NFT and the battle for ecology

Last year an image of a rainbow cat sold for $600,000. One picture was sold for $69 million. And all this is NFT, Non-Fungible Tokens.

Over the past year, the popularity of NFTs has skyrocketed. And statistics say that their average price is almost a thousand dollars. Therefore, it is not surprising that esports organizations are also interested in this promising area.

The most successful were the sales of the organization OG. In 2021, their NFT items sold for almost a million dollars.

For example, an artist digitally creating and selling a work of art. Or, like in MAVIA, you buy a piece of land in the game. Resources are expended to create all this and a certain amount of CO2 is emitted.

If we take as an example the work of an artist, which he prints and certifies, then several stages will pass from the stage of ordering to the receipt of the work by the buyer. Airplanes and delivery trucks will be the main source of emissions here.

In the digital world, everything is delivered instantly, no transport and no emissions. But this is not entirely true, let's take a closer look.

An artist finds a website to help him create an NFT. He simply uploads his artwork, gives it a title, and presses a button to create or "mint" it.

This minting transaction is then added to the list of unconfirmed crypto transactions. The list contains all incoming cryptographic activity, from simple buying and selling to more complex actions such as embedding a record of a digital work of art.

The miner selects a subset of transactions to block together. Transactions are not added to the general ledger one at a time. Instead, they are organized into groups known as blocks. The ledger is known as a blockchain because it is made up of these blocks.

To add this block to the block chain, this miner must race against time and other miners to solve a cryptographic puzzle. They use trial and error to quickly generate random numbers, testing each one to see if it's a solution. The most modern equipment can make hundreds of millions of guesses per second.

This is what makes crypto art so environmentally friendly. More than one miner is trying to add this block to the blockchain. There are thousands of them, many of them huge operations involving huge computer networks in China, the Arctic or elsewhere, trying to find the solution to every puzzle.

To calculate the carbon impact of adding this block to the blockchain, all the energy expended by all miners is calculated.

Miners check the correctness of the solution. The process of confirming a solution requires much less energy than searching for it. If confirmed, the miner's transaction block is added to the blockchain. The work then exists as an NFT, ready to be sold to a buyer. However, according to some estimates, the entire chain of operations requires a large amount of electricity and releases more than a hundred kilograms of CO2.

It's not often in our world right now that users have a choice. Cryptoart now is something new for us.

The best way to support creators is through traditional methods. But what to do with other NFT objects that can only exist and be used in the information space? GIF images, game objects, and so on simply cannot exist in the physical world.

Another option is to choose the best crypto platforms. The method described above is called Proof of Work. The miner must prove that he has done computational work before he can add a block to the block chain. Proof of work was deliberately designed to be inefficient to make adding fraudulent transactions unprofitable for attackers, and is the technique behind most of the popular websites that use NFTs.

There are other options for processing cryptocurrency transactions. For example, the Proof of Stake system is designed in such a way that the task of adding new blocks is randomly received by someone who has more computing power. If the user is more active and invests in crypto, then he is more likely to receive a task to add a new block.

Proof of Stake is 99% more energy efficient than Proof of Work. As proponents argue, the carbon footprint in this case is significantly smaller, falling to the level of conventional production and shipment of objects in the real world.

Currently, there are many Proof of Stake crypto platforms. They are smaller than their Proof of Work competitors and have yet to generate the mind-blowing sales figures seen on the news, but they offer a way to support NFT artists without the absurd carbon footprint.