether the combination of POS and game theory does, in that breaking POS becomes incredibly expensive, because breaking the system would destroy the value of the stake.
Or they are sand in our eyes! There is a vested group who does not want to status quo to change. They make money on pollution, CO2eq-heavy stuff. We need to rearrange the system and the best avenue for this is a very heavy tax on pollution (so big we can lower the tax on wholesome behaviours, like, say, income from labour or housing).
The total non sense is selling an avocado that traveled 6000km to your local supermarket. Just pause for a second and think about it... We'll all need to make sacrifices, and shipping fucking fruits and veggies to the other side of the world is going to be one of them sooner than later.
There are already CO2 taxes on cars and it doesn't change much, people still buy them and it's still unsustainable on the long term. Taxing stuff doesn't automagically make the negatives disappear
> This will not solve anything except for some people to have something to whine about
Let's see how our grand children will be whining in 2150... I'd bet my left nut that your plastic straw and avocado issues will seem very distant to them
Are you sure about that? Over the last few years, EV + PHEV proliferation has exploded around the world. Electric cars now make up 54% of the market in Norway (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/05/electric...). In the US, renewable energy consumption surprassed coal for the first time in 130 years (https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=43895).
You're right that magic doesn't exist, but it applies to electric technology too; you can't just "will" fully featured replacement power systems into existence overnight. There's still a lot of R&D left to do, and the world is simultaneously working towards improving battery technology while also mass marketing existing technology.
imho we're just displacing the problem in time, lithium isn't magic either and will bring its own share of problems. As long as we keep building and using more and more vehicles we'll always hit pollution and recycling issues which aren't sustainable in the long run.
Also, Norway isn't India or Africa, it's a very small country with lots of resources, a very rich population and _massive_ monetary incentives to buy electric vehicles.
No matter how much we'll improve out tech, earth is still a finite planet with finite resources and we can't just keep our exponential growth targets indefinitely (more cars, more planes, more roads, more travels, more computers, &c.). It reminds me of plane engine improvements, every XX years we gain 5% on pollution and efficiency but we run 30% more flights... we'll eventually have to make sacrifices
Regarding whether or not "more electric cars" is a worthwhile goal, I recommend reading this: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/we-will-not-ban-cars
Especially when you have e.g. the aluminium smelting industry that uses around 10x more energy*. Arguably more useful, but the externalities of using unclean energy for that process, and all other unclean energy consuming industries, should still be priced in.
If cryptocurrency miners want to use that energy, they can knock themselves out, but they should at least be strongly economically incentivised to do it in a CO2-minimizing way.
* (15,000 kWh per tonne) * (63.2 million tonnes annually) = around 948 TWh sources: - https://aluminiumleader.com/production/how_aluminium_is_prod... - https://agmetalminer.com/2015/11/24/power-costs-the-producti...
Some (mostly already very wealthy) people want them. That is not the same as a genuine need.
Have you ever had all the funds in your bank account confiscated by the government? This happened decades ago to every citizen in my country. Have you ever had your bank deny you the money you need because everyone keeps trying to withdraw at the same time? Have you ever seen the government impose a $100/person/day cap on bank withdrawals?
You're telling me I have to pay some energy costs in order to make sure stuff like that never happens again? I pay it gladly.
Cryptocurrency has never been about "cashing out" though. The whole point is to be able to pay for things with the coins themselves, without the need to convert to fiat money. I believe Monero is the only one which will one day achieve this goal.
I'm not destroying the environment either. All the energy consumption of bitcoin doesn't add up to even 1% of global consumption. There are far worse offenders here yet somehow people are up in arms about non-fungible tokens. Why? Cryptocurrency is an easy and convenient target compared to entrenched and powerful industries like fossil fuels.
Also, "achieves less than nothing" is just factually wrong. By using even the pseudonymous bitcoin you make it that much harder for the government to seize your assets. They can't just order the bank to do it. They'd have to literally seize your computer in order to obtain those coins. Monero raises the bar even higher and changes the balance of power so thoroughly it's subversive.
The simple fact is that every dollar spent buying a new lambo by some crypto hotshot millionaire has to come from someone else buying their ticket to the carousel. Just like in any Ponzi scheme. There is no creation of value there, just an ever increasing pool of greater fools.
And now we even have companies with millions/billions of dollars worth of BTC on their balance sheet. What happens if one of those companies goes to bankruptcy court? Do you think their equity and debt holders won't want those tokens converted to fiat currency as soon as possible? How do you think that happens?
If you're truly paranoid about the government seizing your assets (which you have no reason to be unless you're already doing something stupid), you can always buy a precious metal or simply take out cash and keep it buried in your backyard.
Also, 1÷ of global emissions is already a huge number. And if Bitcoin should become as widespread as some people claim that number would still need to grow by a vast amount.
That wasn't even necessary. It doesn't matter if bitcoin price hits $0. What matters is whether people continue to believe in it. As long as people see value, there will still be value. It doesn't matter how many crashes it experiences. Short term speculators getting liquidated is a good thing.
> The simple fact is that every dollar spent buying a new lambo by some crypto hotshot millionaire has to come from someone else buying their ticket to the carousel.
Can't sell without buyers. Just like how startups pay people with company stock: cashing out to fiat depends on people believing in the company and buying their shares. All the money evaporates the second people stop believing in it. Doesn't mean it's a Ponzi scheme.
> What happens if one of those companies goes to bankruptcy court?
They'll sell the coins. If it's a big volume it'll cause a flash market crash because people will notice and panic sell. It doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
> If you're truly paranoid about the government seizing your assets (which you have no reason to be unless you're already doing something stupid)
Ah yes, I'm sure my parents must have been doing stupid criminal stuff when the government seized everyone's bank accounts in a desperate attempt to combat runaway inflation. Everyone in my country absolutely deserved to have their entire life savings stolen. They deserved being left with nothing but $50 in their bank accounts.
> you can always buy a precious metal or simply take out cash and keep it buried in your backyard.
I can also buy cryptocurrency which is much easier. I have cash too and precious metals. My parents were also smart enough to withdraw all funds from the bank before the government seized everything and it's the only reason my family enjoys some measure of prosperity today.
> Also, 1÷ of global emissions is already a huge number.
In absolute terms, yes. In relative terms, no. There are far worse polluters out there and attacking cryptocurrency achieves less than nothing until those polluters are regulated.
> And if Bitcoin should become as widespread as some people claim that number would still need to grow by a vast amount.
By that time the cryptocurrency ecosystem will hopefully have moved on to better less expensive systems.
Like the NFT isn't directly linked to the real world, it's only useful if everyone agrees to abide by it and that you own the thing (although I suppose you could say the same thing for most property ownership).
Whereas with Bitcoin, the entire thing is digital. The only thing that is non-digital is the valuing of the bitcoin itself. That takes places in each individuals mind. Thus Bitcoin (store of value) is a solid usecase of this. NFTs are dumb.
The only thing that ensures some value are transactions being made, and right now that is just a low level of illegal black markets in drugs, etc. you can't use it to purchase normal goods or services - I don't feel that justifies the current prices so it seems like a pump and dump.
In a very real sense, I've used Bitcoin to buy real things — and I really don't care at all about the fact that I had to convert to Euros first; it still was just as useful for me to store value I've produced until the time, months later, I'm ready to consume it.
There are other technologies to store wealth and we can compare them, Bitcoin is certainly not the only one. But I think failing to acknowledge this would be just as foolish as pretending it is the only means to do this.
> But why use Bitcoin for that? You could use GME shares and get the volatility without the crazy power usage, or use a stable ETF.
Because if you plot the BTCEUR, the EUR ETF of your choice, and GME *USDEUR over the last 10 years, and apply a moving average equal to your financial buffer (say 6 month), you will see one is clearly trending up: BTC
Someone who put 1% of their income or use DCA to regurlarly buy an equivalent amount of BTC, GME, any ETF will quickly find than the BTC represent 90% of their saving, meaning it grew much faster than anything else.
It's not the volatility or the greeks, but the time trend if you can afford to delay your spending!
If you spend 2/3 of your saving to acquire something that you realize is worth 9 times less than what the other 1/3 of your savings purchased, you quickly stop and reevaluate your automated purchase decisions!
At least titles are relatively harmless
If you're thinking "but it can't be that stupid" then well...
As when you think about it, what gives some rich aristocrats the right to own all the land? It's not as though God Himself came down and gave it to them (though they used to claim this with Divine Right) - they just have some piece of paper which they use to enforce their "ownership" with violence, and demand rent.
I hope at least the absurdity of NFTs might make more people see the absurdity of privately claiming the Earth's land and resources too.
Technically, the state has the "monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force" and other actions, so the threat of violence to non-compliers is part of the law (and probably the largest part if you go far enough back in time to when the land claim originated).
But this is a digression, unless you're making the point that NFTs and suchlike junk are lacking even that customary legitimacy. Without it, a dollar is mere "paper fiat". With it, it's a buck.
> It's almost like a parody of private property ownership.
Yep, without backing, this is make-believe ownership. Not technically enforceable on a .jpg image, not legally enforceable because existing property rights laws take precedence.
Happy if someone with real insight in the industry can share their thoughts..
It may feel worse to the artist because they can see someone making money off their work more directly rather than through ads such as how it happens on YouTube for instance, but it doesn't decrease the value of their art if they were to sell it themselves.
For most of history, scarcity was something that humanity wanted to overcome (and the internet offered a glimpse into a world where it had been overcome).
Now a lot of brain power is spent to "attain" scarcity.
Where did we take the wrong turn?
There are people who stick to their guns and those who were always critical/proponents of crypto- good! But it'll all be forgotten once the fad goes through its course.
Seriously a lot of the NFTs are centralised enough that you might as well just store em in a $50 cloud hosting solution.
however, if you consider the comparison in OPs link - "1.5 thousand hours flight" - and assume 1.5 hour flight averages $50, then 1000 x $50 = $50,000 for a piece sold for how much? millions? not only a great deal for the buyer but also for the environment, considering any business may have way over $50k in expanses (~= CO2 emissions) to generate this revenue.
Most NFTS are selling for under a couple thousand. Even over many editions, the millions figure is not common.
What does this mean?
You explained how this applies to ETH 2.0, how about Cardano and Polkadot?
Polkadot is not "pure PoS" as well, but feel free to bring a citation to prove me wrong.
...For those of us who do not eat, drink, sleep, and breathe cryptocurrency news, could you please explain what this means?
A bunch of people have been mentioning "Proof of Stake," but it's a term I've never heard until the comments on this article.
But this is part of the problem: people passing doom-and-gloom judgment without knowing what is going on. This information is easy to find and people have been screaming it for weeks, but it gets drowned out by the hysteria. Meanwhile, I STILL don't see any new fossil fuel regulations or a GND on Biden's desk, and no one seems to care.