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.

  • 24324564745364253q49 [they/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    "emissions of close to 20 KgCO2 for that single mouse click, due to the underlying PoW algorithm."

    The most fucked thing about this is our tech bro culture is only going to keep going further and no government can regulate this. What the fuck.