Any idea to sell crypto art might sound fun, and donating the money to someone in need sounds like doing a good thing, but the hidden cost is the ecological violence that happens in the production of the energy needed to do even one ETH transaction.

Great article on this: https://memoakten.medium.com/the-unreasonable-ecological-cost-of-cryptoart-2221d3eb2053

The footprint of a single transaction relating to a NFT on SuperRare averaged across all 80000 transactions (including minting, bidding, sales, transfers etc) is 76 kWh, with emissions of 47 KgCO2 (details in Part 2).

A single NFT can involve dozens of transactions, and potentially more. These include minting, bidding, cancelling, sales and transfer of ownership.

This generally pushes the footprint of a single NFT into hundreds of kWh, and hundreds of KgCO2 emissions, and often even more.

In fact, of the ~18000 CryptoArt NFTs that I analyzed, the average NFT has a footprint of around 340 kWh and 211 KgCO2 (details in Part 2).

This single NFT’s footprint is equivalent to a EU resident’s total electric power consumption for more than a month, with emissions equivalent to driving for 1000Km, or flying for 2 hours.

    • lohs [she/her]
      hexagon
      ·
      4 years ago

      This doesn't change that if we were to participate in the NFT art space, there is no avoiding that this is the impact of it. It's mind bending how inane of a system this is and how it's spiraling to a size that consumes almost a whole percentage point of the planet's electricity production.

      The original cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC), is estimated to have annual energy consumption in the range 80–120 TWh [3, 40] which is about ~0.45% of the world’s entire electricity production.