Meet Larry, a very good kid, upcoming addition to the McKay household, and possibly the subject of one of the very first cat tweets to live on forever in the Ethereum blockchain.
Larry’s blockchain adventure is not through his own fault (quite the contrary, actually). This weekend we made arrangements to adopt Larry, and I was so excited that I tweeted some of him provided shelter photos; Larry is so photogenic and got 1,500 likes. It also caught the attention of Twitter user @FatRaccoon, who offered to buy the rights to my tweet for $ 50 in Etherium’s cryptocurrency, ether, through a process I’m still not completely clear on, but it’s a Unique cryptocurrency technology providing a non-replaceable token (NFT).
The blockchain is a system for creating immutable databases through a distributed cryptographic process – networks of competing computers to resolve complex math problems in a way that generates accurate records that cannot be changed retroactively. It has many uses theoretically, but is mainly used to convert raw computing power into semi-imaginary internet money (such as bitcoin and ether) that is hoarded by speculators hoping to get unimaginably rich with the same level of non-effort as someone on Wall Street . .
Those cryptocurrencies are fungible, meaning that they are indistinguishable from each other – one bitcoin can be traded for another identical bitcoin. NFTs are small pieces of data encrypted on a blockchain (mostly Ethereum) a bit like a unit of cryptocurrency, but are instead completely unique. They are still marketable, making them sort of a signed baseball card.
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In theory, just about anything digital could be packaged and sold as an NFT – comments on this article, random photos of my future cat uploaded to Twitter, clips from NBA gamesor works of art. It is that latter practice that has attracted most of the attention of late. A number of artists have recently made millions by selling NFTs of digital artworks at astonishing prices; the buyers will get the blockchain-encrypted trading card in lieu of a physical copy of the art, which may not exist (depending on the terms of sale, copyrights and reproduction rights that would allow them to print an actual copy).
This does not prevent additional copies of the artwork sold from circulating anywhere in .jpg or .gif format or whatever. What the buyer really gets is less tangible: bragging rights, clout, a collector’s item, or just a handy new form of money laundering. And because of the rapid rise of cryptocurrencies, adding words like “token” or “blockchain” or “proof of work” to random junk can skyrocket its value.
Whether you are trading cryptocurrencies or NFTs, the transaction must be permanently encrypted in the blockchain generally using a process called proof of work, where the work is the above math problems. As the blockchain grows over time, so does the overall level of work that needs to be done to keep it going, which translates directly to more physical processors sucking up juice from the locals. often fossil fuel power plant. This essentially means that by trading NFTs you are pushing the planet into a furnace.
This brings us back to Larry, or rather tweet him. @FatRaccoon said he offered to buy my post, using a Twitter to NFT service called Valuables by Cent, as a joke.
“I feel like I now own a part of the stupid world we live in and it’s fun,” @FatRaccoon wrote on Twitter DM. “Buying tweets on the blockchain is seemingly at a peak online. Also cute cat. “
“I expect this whole system to collapse within a week or make it immediately 5-person billionaires,” they added.
The legality of this is completely unclear to me. Can you “sell” ownership of a tweet, which is simply Twitter worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use it? What does it mean if, as in my case, it contains material whose copyright may belong to someone else? What happens if I delete the tweet? Likewise, the economics of this whole thing is absurd. (@FatRaccoon said they got a call halfway through the conversation with us apparently related to signing up for a cryptocurrency wallet.)
A FAQ on the Cent website isn’t exactly reassuring about the stability of this whole thing:
The tweet itself will remain live on Twitter. What you buy is a digital certificate of the tweet, unique in that it is signed and verified by the creator … Owning digital content can be a financial investment, have sentimental value and create a relationship between the collector and the creator . Like a signature on a baseball card, the NFT itself is the signature of the content creator, making it scarce, unique, and valuable.
NFTs make digital content unique: you are the only person who can claim ownership of an NFT that you own. This means that you have control over the NFT, such as the ability to resell or distribute it, and it will either increase or decrease in value just like any other asset.
But there is another problem. You remember that “proof of work” thing? Well, the greater the sale of NFT, the more work that needs to be done to encrypt it on the blockchain, and the more “work” that needs to be put into future transactions on the blockchain. According to digital artist Memo Atken, for example Tracker for CryptoArt.wtf, who tries (approximately) approximate the total carbon footprint of NFTs, recording artist Grimes’ recent sale of 303 editions of a short video piece called Soil for $ 7,500 worth of cryptocurrency each costs a total of 122,416 kWh of electricity. That equates to the average total electricity consumption of a resident of the European Union over the course of 34 years (presumably someone who does not trade NFTs), or an extrapolated 79 tons of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere of our slowly dying planet. Suffice to say, environmentalists are not fans.
According to CryptoArt.wtfthe Larry transaction used the equivalent of about 11 kilowatt hours. That corresponds to the average electricity consumption of a resident of the European Union for a whole day, which is about 34 kilometers away with a petrol car, a month of laptop use or a week and a half of desktop computer use. My last electricity bill for my home (a two-story unit with two occupants) was 628 kWh, or 22 kWh per day, which means that I essentially 50% extra added to my electricity consumption on Monday.
Those numbers don’t count, as CryptoArt.wtf noted, the energy costs of “producing or storing the works, or even web hosting.” Neither are the energy costs of resale of the NFT, and they don’t include the infinitely small amount I just contributed to make the blockchain soak up even more juice in the future, which I assume is incalculable.
Defenders have quarreled that NFTs and blockchains in general make up a very small part of total global fuel consumption, and that it is more environmentally friendly than selling an equivalent dollar amount on cheaper products such as shirts and prints. The first defense is like insistence coal mills is fine compared to the dang power plants, a lazy whataboutism that doesn’t address the fact that NFTs still take a toll on the climate. In the second scenario, the higher carbon footprint is due to people actually getting hundreds of t-shirts i.e. objects that actually exist
I raised the issue of waste to @FatRaccoon, who told me, “I work in technology and have been convinced for years that it was all a house of cards about to collapse, but it doesn’t seem like it will do that soon, so I can participate as much as I can. If I become a rich man, I promise to donate 50% of my money to the environment. “
I asked @FatRaccoon if they agreed with my assessment that this appears to be the “outcome of some process of just absolutely colossal stupidity”.
“What keeps getting me is that it seems to do a lot of work for the end result of saying, hey, this jpeg is now a jpeg,” they replied. “It only works because all the people who love this shit are so invested in it that they will never let it be worthless. Any rational financial system would have shut down bitcoin, but our government is like, um, whatever, and so it’s just chaos now, gambling without rules. “
“We’ve cut 10 trees so you can have this poison from LeBron doing a sick dunk,” concluded FatRaccoon. “If you ever sell it, we’ll get some money and cut some more trees.”
I apologize in advance to Larry for allowing him to interfere with this. If anyone feels the need to buy one of my tweets in the future, I recommend this three-for-one bundle