I hadn’t heard of this and it’s blowing my mind.
NBA Top Shot, cryptoart, and other NFTs are selling for millions of dollars – Vox:
NFTs, the digital bits of anything that sell for millions of dollars, explained. Artists, influencers, and the NBA are making millions from non-fungible tokens.
Just another take on NFTs:
https://seths.blog/2021/03/nfts-are-a-dangerous-trap/
Thanks for that. Very interesting and this particular article is especially frightening: but-the-environmental-issues-with-cryptoart
It seems that as a species we only respond to short, simple messages so,
NO MUSIC ON A DEAD PLANET or put another way
NO ART ON A DEAD PLANET … (as the saying on the T-Shirt goes)
1 day of _just Etherium_ == 25.36 TeraWatts used Year to date.
1 day of _just Bitcoin == 77.782 TeraWatts used Year to date.
(1TW=1.0E12 Watts)
The CO2 footprint of JUST these two are 36.95Megaton and 12.05egaMton of CO2 respectively. These are annual numbers, but the website listed below shows it on a per transaction basis.
(source:
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption)
I really cannot think of a more pressing issue than keeping our planet from being dead. In the classes I teach, we are always on about “efficiency, efficiency, efficiency” … cryptocurrency is the antithesis of this, but really, it doesn’t have to be: It’s an implementation and hardware problem which is completely solvable.
EDIT: where it says “1 day of” substitute “Year-to-date”
My bad.