"Humans are very good at inventing commodities, and we’ve been at it for a long time.
See that pebble over there?
Well, that’s a better pebble than all these others, and if you give me something in exchange for it, I’ll let you take ownership.
It’ll be your pebble, forever.
And soon there will be a market in pebbles, a pebble community, pebble exhibitions and auctions filled with pebble speculators, pebble exchanges, and pebble artists.
The deeper, evolutionary reasons why we do this—or why any species commodifies objects or experiences—are not immediately obvious.
... IWhat further complicates digital assets is the cost incurred for individuals or a species; the expenditure of resources and energy.
... just as a cryptocurrency is meant to be infallibly secure and fair, an NFT is a way to assign secure provenance and ownership to a digital asset.
That digital asset might be an image, a video, or some hybrid digital experience.
... there’s been a lot of grumbling about the extraordinary energy demands of cryptocurrencies.
Now there’s grumbling about the absurd growth in the market for NFTs.
This is because both commodities use a robust system for tamper-proof bookkeeping: the blockchain.
Blockchain technology is purposefully burdensome and computationally distributed, making it notoriously energy intensive.
Estimates put the energy used to create and trade a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin on a par with the total consumption of a country like Sweden.
And that’s without accounting for the environmental footprint of the physical computer hardware.
It’s possible to see a purpose for cryptocurrencies, but NFTs are (for now) almost comically bereft of anything most of us would associate with social or cultural value.
Down the line there may be value in attaching permanent ownership or provenance to digital works of art.
But at the moment it’s Pudgy Penguins for the masses, or a pixel-heavy version of Nyan Cat going for an eye-watering $1.2 million for cynical investors.
With an explosive growth of equally speculative and bewildering offerings appearing every day.
... In digital form, data can be reproduced perfectly.
A digital copy is just as good as the original.
That’s a remarkable thing, and one key to the power we get from digitization.
But it is precisely this quality that gives rise to the issues we face with security and ownership further down the line, and the burden that places on us, our energy, and our planet.
A trail for easily-copied data can only be maintained with yet more data, and encryption, and redundancy, and more hardware, and more energy-consuming computation.
... Blockchains are clever ... But it’s atrocious timing for us to create yet another fast-growth planetary burden. "
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Friday, January 14, 2022
Electricity Wasted for Cyypto-Currencies and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)?
NOTE:
Some key points from a much too long article
Ye Editor
Full Article Here: