Hacker News Reader

Comment by schrototo | Hacker News Reader

God this is infuriating. Apart from being an obvious scam, NFTs are actively doing harm to the environment. This is not funny, it's just bad. It’s a net negative for humanity.

As, of course, are any and all cryptocurrencies and blockchain-related get-rich-quick schemes. I can’t wait for this whole pyramid to collapse.

View on HN

> NFTs are actively doing harm to the environment

I think there is a few misunderstanding here that are worth clarifying. Proof-of-Work blockchains are actively harming the environment due to mining activities. How much energy miners spend on the network is mostly a function of the crypto currency price, not the number of transaction.

Secondly, NFTs can easily be minted on Proof-of-Stake blockchains that do not rely on miners and have little impact on the environment (and have very low gas fees, so that would also be beneficial for buyers and sellers).

My point is: Proof-of-Work is the actual environmental disaster, not NFTs.

(Note: I think that NFTs are an absurd and stupid concept that is completely overhyped)

I thought you were saying that PoW is environmentally fine, as long as the currency it's securing is sensibly priced (which Bitcoin is not).

PoW is an environmental disaster because of its terrible incentives. When the price is low the amount of energy spent isn't such a big deal because it will be limited by the expected reward (which is low), but the more the price raise the more miners will spend to get their rewards (which correlates directly with a higher energy footprints).

And next time you think a "grey goo" or "paperclip optimizer" scenario can never happen, think of this. A clear cut case of it, we're just lucky humans were still involved so we can choose to pull the plug.

A distributed plug though, that will be hell to unplug it!

It's not about the price but about what is being secured. If Bitcoin's market cap was $1Q and used as a global financial settlement layer then there is some threshold where "it's just the price we currently pay"

That is an unsettling perspective. Bitcoin like a humongous casino. Its only societal value is to vent speculative impulses. When the tulip mania happened in Netherlands, one could argue, it was caused by wealth inequality. The tulip bubble represented a way to fly up the ever lenghtening social ladder. Makes you wonder.

Now that solar is the cheapest source of electricity miners are actually switching to solar in a big way.

This not only drives the solar industry, but takes proof-of-work’s foot off the gas, environmentally speaking.

I think it's necessary to put emphasis on the "get-rich-quick schemes" part, and not the "blockchain/cryptocurrencies" part.

I hope you're not implying blockchain tech and all cryptocurrencies don't/can't provide real utility value, but if so I beg to differ substantially. I built a hook to the Stellar blockchain to store SHA256 hashes of audit evidence that can be validated against at a later time as tamper-proofing evidence. This is just one extremely simple use case, not to mention the entire Defi ecosystem that's being developed as we speak.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161

I am absolutely implying that blockchain tech is fundamentally useless, and cryptocurrencies doubly so.

Depends how you define useless. They're pretty good at demonstrating what happens when the immature, privileged assholes of this world run amok with shitty ideas, devoid of any true foresight or reflection.

They're also pretty good at demonstrating how a borderless financial system can facilitate innovation and development whilst retaining IP without VCs (Aave, Uniswap).

Now all we need is the autogenerated whitepapers.

A bold statement is expected to have an argument. A trustless, censorship-resistant ledger is fundamentally useless? Come on.

HFSP

Why not use Twitter or GitHub instead?

So you don't need to put your trust into all the people that have or could gain write access to their databases?

The tamper-proof timestamping has been around for a long while - there are many timestamping servers which sign hashes using a simple protocol [0][1]. Get a signature from a few servers in different jurisdiction if you are worried that one will get compromised.

This is one of the reasons I don't like the blockchain hype -- people have real problems. Instead of choosing existing simple and reliable solutions -- TSA, CT-style logs[2], people go with the blockchain stuff which directly powers cryptolockers, ponzi schemes, and other crime.

Yes, I know cryptolockers don't use Stellar... but most people don't -- and they see posts like yours as a justification that to put their life savings into another scam.

[0] https://www.freetsa.org/index_en.php [1] https://gist.github.com/Manouchehri/fd754e402d98430243455713... [2] https://certificate.transparency.dev/howctworks/

Tamper proof timestamping is just a small part of blockchains and they exist in parallel with different security guarentees.

Blockchains aren't going to dissappear so in my mind the only good solution is to educate instead of fear monger.

Apart from being an obvious scam, NFTs are actively doing harm to the environment.

It's like people collecting/trading/selling Funko Pop figures, or most other collectibles. NFTs are pretty much captialism working as intended. Is scam the right word?

Sort of? It is clear evidence that capitalism does not actually value productivity or improvement of the human condition, at the very least.

Was it supposed to? Humans aren't maximisers and a cursory glance at history finds that productivity and the human condition is often forgotten.

I don't think it is supposed to. But I do think that a lot of people believe (falsely, in my opinion) that capitalism will produce the best outcomes. Identifying cases where that is clearly not the case can disabuse people of that idea.

When it comes to NFTs who's being scammed? Longer term crypto investors, CEOs of companies and already wealthy that are buying these NFTs? It's not that difficult to look through each wallet and see their substantial holdings.

I also hope blockchain related get rich quick schemes collapse, so we can finally look at areas where distributed hash technology can actually be benificial.

I'm not sure how NFTs work, but are they proof of work or proof of stake? I was under the impression that one was more destructive than the other, and that proof of work was very outdated. I would imagine NFTs being somewhat new that they use the newer protocol.

So I see this claim made a lot, but I wonder if it isn't a spillover of the BTC inefficiencies into a domain that doesn't have this problem? I could be totally off here though.

> I'm not sure how NFTs work, but are they proof of work or proof of stake?

NFTs are nothing but a transaction on a blockchain (which can be proof of work or proof of stake). There will be unique transaction id (which proves nothing). The image associated and the transaction id or any data with the transaction has no relation whatsoever. For example, you can get access to this cat image and replace it with a dogs image and nothing happens.

No, it's good! It's free market efficiently re-allocating funds from stupid people to clever people who would have a better use for the money.

I'm not sure where you get this kind of idea. Those purchasing NFTs are normally quite wealthy. Those creating NFTs are normally already famous (therefore moderately wealthy).

Like art it's just a way for the rich to move numbers on a computer around.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com