I think it's important to have a mission statement for all projects, for limiting focus in a world full of never ending rabbit holes. This blog's purpose is more than just a collection of technological musings of a professional who is only tangentially related to the technology he talks about, but more of a dim hope that there maybe some people who can impact the relation most people have with digital currency and art.
While Memo Akten's Article The Unreasonable Ecological Cost of #CryptoArt can't be out done, I'd like to restate my specific concerns with crypto in the following:
Crypto art or NFT art (experts in this field haven't fully settled on the term yet) are experiencing massive, high-profile sales moments. Last month, an animated image of Nyan Cat, a popular meme in which a cat shoots a rainbow, sold for $660,000 on a blockchain sale made with PopTart. Christie's latest bid for an ongoing auction for artist Beeple's NFT, known for her playful and bizarre approach to ongoing events, is $3.5 million. But this is only the pinnacle of a booming industry. Works by lesser-known artists typically sell for thousands of dollars, and the burgeoning TikTok video subgenre advises viewers on how to sell quickly and make significant profits. No one understands that number, and the same was true for some art pieces on sale. However, this also applies to recent GameStop and Dogecoin stocks. This is a strange and exciting time for digital speculators. The appeal of blockchain for digital artists is a new ownership model. Crypto art is no more protected from copycats than anything posted on the internet. A person can easily record a video or take a screenshot and proudly display a copy on their desktop. However, with NFTs, owners buy verified tokens that provide digital proof that a work of art is an artist's signature. The idea is to provide a similarity of authenticity that naturally appears in physical art. After all, most people will say that a perfect replica of a Mondrian abstract painted on a garage door is not the same as the one created by the artist. Why isn't it the same for .CAS files? The advantage of this model is that by extending ownership, those tokens can be resold, allowing artists to continue to receive their stake. The downside is that this model consumes a lot of power. The major marketplaces for NFT art, including MakersPlace, Nifty Gateway, and SuperRare, conduct sales through a process called mining, cryptocurrency and Ethereum, which maintains a secure record of NFT transactions. The system is similar to a system that validates Bitcoin, including a network of computers that use advanced cryptography to determine if a transaction is valid, and uses the energy of a small country to do so.
Exactly how energy consumption translates into carbon emissions is the subject of heated debate. Some estimates suggest that up to 70% of mining operations can come from clean resources. But the numbers fluctuate with the seasons, and in a global energy system that runs mostly on fossil fuels, critics say energy consumption is energy consumption.
However, the blockchain technology that underpins cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is associated with massive greenhouse gas emissions.
In a nutshell, when an artist uploads a piece of art and "crafts" it at the push of a button, a process called mining begins, which requires complex puzzles, incredible computing power, and huge amounts of energy. This is because Ethereum, the platform of choice for NFTs, uses a method called proof-of-work (PoW) to create digital assets such as non-fungible tokens. To successfully add assets to the
blockchain ledger, miners must compete to solve cryptographic puzzles, and computers quickly generate numbers in a frenzied trial and error race. According to the trading platform Blockchain.com, as of mid-April, miners were making more than 170 million attempts per second to create new blocks. (A quintilion is 1 followed by 18 zeros.)
. The miner with the correct answer first wins and adds the asset to the blockchain. It has been shown that releasing 6 cryptoarts consumes more power in 10 seconds than a regular studio over 2 years. It's a really big boom and the prices are going crazy. However, there is a feeling that this cannot go on or that the amount of time you can make as much money as possible is very limited. So that`s why many dismiss this energy impact. Annually, Ethereum is currently estimated to consume roughly 44.94 terawatthours of electrical energy, which is comparable to the yearly power consumption of countries like Qatar and Hungary. It is responsible for about 21.35 metric tons of carbon dioxide released each year, comparable to the carbon footprint of Sudan.
The amount of electricity that mining Bitcoin consumes in one year is equal to that used to power Malaysia, Sweden or Ukraine, according to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index. In a recent study, scientists warned Bitcoin alone could push the Earth`s temperature 2 degrees Celsius above historical levels, if it were to become as widely adopted as other new technologies. Personally I'd prefer to have Malaysia.
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