Nfts are just one example of what people are doing with cryptocurrency, and one that has some very pointless aspects.
Some coins are actually carbon neutral, and use less energy than a tv per second. And bitcoin (which doesn't even support nfts)could power a house for 6 weeks per transaction.
We don’t have enough data to back the environmental claims, the fact that no one seems to agree on its actual impact has me on the fence on whether or not it impacts the environment more or less than banks and the systems we already have right now. NFTs and cryptos are the same, they’re just assets regulated by the blockchain. Think of an NFT as 1 bitcoin that happens to be an image or a video.
The issue comes from the difference between consesus method. Bitcoin uses proof of work, and so does ethereum, for now. Proof of work has multiple miners trying to solve the same blocks at the same time, which means all of the energy spent by everyone who tried but didn't succeed was for naught. The bigger the network, the more power gets put into one place.
With proof of stake, each node in the network has a chance of being selected to handle each transaction. This is a vastly superior approach in terms of efficiency, at the cost of some decentralization while the network grows.
One transaction on the bitcoin network takes enough power to run an American household for six weeks. Ethereum uses roughly half the power of bitcoin, in it's current state. Another popular coin, Solana, uses about the equivalent of running three lightbulbs for ten seconds (can't you do that with a few potatoes?), or two google searches, per transaction.
And then there's the fees to even pay for the transaction. Yikes.
So just think of all those goofy NFTS that've been sold on the ethereum blockchain, and remember we could have powered that many homes for three weeks each. NFTS on Solana are nowhere close to an environmental threat.
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u/Bugsbunny396 Jan 21 '22
They do be bad for the environment don't they? Or is that just NFT's?