Reasoning like this is why the world is insane. These comparisons are not equals. There is no bargain or great deal, there is only euphoria from people who figured out a new way to shake the money tree. And "shaking the money tree" is a deep an understanding as many of these NFT grifters go. This is a signal, and that signal is increasing levels of fraud. Laypeople "share the fact" that the environmental expense of these NFT are what legitimize them, which is a bastardization of the concept to the degree they can't see the difference between the correct distinction and the pop culture watered down vague description.

Why are you calling artists making a fair living off their work grifters and scammers? What's your problem?

What proportion of the NFT mania is actually artists making money vs grifters and scammers making money?

If there are artists making money that previously weren't then that proportion is irrelevant. It's a completely voluntary system, no one is forced to use it or care about it.

Except for the many artists who are having their work stolen.

Those are unauthorized. Too bad to the collectors who gave their money to scammers, but those NFTs are worthless the moment the artist declares them forgeries.

Worthless according to who? It's not like the artist can take ownership of the NFT

The value of an NFT is in its provenance, just as with traditional works. If you forge a Mondrian, it won't be worth as much as an original Mondrian. It's even worse for NFTs since anyone can own the file data; the value of the NFT is almost purely its relationship to the artist.

Artist making a fair living sell their art, this selling of NFTs is not them selling their art, they are selling an immaterial bragging right. It's insane.

It's irrelevant what it is or isn't, people are paying money for their art. How can you tell someone like this guy https://twitter.com/deekaymotion who recently starting making good money off his work that he's a grifter?

I think it will still take years until the migration to PoS is done. Therefore why don't use a blockchain which is already PoS and has the needed infrastructure??? Tezos has everything needed. A lot of NFTs are beeing minted there right now. But it could be much more. It would make sense to spread the word instead of complaining about the bad impact PoW has. We should talk about the solutions not the problems.

> once we move to proof of stake everything will resolve.

...For those of us who do not eat, drink, sleep, and breathe cryptocurrency news, could you please explain what this means?

A bunch of people have been mentioning "Proof of Stake," but it's a term I've never heard until the comments on this article.

Rather than having a ridiculous number of computers competing to be the fastest to complete the calculations that underlie blockchain activities (the source of the power usage), blocks are instead given to a single node to complete, and your chances of getting that block are higher the more existing token owners have "staked" with it. PoW: you get blocks because you're working hard; everyone has to work harder to keep up. PoS: you get blocks because your node is popular, within a certain limit (because you give good rewards, because your node is owned by a good cause, w/e).

But this is part of the problem: people passing doom-and-gloom judgment without knowing what is going on. This information is easy to find and people have been screaming it for weeks, but it gets drowned out by the hysteria. Meanwhile, I STILL don't see any new fossil fuel regulations or a GND on Biden's desk, and no one seems to care.

"once we move to proof of stake" -> Alas, there is no PoS algorithm (who's security does not depend on PoW blockchain), so it's not "once" but more "if we ever move to PoS after we manage to invent it".

Ethereum has something like 100,000 validator nodes up right now with a plan to switch completely this year, summer I believe. Polkadot, while not nearly as popular/big, is already running as a pure PoS blockchain.

These validator nodes all have stake in Ethereum PoW blockchain and are worthless without it.

Polkadot is not "pure PoS" as well, but feel free to bring a citation to prove me wrong.

Your assumption is off base. Cardano has PoS, hovers between the top 5-3 cryptos. It works,and works quite well.

No, Cardano works towards a PoS, but at the moment is federated. They began from the "Byron era" (federated by the Cardano organization) and are now in the "Shelley era" (federated by the Cardano community).

https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/shelley/

> Alas, there is no PoS algorithm (who's security does not depend on PoW blockchain)

What does this mean?

It means that you validators use PoW algorithms to hold their stake (like in Ethereum 2.0) and/or write the state of the PoS blockchain on a PoW blockchain once in a while to prevent long range attacks (long range attacks = when someone steal all the keys of the validators in the genesis block, and create and equivalently long PoS with hardly any effort)

You need to quantify what that means for energy usage, as that is the main point of contention. Fossil fuels are the primary contributor to global warming as they're used now, but no one should have any problem with, say, a portable gas generator used during an occasional blackout.

You explained how this applies to ETH 2.0, how about Cardano and Polkadot?

You’re right to try to compare to emissions in a physical sale but I think your estimate is way off.

Most NFTS are selling for under a couple thousand. Even over many editions, the millions figure is not common.