But this is a somewhat puzzling response. Surely, if your issue is with greenhouse gasses and environmental damage, criticism should be directed towards things like using fossil fuels to generate that electricity.
NFT’s don’t cost a lot of Ethereum for a good reason. They cost a lot because Ethereum is slow in adopting proof-of-stake.
I think it’s very valid to argue that instead of deploying NFT technology Ethereum should have first moved to proof-of-stake.
Intuitively, we might imagine that the issue here is that people perceive the use of electricity as “wastage” and therefore not worth the negative environmental impacts of other, more justified usages.
Using outdated proof-of-work technology instead of more modern technology is wasting energy, the same way that using the old lightbulbs that need more energy then the newer more efficient one’s is wasting energy.
Did you know that the US energy grid wasted 67.5% of the energy produced in 2019?
That doesn’t matter as electricity is something we want to consume 365/7/24. It would only matter if mining would stop whenever the electricity production is relatively low but that’s not how the mining pools operate.
But it does imply that we have a huge amount of optimization to address through building smarter electricity grids, building more optimized energy markets, and rolling out innovations like smart-meters and battery storage.
While it’s possible that such technology can be used to optimize the energy marked it doesn’t imply that the technology is enough or cost-effective (it’s also possible that the problem is week to week or month to month energy flucutations).
NFT’s don’t cost a lot of Ethereum for a good reason. They cost a lot because Ethereum is slow in adopting proof-of-stake.
I think it’s very valid to argue that instead of deploying NFT technology Ethereum should have first moved to proof-of-stake.
Using outdated proof-of-work technology instead of more modern technology is wasting energy, the same way that using the old lightbulbs that need more energy then the newer more efficient one’s is wasting energy.
That doesn’t matter as electricity is something we want to consume 365/7/24. It would only matter if mining would stop whenever the electricity production is relatively low but that’s not how the mining pools operate.
While it’s possible that such technology can be used to optimize the energy marked it doesn’t imply that the technology is enough or cost-effective (it’s also possible that the problem is week to week or month to month energy flucutations).