Why not buy Bitcoins instead? I think it has to do with the cool factor. It feels probably better to own an NFT than a Bitcoin, as it feels different to own actual art than stock in the Coca-Cola company.
(I can only guess though, I have never owned any of those.)
Second of all - why do people pay more for a limited edition print than a normal print?
Well...no. Quite the opposite. The art is an asset. NFTs are not the artwork, and they're not a deed to the artwork. Buying an NFT gives you ownership of the NFT; it doesn't give you ownership of the artwork.
Selling digital unfakeable deeds to an artwork, and trading those deeds on the blockchain, sounds really cool. That might have value! But to the best of my knowledge, nobody has done that, largely because it's utterly impossible and we have no idea how to even go about trying to do it. And in any case, NFTs certainly aren't that. You're not buying and selling the artwork, you're buying and selling a numbered acknowledgement that the artwork exists.
- .pngs are you're 8 year old self may have left in your parents windows MyDocuments folder,
- scratch files your 14 year old self made at VFX camp
- any unused game assets that you have made for Unity/Godot
e.g. http://cryptoart.wtf/#https://superrare.co/artwork-v2/spheri...
(assign a GPT3 generated phrase, being fed some texts from the cubism,dada era (duchamp, picasso etc...) )
make 400$!
This thing is gonna get flooded
And I'm sitting on Marcel Duchamp's toilet chuckling to myself.
And just to be clear: Bitcoin is a bit more pushback than, say, residential heating, because it’s an entirely new CO2-emitting industry, and it is neither necessary nor beneficial except maybe for the thin slice of humanity that spends too much time on Reddit.
In other industries carbon emissions are an issue too, but at least there are people trying to bring energy use down with technology. Bitcoin’s difficulty mechanism nullifies any such attempts.
Name a single thing we produce with Bitcoin.
Internet arguments about Bitcoin?
I have it on good authority that owning bitcoin gives people a very similar kind of feeling and there is nothing wrong with that. humans doing human things.
of course now there's plenty of arbiters of what constitutes proper warm fuzziness, and apparently a new BMW made from aluminium and steel is AAA+, but buying 0.1 of a bitcoin is not.
Also, NFTs are generally based on Ethereum, not Bitcoin. Did you read the article?
If can start on the agreement that we need to curb our environmental impact, then any new technology we embrace surely needs to be very useful to as many people as possible in order to justify any significant affect on the environment.
It’s ironic that Bitcoin started as a way to subvert the state, but now that its externalities are clear it’s a failure of the state to control those externalities. Never mind that it would require a global carbon tax, since coins are fungible and mining will relocate to avoid having to pay the cost of its externalities.
Frankly, I'm increasingly of the opinion that we don't deserve to survive as a species.
Because that would be absolutely pointless.
If energy were infinite and free, then all of this would disappear instantly.
The value of crypto is proportional to the future cost of minting. No future cost == zero present value.
You are actually arguing that it's pointless to incentivise usage of clean over dirty energy. Do you own a coal mine?
> The value of crypto is proportional to the future cost of minting. No future cost == zero present value.
This argument requires some evidence. I was under the impression that scarcity of the asset underpinned the value.
This is not true, there are numerous ways to discourage these harmful proof-of-work systems.
This could be done at the mining source, by states taxing this industry extremely heavily or just banning it outright, and at the point of exchange, with states heavily taxing or banning conversion between normal currency to cryptocurrency. A wealth tax (payable in real money) on cryptocurrency holdings would be another option.
If enough economically influential states decided to do this, we should see a massive crash in the price of Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies from this, as people realise it's not worth the hassle of dealing with under these increased regulations.
Now I'm imagining a crypto currency that just gets awarded randomly to any person on the planet in a world-wide lottery. Or it could get distributed evenly like UBI to everyone.
If you devise a way to have a proveably fair worldwide lottery for every human on the planet at essentially zero cost to each participant, in a decentralized network, I think you would will win a Turing at least if not a Nobel, aside from making billions of dollars.
You need a random oracle that outputs a value that maps 1:1 to a human in the world, probably without any form of pre-registration, because any registration function can be reused by the same human multiple times.
Basically a decentralized technology that can identify souls on the planet and randomly select them in a Byzantine fault environment. As of today, entirely indistinguishable from magic.
Of course it’s possible to do with a centralized registration system, but building and deploying such a tracking system IMO is akin to a war crime.
Imagine you did that, everybody has 1 UniversalToken every newborn gets one (and people are absolutely not killing they own children for personal gain as it was done throughout the human history, I diverge). And by yet another miracle this token has some value.
You know exactly what those struggling financially do with that token right away. Food is better than tokens.
You also know who will buy it.
Thy system self-"corrects" itself right away.
I've been thinking about it for some time. Fiat system is flawed, it literally takes money away from the bottom and puts it at the top (inflations + being able to diversify outside cash + loans + bailouts). But even the most perfect forms of money seem to have inherent unfairness in them. Money makes money. Having time to research possible investments, having money to do them, being able to afford risk, liquidity that allow you to avoid loans (unless you want to use them for leverage) etc. At least as long as people sell their time which seems like the foreseeable future.
If you were hoping for me to offer some solution I have none.
<daydreaming> But on the long enough run (if we have one) I think money will become irrelevant and our society will be more like a single organism. A shift in entity and entities mindset to be more oriented towards information processing and achieving specific goals / playing specific role and less driven by the limbic system which now can be satisfied at will if still present. I mean, it sounds mooshy wooshy, but look around your lucky good coders bubble. I think money is already losing value for those who don't worry about basic needs (while of course still being solution to 95% of problems for those less lucky, which seems great to remember).
In more strict terms, the only valuable thing on the long run is information. I hope for some well-grounded disagreement on that.
That being said, this has been done, but usually off the backs of existing blockchains. In Etheriumland this is known as an "airdrop" and is considered a form of annoying spam these days. Of course, if you actually wanted a wallet full of no-name ICOs you could just send coins back and forth to yourself to keep your address on the blockchain so that you got more airdrops. This is bounded mainly by gas price (which is artificially made scarce through protocol limits), but I wouldn't consider this system robust or equitable.
Are you seriously asking how having the value distributed out to a large number of people could ever have utility without oligarchs to "set the value" to some "proper" value?
If you are worried about the environmental impact (which for 1 minting is fairly small) just use the PoS options available today and rant about ETH generally using PoW instead.
The article makes specific claims to the contrary
> just use the PoS options available today
Does PoS actually work today? AFAICS it's vaporware.
Which are unsubstantiated. One minting is basically one (largish) transaction. Transactions arent quite that expensive, it costs maybe $50-100 and you definitely don't put months of electricity to earn that little as a miner. I don't have the numbers but it doesn't check out.
>Does PoS actually work today? AFAICS it's vaporware.
Yes, it's worked for a while.
Yes. PoS chains using real practical byzantine fault tolerance like Cosmos Hub, using Tendermint consensus, have been running since 2018.
The author addresses the existence of Po[X]:
""" I’m sure you’re seeing the problem here- there is not a schema that doesn’t reward those who already are already wealthy, who are already bought in, who already have excess capital or access to outsized computational power. Almost universally they grant power to the already powerful.
This is also a climate issue. """
I'm not making _any_ claim about the worthiness/sustainability of the platform, just that it is what is being used. The list of "communities" on the Flow landing page suggests that it's being considered for a couple of high-profile platforms.
> today when you sell crypto art it's PoW.
I think more specifically when you sell crypto art on a platform that uses PoW, which makes this sentence a truism.
It's been coming soon on ETH. Again, you can use PoS options today outside of ETH. Tezos is a popular one, and even the biggest ETH marketplace (opensea) is adding Tezos as an option right now.
Most of the mining happening in China, for instance, is happening near non-CO2 emitting plants (hydropower, wind) where energy is virtually free most of the time. The increased demand for energy that is otherwise of little value may in fact be financing a rollout for renewable energy. The primary problem with renewables like wind power today is not production capacity, it is storage.
It stands to reason that at least some mining temporarily leads to increased CO2 emissions due to revenue exceeding the cost of fossil fuels. However, this only happens in the short term, because of difficulty adjusting revenue to the point where only the very cheapest energy sources remain competitive, and these are not fossil fuels. Furthermore, the increased demand for more efficient semiconductors finances the R&D required to lower the power usage of all computing into the indefinite future.
A few minutes with Wikipedia and a calculator would also lead to the conclusion that transmission losses in the worst case of having to transmit the power the longest straight line within Chinese borders are somewhere between 5 and 10 %.
1. If you are the Communist party and you are planning electricity for a 5M inhabitants city in 2007, growing at 9% (doubling every ~7 years, electricity use is highly correlated with economic growth), you need to make the plants 10 times bigger than needed for them to last 20 years
2. Mining equipment is placed next to the source of electricity
3. Corrupt officials are co-opted (just turn on that turbine that is wasted working capacity for you, and I'll pay you in cash)
4. Profit?
FWIW, I think this doesn't happen exclusively in China but in every place where there's idle energy capture potential.
Also, the green power generation requires the manufacturing and distribution of things like solar panels, which is not currently CO2-neutral and has other environmental impacts.
There are also theoretical (if not real) limits to how much you can actually expand grid capacity. Mining already even in conservative estimates consumes a lot of power, and unless PoS is fully rolled out it will continue to consume more and more, which will put increasing strain on local power grids.
The post you were replying to is disagreeing with this. Power made available for extremely low cost next door to a hydroelectric dam etc. might be technically "on the grid" in that there is some connection between that town and the rest of the grid, but if the long-distance transmission lines are already at maximum capacity (which is usually the case, otherwise power wouldn't be any cheaper in those towns than anywhere else) then that surplus power is de facto not available to the rest of the grid.
This is a hypothesis, but where is the evidence, i.e. actually increased CO2 emissions? My argument is that most of this mining is using electricity that would otherwise not be used or produced. That is why it is so cheap in the first place.
> Digital files also require power to access and maintain, and are incredibly unstable over time as new operating systems, plugins and standards render things unviewable- often within a decade. They are also vulnerable to bitrot and physical degradation of storage media- the stable shelf life of a CD-ROM, for instance, is less than 20 years.
This is pretty much nonsense. The actual artwork on a piece of paper will typically be lower fidelity than a digital version of it, and paper degrades faster than CD-roms. I've dug out a CD full of photos that spent 10 years in a damp attic, and the photos are as good as the day they were taken - try that with photos printed on physical paper. Furthemore, while an NFT is by design not copyable in some sense, it's certainly not vulnerable to degradation of physical media.
I don't know your definition of fidelity, but a paper artwork is full of details and a digital capture of it will loss information. Consider the tridimensional nature of real paper and paints, or the infinite interplay between light and medium. You can't capture any of that information in a digital copy.
Also, the argument about longevity is not that clear cut. We can see paintings in cave walls from thousands of years ago, same with stone carvings. Let's see if you can render a JPG 10.000 years from now. (without having to reconvert/maintain it each epoch)
For physical medium, given the right storage conditions, you can store film for quite a while, and that technically has infinite resolution in comparison to a digital copy.
I think the post does a nice job of countering this; a physical object will always contain much more information (in the Shannonian sense) than any digital alternative could, and that goes far beyond things like DPI.
Is this worth looking into?
It's about how he's against the tokenization of art, which happens on the public ethereum blockchain. Tokenization brings uniqueness to digital goods, because it allows you to prove ownership if all parties involved accept the blockchain as a source of truth.
Edit: I see I am getting downvoted for simply stating facts again. Perhaps you could try and debate instead?
That's an opinion - one I tend to share - so feel free to disagree.
When the value of crypto is high, large amounts of economic output are funneled into crypto at the expense of other opportunities. NVidia expects supply shortages of its newest line of video cards (released in December and going for $1500+ on eBay from an MSRP of $700) to extend into 2022. Oh yeah, and this happens every time a new generation of chips is released. Hope you didn’t need any to train ML models.
I started out mining BTC on a Core2Duo laptop from 2006, in 2010. I upgraded to a Butterfly Labs Jalapeno miner. Then I started to realize Chinese miners were soaking up the mining equipment and many of them were getting industrial power rates.
Then people who couldn't afford / acquire BTC ASIC miners made more ridiculous alt-coins that they could mine with GPUs. Cryptocurrency isn't the problem, people butthurt about missing out and wanting to make their own coin are the problem.
> Cryptoart lets a few artist early adopters get rich from a system made to reward investors, not artists.
This is true in the same way as Da Vinci pieces are expensive because Da Vinci was an "early adopter" (one of the first great artists)
Contrary to the article title, 90% of the arguments exposed are just rehashing why energy waste os bad, and why we shouldn't make use of it for NFTs. 10% of the article ("the many other reasons") is a critique of the art circuit and imho, a little ranty about how hard it is to get rich from art.
The actually interesting part of the article is at the end, but its just an enumeration of the ways in which cryptoart world:
* Cryptoart creates artificial scarcity for digital objects, creating an “original” which can be owned
* Cryptoart recreates the some of the worst aspects of existing art markets
* Cryptoart offers no intellectual property protection and there is no regulatory structure in place to keep copyrighted materials from being minted into and sold as NFTs
* Cryptoart smart contracts offer no legal protection, and any talk of contracts baked into the NFT “requiring resales to cut in the artist” or “compensate gallery workers” depend entirely on the goodwill of the purchaser.
The rest 4500 words are a repetition of how bad it is to waste energy, woth a note at the end about how the author was "never as bored with a subject to write 5000 words about it", which to me is pretty passionate.
edit: formatting
Maybe if they would fix their ideology, people wouldn't have to resort to decentralized solutions.
As for the actual content, I plainly don't trust the calculations of the anti-crypto crowd.
And while I also had lost faith in Proof of Stakes ever making it into Ethereum (unfortunately also selling all my Ethereum when I gave up on them), they have now activated the PoS chain and run it in parallel to PoW, with the goal to switch completely.
The stuff about "social justice" is also nonsense, at least with respect to mining in PoS: it is not that much Eth you need to participate, and if you don't want to invest as much, you can join a mining pool. Everybody can participate, if they want to. It is also not "unjust" if people who invest (or stake) more receive higher rewards. The opposite would be unjust.
This is not correct. About 1 block is mined every 10 minutes, while block rewards decrease over time.
The one block per 10 minutes is also what is kept stable, and the reason mining difficulty increases over time. There is nothing in BTC mandating the difficulty to increase, and indeed it does decrease sometimes.
I think a better way to put this would be to say that cryptocurrency and cryptoart cannot maintain value without maintaining scarcity, which they do by burning energy. The value doesn't come from the energy burning in itself, but in the current NFT system, that energy burn is a necessary component to preserve value. An attempt to change this would require finding a different way to produce scarcity.
Ethereum seems to very much be in the process is switching to proof of stake but we should ignore that because of the author's gut feeling it's a "joke"?
I guess this claim depends on the definition of "climate justice." But if we broaden that "climate fixing" (which is how I initially took it, before going back to the original quote and noticing the word justice), what has to happen is that those in power need to care about the problem and know what to do to fix it. This can happen by putting power into the hands of those who care and know what to do and it can happen by changing the goals and know-how of those who currently have power. Neither option is easy!
The solution to proof of work using too much energy is not proof of work. It's fractional reserve bitcoins / ethereum / etc.
To explain:
For game theoretic / economic reasons, people will spend as much effort mining as there are mining rewards to be claimed.
If move to a system that doesn't hand out mining rewards, you still have to hand out the coins on some basis. So people will do the activity of that basis as much as there are rewards.
I will talk about bitcoin for simplicity.
It behaves very much like gold in a lot of respects.
If bitcoin sees wider adoption as cash, that means it will have to support a larger amount of spending in real terms and also a larger demand for real balances held in 'cash'.
Since the total nominal amount of bitcoins is fixed, you can only get the latter via an increase in the real value of each bitcoin.
But, here's the solution: gold was (and is) also hard to mine, but even when gold was money, you didn't actually need physical gold coins to serve most of your cash needs.
Bank notes and 'checkable' deposits fill this very need: they allow to expand the effective money supply without needing to mine more gold. The same will work for bitcoin.
(Of course, only that the banknotes will be electronic, of course.)
We already see some signs of that eg in bitcoin futures. The only way to get investment exposure to bitcoin used to be buying physical bitcoins. But nowadays you can buy (and roll over) bitcoin futures instead.
Of course, every future needs a counter party that's taking the opposite side of that exposure.
If you think about it, that's pretty much the same thing that banks do. Selling futures is very similar to offering time deposits:
With a time deposit, the bank incurs an obligation to pay a certain amount of money later. They could hedge that obligation by just holding on to physical money, but more typically, they invest in assets like bonds and loans, and hope to be able to exchange them for money when they have to pay back the time deposit.
That's basically the same economic exposure as being short a bitcoin future and going long a bond future.
To end the long rant, even if your base currency is gold or bitcoin, you can support lots more money than that.
> a financial network that uses more energy than Argentina
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
Just for context: Argentina used about 3% of the energy consumed by the US alone in 2018. And only a fraction of that amount consumed by G8 in total. However, the number does not tell us how this energy was produced and, hence, can not provide an insight into the environmental impact of Cryptos. If it came mostly from renewable sources, the carbon footprint of Bitcoin and other cryptos would be quite reasonable, I believe.
