I don't think anyone understands that this is purely a "fun" thing to raise money. Yes, it's exactly like a donation drive.
They're literally aiming at saving thousands of lives and the comments are all focused on how bad NFTs are. Give me a break, talk about missing the point.
"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible" ~ Stanisław Jerzy Lec
No transaction individually harms the environment. The collection of all transactions harms the environment. This one transaction is part of that collection and it has potential to help attract people to the platform which will encourage more transactions in the future.
Just donate the money, using a fraction of the carbon cost, and if you want to generate hype, do a match.
What a waste of time and energy.
It's not nonsensical from the perspective of their mission if it increases the amount of money that they're able to raise.
> What a waste of time and energy.
They're emitting ~90 kilograms of CO2 to save 2000 lives, which is a good trade-off if they wouldn't have been able to raise that much through traditional channels.
Source? I'm curious to see exactly how the environmental harm of a fundraising dinner is quantified.
edit:
When I google "ethereum transaction energy cost" the Google featured snippet says 50kwH for a single transaction. I find it hard to believe that it would take 50kWH to cook a single dinner. If you're referring to multiple dinners, then you would have to subtract the cost to eat in general as eating is a human necessity - hence me asking your source since I'm genuinely curious.
But again, I want to reiterate that focusing on the environmental impact here is totally missing the point. It's like saying the outside of the hospital is painted a jarring color.
also, given that it's already very easy to send money to any non-profit talking about the potentially unnecessary environment costs doesn't seem unreasonable. the only reason people bring it up is because there's an alternative that doesn't incur the same costs but achieve the same thing.
Neither of us put up numbers, but I didn't call you disingenuous. I stand by what I said until I see math to the contrary.
Apparently it's on Ethereum. Ethereum is already using an hybrid PoW / PoS (proof of stake) chain and at some point the PoS chain should be the only one. It PoS works, the impact on the environment should be a rounding error.
At this point people are voluntarily using an expensive and wasteful mainnet on Ethereum, and it is better to promote the the existing solutions rather than spread FUD that they do not exist.
I am not arguing blockchain in various implementations do not harm the environment, only that there are many external costs and collateral damage by the current systems which is often ignored. What is a "normal donation drive" after all? Is it a bunch of celebrities and musicians jumping on private airplanes? Is it a $10,000 per plate filet mignon dinner indirectly supporting bigAG and bigAG animal farming? What external costs have you contributed to just to make a post, are there plastics in your device, was coal burned somewhere or fossil fuel burned to supply parts to your device or charge your device?
Certainly this NFT is not saving lives, the entity behind it was saving lives before the NFT, and certainly they would have continued to save lives without the NFT, but if the NFT generates $2.5M and they can save 1 life with every ~$1,200, then there is a number. Maybe someone who really believes in the argument that saving 1,000 lives is good but not at the expense of the environment which will result in killing us all can step up and pay this entity double ($5M) not to do it, sure its a number reserved for the 1% but its also a number that means nothing to the 1%.
You can't solve a political problem with technology. PoW is incredibly inefficient and wasteful. BTC is slow and wastes a lot of energy, just to maintain consensus.
I'd rather see a system with decentralised nodes I can trust (imagine tons of trustworthy corporations running these instead of the duopoly of Mastercard / Visa) which can process transactions without worrying about consensus and without wasting energy.
Looking forward to PoS, which could bring us closer to that reality.
Even with BTC (or a crypto with PoS) the problems with the governments won't disappear, I'm sure they'll find a way to keep ruining our lives and extracting money from us, even with cryptocurrencies.
Every action we take has tradeoffs. Everyone acts hoping that they can bring more good to the world than bad. Thats not to say we shouldn't be critical of decisions people make, but the moral panic around nfts is overblown imo. There are solutions being worked on [1] and the upside to addressing coordination problems[2] is huge.
Or, as the saying goes, "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater"
[1]https://our.status.im/ethereum-is-green/ [2]https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
But in the case of NFTs, there's no baby in the bathwater.
Not so sure about that one
I want to live in that world.
Those are some seriously potent rose colored glasses you've got going on there.
I think it's true that many people think and act that way, but I don't know what percentage of people are basically good like that.