Commercial aviation makes up 918 million metric tons of carbon.
Bitcoin mining makes up 22 million metric tons.
I'm less worried about NFTs than I am air travel.
Bitcoin mining makes up 22 million metric tons.
I'm less worried about NFTs than I am air travel.
If Bitcoin turned off tomorrow, some speculators would be very upset and nobody else would notice because 13 years in it still hasn't found something it can do competitively with alternatives which are significantly cheaper, easier to use, and less polluting.
Are you familiar with what is being done on these systems? Uniswap alone did $1 billion in fees last year, a distributed, permissionless, unstoppable exchange. Ethereum did $10 billion in fees last year.
I know someone who bought their house with a loan from Dai, which is far less hand wavy magic than Wells Fargo. It took them 30 minutes and no permission for the powers that be was needed.
Consider whether bragging about the overhead fees for a system which statistically nobody uses is a great way to sell people on it.
> I know someone who bought their house with a loan from Dai, which is far less hand wavy magic than Wells Fargo. It took them 30 minutes and no permission for the powers that be was needed.
How often do you buy houses that giving up protections is an important selling point? Someone is going to be left holding the bag if they're not scrutinizing the borrower's ability to afford the property and its value.
The fact that someone is paying interested on their house, a physical asset, to a blockchain application instead of Wells Fargo is a huge deal.
What you really want to see are real-world impacts: how many people use the network? How many real business transactions occur daily? and, especially, how much real value is entering or leaving the system? If a bunch of early adopters are churning an NFT back and forth boosting its value, they're definitely paying fees but that's neither economically-useful activity nor popular adoption.
Other stats are well known and easily googlable. People in the industry are constantly looking at those statistics, just like any other business or industry. Just for starters, Coinbase has 73 million users. Ethereum is doing 1.2 billion transactions a month.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/730818/average-number-of... https://www.coinbase.com/about#:~:text=Coinbase%20powers%20t....
Those are valid use-cases.
getmonero
If you consider that one of the two is (prior to COVID) used by a significant number of citizens of Western countries for vacations, business trips or visiting family, whereas the other is primarily used for financial speculation, money laundering and grey/black market financial transactions, this should be even more appalling.
I don't know what makes you think you can put these two numbers side by side and have Bitcoin's carbon emissions look like the reasonable one. Especially when aviation is an established industry and has been the target of ecological regulations for years.
NFTs do not provide social value. That's the central argument to the article. Did you read it?
In other words, as an electronic payments system, Visa is roughly one million times less polluting than Bitcoin.
So until NFTs are using a system at least as energy-efficient as Visa, I'll continue to worry...
Just because something we currently do is worse than something we want to do, doesn’t mean the new thing is good. Nor does it mean we should add to our current burden unnecessarily.
It also ignores what we use the old thing for. Flight has enabled so much: fast response to disasters, faster shipping of goods, saving human lives. The entire planet can benefit from flight. Crypto is used by a small minority and seems pretty much fueled by speculation.
The only legitimate use of crypto is as a currency in places where the economy is poor, or the state can too easily seize your assets etc.
No one said eliminate all air travel. Cutting it down to once a week for non-emergency use world wide would have a huge effect, but even then aviation is only 1.9% of the problem. Making tarrifs, even within the same country, on food grown by milage from consumption would reduce the transport and farming slice of the pie. Eat locally for the cheapest cost.
And there's no reason for it. None.
There are better cryptocurrencies: ones with no mining, that use a fraction of the energy.
Nano, for example, uses six million times less energy per transaction, and is mining free. It's fully operational, putting every Bitcoin maxi lie to shame.