Snake in a block – how I ran snake on Ethereum

primarily because artists are poor because art pricing is a race to the bottom and the audience for their work doesnt exist outside of nfts as it is oversaturated

the secondary reason is that the nft pipeline has royalties built in upon future sales between third parties and the royalties automatically go to the original artist

it will likely be a race to the bottom in the nft space as well as it becomes more oversaturated

while royalties are unobtainable by almost all artists, and even the ones with the expensive network and resources to get into such licensing arrangements have trouble enforcing the royalties and at great expense and use of energy with the entire legal system

collectors like them because they can obtain tertiary valuable benefits to closed communities, being able to prove ownership in ways that “right click save as” cynics cannot with their raster copies of nfts

Ethereum would be mined, regardless whether NFTs exist or not. It was early, and grew quickly to become the number 2 coin in terms of market cap. It’s heavily leveraged. The price is high enough to not care about everything else. As long as people play the liquidity game on exchanges (pure TA trading), other parties will continue to mine.

Its all new so the carbon footprint of these is likley to go down as they find new ways to work with these. I've done traditional art for over a decade. I've sold a lot but it's not enough to live on nor is it easy to find buyers especially in areas like where I live. I'm guessing you've never heard the term starving artist. Most traditional artists aren't able to sell their work for much or at all no matter how good it is. In areas like mine, no one can afford it. Could sell it online but it's costly to ship and depending on the distance and considering the packing material, and waste created making it, not much greener than making an nft, if it is at all. A lot of people make digital art that isn't an nft and sell it online. It's easily stolen and never paid for or the amount paid is a few cents for each download.You either need to be good at selling and advertising or pay a lot to have it done. Most the NFTs I find are extremely different from traditional art. People are buying and selling crypto currencies regardless of nfts, artists just found a way to use it that profits them. If you consider someone could make a living selling these, it means they probably won't need to drive to work daily saving fuel there so it may balance out to the same as driving to a job while doing art as a hobby or side job. This opened up possibilities of remote work for more than just artist since people are needed to run it all too. In an area like where I live, you have 100 mile round trip to work each day. In fuel alone that's a decent carbon footprint. Now add the fact those kinds of miles mean more oil and tires are needed. I feel like the amount of remote work these opened up probably makes up for the waste they produce. There's a lot there to consider before I'd say it does or doesn't but the average NFT has a carbon footprint of about 90 kilograms whole a 32 mile drive to work is 3200 a year (about 9 kilograms a day). An artist wouldn't need to make or sell one each day. Some only need to sell a few in one year maybe just one to no longer need a daily commute. Since that only considering 32 miles and here the daily drive it 3X that, it seems like a good way to cut a carbon footprint too. Opensea is starting to use polygon for nfts, a more eco-friendly option, so they are trying to cut that area back to.From the look of it, another nft marketplace may have found a way to make and sell these with a lot less of an impact. Nfts are a small percent to blame for emissions. Buying anything at all has a carbon footprint. It had to get there somehow right. Why destroy the the planet to buy clothes that serve no real function other than looking nice? Why destroy the planet to buy anything that isn't vital to survival? It's odd how people call it destroying the planet when it's something they don't enjoy but don't look at their own carbon footprint for things they enjoy. I've cut my carbon footprint in so many ways for so long that if I sold a few nfts it wouldn't come close to what I cut. The lack of new clothes alone would likley make up for it x1000 alone. If I sold any it would be for the same reason I'd need to drive 100 miles a day. People participate to make money where it's being made like they always have. It's a source of income to pay for the things we need to survive and its not really much different than other more traditional jobs other than its more accessible for those if us in remote areas with few options for work.

Yes, the gas fees support the miners directly. Of course, the miners are also financed via the block rewards; the cause-effect relationship is much more spurious there; individual transactors can only be considered responsible for that part of the energy output in so far as their actions cause an increase in the price of ETH, for example by causing ETH to be desirable.

Arguably, a sell-transaction of ETH could be energy-positive in that it causes downward-pressure on the ETH price.

This also means that buying ETH on an exchange can be considered as contributing to the energy consumption of the network.

The fees the miners earn are currently a small part of their revenue:

https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereu...

This is incorrect. Ethereum gas fees are burned, they don't go to miners.

Yes but less than before (since eip1559 part of the fee is burned instead) so the relationship is sublinear.

yes, they deployed it on mainnet Ethereum, they could also deploy it on non Proof of Work platforms that use the Ethereum Virtual Machine, their wish was to display it on the NFT marketplace Opensea, which currently reads data from Ethereum mainnet and Polygon mainnet so they have two choices.

to answer the more facetious but concerned prior poster, blocks use energy no matter how many transactions are involved, so the existence of the transaction itself was not a meaningful contributor to the energy use. completely empty blocks use almost the same amount of energy, which inevitably solidifies the actual concern about Proof of Work energy use, but also highlights how its not a useful comment on any thread that coincidentally used a Proof of Work blockchain as a development platform.

The energy cost is born for two purposes, neither of which is entertainment:

1) reach consensus on tx history (without being hampered by notions of weak subjectivity like PoS is)

2) provide a somewhat fair distribution mechanism for new coins (something PoS fails at completely)

If the price drops, there will be less incentive to mine. We are headed downwards anyway

PoS is coming. There may be other developments too. Betting against humans figuring out how to do something they want to do is rarely a good idea in the long run.

Well I don't think the 6 tons of CO2 is reasonable. But I think the someone already paying $150 in transaction fees might be willing to pay $112 to mitigate the environmental damage as well.