cryptoart-footprint VS ethereum-emissions

Estimating the actual energy use of cryptocurrency stuff is hideously complicated... which gives people a lot of room to hide behind excuses like "well actually it's mostly renewables these days" and so on. But yes, it is that bad. Even just considering an estimate for CO2 emissions based on ethereum transactions which directly interact with OpenSea (one NFT marketplace), and ignoring the fact that there must be other transactions involved there by the people interacting with the system and there are other NFT marketplaces etc etc, there's 551,268,013kg CO2 used there alone, or the yearly CO2 output of about ~35,000 US Americans. Or ~78,000 New Zealanders. Or 0.5% of the country of Belgium. And I should stress that this is definitely a low estimate, probably by an order of magnitude if you're looking to estimate NFTs as a whole. Sure, NFTs aren't so bad as to make stopping the impending end-of-the-world scenario impossible while they're being recklessly played with, but they're sure as anything not helping.

i do honestly think the concept of digital ownership could be really cool, but for digital art that you can just right click save or screenshot it’s pointless. and that’s not to mention the insane energy usage. for example OpenSea power usage has generated 655 million kilograms of CO2, compared to approximately 1.09 billion kilograms for the entire country of swaziland/eswatini in 2018, a country of 1.16 million people. (https://github.com/kylemcdonald/ethereum-nft-activity - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.KT?locations=SZ) and thats just opensea, the biggest but certainly not the only NFT platform.

As of October 8th there have been 11,095,321 on the 10 most popular NFT sites https://github.com/kylemcdonald/ethereum-nft-activity

From [crypto.wtf](crypto.wtf)'s link I found kylemcdonald's ethereum-nft-activity project, which gives us some harder data to look at. For rareable each transaction weighs in at 54 Kg (119 pounds) of CO2 produced or the equivalent of 6 gallons of gas using the EPA's numbers.

Hi everyone 👋 This is from some new research I just published. You can read about the full methodology in this 22-page writeup and I also made a daily-updated Ethereum energy and emissions tracker.

Hi, I am the author/creator 👋 The short version is: every day that ETH2 is delayed means emitting around 20 ktCO2, similar to 2–3 coal power plants. This is comparable to the emissions of 500k people in the US or 4.2M people in India. I wrote a summary article and an in-depth 22 page writeup explaining how I got these numbers. Happy to answer any questions 🤗