[sygma]

I know it sounds catchy to say that NFTs are an ecological disaster, but that statement is sensational and not accurate.

NFTs do not cause carbon emissions themselves, just like you don't add carbon emissions by occupying a seat on a public transportation bus. The bus is doing its daily route and has a fixed amount of emissions per day whether it has any occupants or not. This analogy breaks quickly, so I wouldn't look too much into it.

Maybe a better analogy is to think of your WiFi router. Its energy use is (predominantly) static regardless of how many packets you route through it. So by browsing, you are not causing additional carbon emissions.

In more technical terms: more transactions do not cause more hashrate. Ethereum's CO2 footprint does not scale with transactional count. So asking people to use the network less will not cause the hashrate to go down. The only way you reduce energy consumption is by getting miners to mine less, which triggers the protocol to adjust the mining difficulty accordingly. As laid out above, this has nothing to do with how many transactions are happening on ETH, or whether NFTs are being minted on it.

[karpour]

More accurate would be to say that NFTs are additional fuel for the ecological disaster that is ETH. Your analogy makes little sense in this context.

Mining hardware will always run at 100% capacity, regardless of the amount of transactions, unless mining becomes unprofitable.

The issue is, while the energy used by mining is not directly dependent on the amount of transactions, it is dependent on the amount of people and money invested into the network, which raises the price, which causes an expansion of mining effort. With more people investing, the amount of transactions also increases.

If NFTs were to become a popular thing, mining will obviously increase at an even faster rate

[jules-jules]

The energy used to secure PoW networks is indeed wasteful. But just a heads-up, Ethereum is currently transitioning to Proof of Stake consensus mechanism which will reduce electricity costs by an order of magnitude.

[h4kor]

How long and how often have the announce the transition yet?

[T0Bi]

Well Phase 0 is already live with a lot of people staking.. Don't pretend like it's never going to happen

[um_ya]

This is only a short term issue. ETH is currently transitioning to proof of stake with ETH 2.0

[8fGTBjZxBcHq]

OK read the article again because it addresses two different and significant reasons why that doesn't solve the problem.

[dlubarov]

Their arguments seem to be

1) Eth2 has been "coming soon" for a long time, so it will never happen. (Yes progress has been slow, but it's happening, with phase 0 live now.)

2a) In PoS, the rich get richer. (Not true in a meaningful sense. Staking rewards are neutral with respect to economic inequality, since everyone has access to the same rate of return.)

2b) PoS is a social issue. Climate change is also a social issue. Therefore, a PoS is a climate issue. (This is a converse error.)

[ShinTakuya]

This argument has some flaws. So firstly, if nobody got on the bus, the number of buses on the route would be reduced, and depending on circumstances the route would be cancelled. Additionally, the weight of the passenger does slightly increase the power requirement. Ignoring that, while there's minimal direct effect of usage, ultimately the bus is only there due to demand.

Similarly, for block chains, mining only occurs when the thing being mined has value. NFTs would not be mined if people weren't using them. Therefore I would absolutely call them an ecological disaster.

[sygma]

> Similarly, for block chains, mining only occurs when the thing being mined has value. NFTs would not be mined if people weren't using them. Therefore I would absolutely call them an ecological disaster.

The point is that energy consumption due to mining on the Ethereum network does not scale with transaction count. So it does not matter if NFTs are issued ("minted") or not. They add no marginal energy cost in the mining process. That is why calling them an "ecological disaster" is a misnomer.

[paulgb]

I’m less familiar with ETH than BTC but my understanding is that this is true:

1. Minting an NFT costs ETH in the form of “gas”

2. The miner who mines a block gets that ETH

Assuming both of these are true, each NFT minted on the ETH blockchain increases the amount they can profitability spend on energy in economic equilibrium.

[bhay]

Your understanding is correct, however ETH is moving sharply away from PoW to PoS systems which are significantly less demanding systems in terms of energy requirements. I believe the roadmap expects the full PoS transition to happen this year (a multistage launch that we are partway through).

On top of that, there's other more specialised NFT blockchains like flow which are becoming very popular.

[ryanbrunner]

What they're saying though is that if no one was using Ethereum (for NFTs or other purposes), there would be zero reason to mine them in the first place. It seems to follow to me that as demand goes up, the supply will increase in turn, since it's seen as a more attractive thing to mine.

[quickthrower2]

Buying an NFT requires buying ETH which increases demand for ETH and pushes up the price, encouraging more people to mine ETH, which uses more electricity. Also another effect is pushing up gas fees as people compete to make transactions which again helps miners and encourages more new miners to rig up and join in.