By Henry Pincus '22
Unless you've been avoiding the internet like a plague for the past two months, to which I'd say I honestly can't blame you, you've probably heard the phrase "NFT" at some point. Maybe you already have a vague understanding of what an NFT is and are confused by the aforementioned “problems they cause.” That's understandable; from a surface level, NFTs seem pretty harmless. However, it is this apparent harmlessness that perpetuates the issues NFTs cause.
Before we get into that, let me explain what an NFT is for those who don't know. "NFT" is an acronym for "non-fungible token," which is a very professional way to say "bitcoin for digital images." The way the NFT market operates is that people use a cryptocurrency known as ETH (short for 'Ethereum') to buy a piece of digital art that does not exist anywhere else. This digital art piece is encrypted in such a way that you can't trade it or sell it again—that's what makes it "non-fungible." It's like if you were to buy a painting at an auction and put it in your house. That painting would belong to you and nobody else.
The difference here is that NFTs are more restrictive. If you wanted, you could probably resell a painting or trade it out for another painting, and someone could post a picture of the painting online and still enjoy it. The appeal of buying NFTs is that there are no other copies of the art you're buying. You are the only person who will ever have unlimited access to the file you just paid an unfathomably high price for. Just hope nobody screenshots it.
In short, you're just buying digital art that you can't share. Phenomenal.
At a surface level, it seems fine. However, looking further into it, it's a pretty slimy practice, especially when you consider how much 1 ETH is worth in actual U.S. dollars. NFTs are sold for ridiculously high prices, with one in particular selling for $69 million last month. People are willing to dump insane quantities of money for one file that they can brag about being the sole owner of, and NFT artists seek to capitalize on that mindset.
As such, people get upset when they see artists they enjoy turning to NFTs because the practice centers around the price the art will be sold for, not for the art itself. Artists selling NFTs alienate their audience because it shows a shift in focus from passion to profit. Doing art full-time is a difficult way to make a living, but there are other ways to sell digital art, such as Patreon, that allow both digital artists and their fans to benefit from their work.
That said, if this was the only issue with NFTs, the practice wouldn't be that big of a deal. Allow me to explain why it is, in fact, that big of a deal.
NFTs and Ethereum are encrypted using blockchain, a system that takes a lot of energy to maintain. All that energy requires thousands of servers to uphold, and all of those servers take up a lot of electricity and are responsible for mass carbon emissions. The energy required to encrypt and store the data for one NFT transaction is roughly equivalent to a month's worth of electricity. On top of that, all those servers take up space, and as the market continues to grow, more and more land is going to be cleared to house all those servers. All of this combined has given the NFT market a carbon footprint of 160 tons of CO2, and the practice only started a few months ago. The disastrous effects human actions have had on the environment were bad enough already, but this very new practice has already been a dropkick to the gut of Mother Nature in the very short time it's been around.
So, if NFTs are this bad for the environment, why do people continue buying and selling them? Well, the easy answer is money, but after seeing a lot of artists and individuals who are definitely better than this get involved with it, my theory is that it comes from a lack of information. Not a lot of people know what an NFT is in the first place, let alone how dangerous they are. Watching Gorillaz start selling NFTs despite releasing Plastic Beach, an entire album about environmental destruction, tells me that far too many people involved with NFTs just don't do their research. If more people knew about the effects NFTs and Ethereum have on the environment, there probably wouldn't be so many people eager to join in.
So, yeah. Don't buy NFTs, please. The profit really isn't worth the damage it causes in the long run.
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