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by CryptoPunk 1913 days ago
Please, stop calling any non-essential use of energy that you're looking to smear, "evil". Are movies, which consume energy in their production and consumption, also evil? Video games? No, because you personally see the entertainment they provide as redeeming?

If people want to expend their own resources on NFTs, that's entirely their right to do so, and calling it evil because the process consumed energy is absurd.

If you have a problem with CO2 emission, by all means advocate for laws requiring energy production to not emit CO2 as a by-product. But to single out some non-essential activity that you personally don't like because of the imagined motives of those behind it, while ignoring every other non-essential activity that uses energy, is disingenuous and irresponsible.

2 comments

I really resent the community of grifters like yourself constantly pushing the stuff and defending its excesses.

I recently saw Twitter thread where a big pusher of NFTs was moaning on about how the real issue is we didn't create enough nuclear power plants and now we're blaming NFTs for this.

It's blatantly obvious that this is all a pyramid scheme capitalizing on people's complete ignorance and optimism with crypto. Enjoy your pyramid scheme and I hope you make out like a bandit and eventually develop a conscience for the people you're grifting.

I don't think parent is promoting NFT's.

I think he or she is saying that "climate change" is a ridiculously hyperbolic attack vector. And they're right. Of all the idiotic aspects there are to NFT's, Ethereum energy consumption may not crack the Top 100.

That has nothing to do with my point, which is that by no reasonable standard, can the people producing/buying/selling NFTs be singled out as "evil" for contributing to global warming.

You're obviously getting overly emotional, and throwing whatever you can at the people involved in cryptocurrency ("they're evil for using energy") to see what sticks.

I reiterate, it's a reckless and disingenuous way to conduct oneself, regardless of whether the underlying grievances motivating the hostility have merit.

This is basically a "what about" argument but in this case it does illustrate something valid. There are lots of things that benefit a segment of people and harm everyone. One I happen to notice regularly because I don't have one, is cars. They not only contribute massively to climate change; they also directly kill ~35,000 people annually in the US. Yet cars are beloved, sacred, unassailable to a majority of Americans. Are those people evil? No one alive can throw the word evil around without implicating oneself. The whole concept is just a religious overlay designed to try and mitigate a bunch of much older and ubiquitous human behaviors that suddenly became disruptive after we took up agriculture and settled in villages. (Which by the way, was itself "evil" in that it enabled a few to feed themselves, by taking land from "everyone" or at least all hunter-gatherers, and destroying the natural habitat that the land contained.)