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.
Posting because I saw someone suggest doing this, and when I mentioned the environmental impact another user thought I was doing a bit until I'd linked the article in another comment.
Semi related: video of what appears to be a natural gas well hooked directly to a generator, which in turn drives a crypto rig that fills a shipping container.
https://twitter.com/MattLech/status/1367969084353241094?s=19
https://twitter.com/GigaEnergy_?s=09
Looks like they're offering this as a solution to oil producers who normally would just flare (read: burn as waste) the gas otherwise.
Capitalism: The Efficient System™️
Burning the planet for currency that doesn't even exist.
Truly, the power of crypto is the freedom to drive the planet into an even worse climate crisis with no fear of any government being able to regulate it even if they tried.
"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.
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.