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Comment by _6hmp | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a fan of Yuga or "land" sales on blockchains, but this argument comes out every time there is something even tangentially related to proof of work blockchains. There is not a significant marginal expenditure of electricity per nft minted or transferred. The same order of magnitude of energy is expended to ensure the security of the blockchain whether a large NFT mint happens or not so long as the blockchain exists.

What really happened here was that the company that launched this did it in a way that congested the ethereum network and an auction essentially occurred in "gas" to use the network for this purpose for a couple hours. Instead, the company should have pre-allocated guaranteed minting on a lottery basis so it didn't devolve into a "gas" auction or, increased supply to match demand, which they knew in advance (like you said, limits here are artificial).

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> The same order of magnitude of energy is expended to ensure the security of the blockchain whether a large NFT mint happens or not so long as the blockchain exists.

That's not completely true. The amount of resources wasted per hour are proportional to the value of the coin. Lacking any genuine uses for for cryptocurrencies, people determine coin value by things like transaction volume, market capitalization, influencer endorsements and active wallets instead. Thus every additional user, transaction and especially the common million-dollar wash trades designed to pump their respective projects, contribute significantly to the waste that is generated.

That's only true in the long term. It's not true as applied to this particular sale.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_network_hash_rate

A better way to look at the gas price is that is the cost of decentralization.

One single entity being the source of truth will always be cheaper than a blockchain verifying a transaction. The caveat is if that cost is worth it.

For buying tangible goods, the gas price might be worth it since Visa/MC control what you can sell online and payment processors can be circumvented using crypto. That is a pain point.

For intangible goods, the gas price is simply not worth it. What pain point exists for owning digital goods that would require decentralization? In my opinion, none.

Something like BOYC couldn't have been build in a traditional centralized manner. 4 founders had the idea of this club and were able to build it up on the back of Ethereum without any permission needed or their own infrastructure. It might not be worth it, but that's something unique that hasn't been possible before.

Serious question: what did they actually build?

They create images and sell them on someone else's network. I could list a JPG on eBay without having to run any infrastructure either.

They built a weird business that made them rich.

If it wasn't built on crypto hype, it wouldn't have been popular.

Listing jpg’s on eBay wouldn’t get you a cut every time one of those jpgs was sold. You couldn’t easily airdrop items to holders of your apes, etc.

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