A ticket on the ecodisaster train
March 3, 2021 2:17 AM Subscribe
In response to ongoing discussion of the ecological cost of cryptoart, Superrare (a platform for hosting and selling cryptoart) has written a post "clarifying" the ecological impact of NFTs.
It argues that Ethereum (as it currently stands) uses huge amounts of energy regardless of their involvement, and that their business model is tantamount to buying a ticket on a train that "will keep running at the same speed and with the same energy consumption whether or not there are any seats filled."
Ecological impact aside, critics are also pointing out that the art brokerage aspects that the system is supposed to solve aren't as easy (or cheap) as touted.
Esteemed musician Grimes, wife of the world's 7th richest man, recently sold NFT pieces worth $6m.
Ecological impact aside, critics are also pointing out that the art brokerage aspects that the system is supposed to solve aren't as easy (or cheap) as touted.
Esteemed musician Grimes, wife of the world's 7th richest man, recently sold NFT pieces worth $6m.
crypto proof of work apologia
brought to you by the same rhetoric and logic as:
'those flights are scheduled to fly anyway'
'those animals have already been turned into steaks'
'that child porn already exists'.
posted by lalochezia at 4:13 AM on March 3, 2021 [36 favorites]
brought to you by the same rhetoric and logic as:
'those flights are scheduled to fly anyway'
'those animals have already been turned into steaks'
'that child porn already exists'.
posted by lalochezia at 4:13 AM on March 3, 2021 [36 favorites]
Cryptoart makes me throw up in my mouth, and yet I can't fault artists for selling to these fucking morons because their money is just as green.
Barnum knew; you can only sell what the chumps want to buy.
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:42 AM on March 3, 2021 [6 favorites]
Barnum knew; you can only sell what the chumps want to buy.
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:42 AM on March 3, 2021 [6 favorites]
their money is just as green
It’s really, really not.
posted by mhoye at 5:04 AM on March 3, 2021 [39 favorites]
It’s really, really not.
posted by mhoye at 5:04 AM on March 3, 2021 [39 favorites]
I was unaware of NFTs and cryptoart, but vaguely familiar with Blockchain energy costs.
Nobody should not be selling / trading anything in a way that requires a massively disproportionate energy cost and thus ecological destruction. The total energy cost should be related to the required energy cost - i.e. the time, materials and labour required, and we should be actively working on reducing that total energy cost at the same time as improving the efficiency and ecological approach of generating that energy.
Anything using blockchain is massively destructive relative to the benefits it brings. I understand the benefits of a distributed ledger, but more efficient algorithms / mathematics should be a prerequisite for using this in the real world.
posted by Stark at 5:05 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
Nobody should not be selling / trading anything in a way that requires a massively disproportionate energy cost and thus ecological destruction. The total energy cost should be related to the required energy cost - i.e. the time, materials and labour required, and we should be actively working on reducing that total energy cost at the same time as improving the efficiency and ecological approach of generating that energy.
Anything using blockchain is massively destructive relative to the benefits it brings. I understand the benefits of a distributed ledger, but more efficient algorithms / mathematics should be a prerequisite for using this in the real world.
posted by Stark at 5:05 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
As Jamie Zawinski put it, “"Crypto art" is literally just "numbered prints, but each time I sign my name I also promise to burn down a local park."”
posted by acb at 5:06 AM on March 3, 2021 [83 favorites]
posted by acb at 5:06 AM on March 3, 2021 [83 favorites]
Also, isn't Grimes on record as an ecofascist doomer or something?
posted by acb at 5:06 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by acb at 5:06 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
OK sure you can poke fun at my "green" metaphor haw haw you win a dozen mefi conversation points AND YET a lot more artists struggle to pay bills than cryptoart collectors so
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:06 AM on March 3, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:06 AM on March 3, 2021 [5 favorites]
The more Grimes NFT art sells, the quicker the world burns and the sooner we all have to up sticks and travel to Mars to toil in the Musk mines.
posted by aeshnid at 5:18 AM on March 3, 2021 [10 favorites]
posted by aeshnid at 5:18 AM on March 3, 2021 [10 favorites]
I'm having trouble understanding this. The block chain computers use a ton of energy?
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:21 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:21 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
I'm reading about it but I think bitcoin is beyond me, sorry I spoke up.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:32 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:32 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
tiny frying pan, currently the energy used in a single bitcoin transaction is around 700-800 kilowatt-hours. And it continues to rise. That is insanely wasteful by any standard.
posted by drstrangelove at 5:39 AM on March 3, 2021 [8 favorites]
posted by drstrangelove at 5:39 AM on March 3, 2021 [8 favorites]
OK sure you can poke fun at my "green" metaphor haw haw you win a dozen mefi conversation points AND YET a lot more artists struggle to pay bills than cryptoart collectors so
Well but is the NFT market really addressing this, or is it simply recreating the existing art market where a few superstars get rich and everyone else starves? Part 2 of the article says:
Though it wasn’t designed to apply at this scale, we can try looking at a metric of income inequality such as The Palma Ratio (PR) — a ratio of the top 10%’s share of income, compared to the bottom 40% (lower PR implies more equally distributed income, higher PR implies more inequality) [10].
The US’s PR is relatively high within the ‘Western’ world at 1.85. Japan and Denmark are more egalitarian at around 0.9. Countries like South Africa are amongst the worst with a PR of 7.The entire world’s PR — i.e. the income gap between the richest people in the world, compared to the poorest people in the world is 32.
SuperRare has a Palma Ratio of 29.
Actually I think the article's accounting is overly generous, because it only looks at artist gross income without considering the fact that every part of this process incurs fees (same tweet as OP), from listing ('minting') a piece of art to even accepting a bid-- many artists at the bottom are probably losing money by putting up their art.
posted by Pyry at 5:46 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
Well but is the NFT market really addressing this, or is it simply recreating the existing art market where a few superstars get rich and everyone else starves? Part 2 of the article says:
Though it wasn’t designed to apply at this scale, we can try looking at a metric of income inequality such as The Palma Ratio (PR) — a ratio of the top 10%’s share of income, compared to the bottom 40% (lower PR implies more equally distributed income, higher PR implies more inequality) [10].
The US’s PR is relatively high within the ‘Western’ world at 1.85. Japan and Denmark are more egalitarian at around 0.9. Countries like South Africa are amongst the worst with a PR of 7.The entire world’s PR — i.e. the income gap between the richest people in the world, compared to the poorest people in the world is 32.
SuperRare has a Palma Ratio of 29.
Actually I think the article's accounting is overly generous, because it only looks at artist gross income without considering the fact that every part of this process incurs fees (same tweet as OP), from listing ('minting') a piece of art to even accepting a bid-- many artists at the bottom are probably losing money by putting up their art.
posted by Pyry at 5:46 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
Nobody should not be selling / trading anything in a way that requires a massively disproportionate energy cost and thus ecological destruction
Wave goodbye to the entire 21st century economy (for better and worse). Nothing anyone is doing in the developed world is sustainable and doesn’t come at a massive cost to the environment.
posted by paulcole at 5:54 AM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
Wave goodbye to the entire 21st century economy (for better and worse). Nothing anyone is doing in the developed world is sustainable and doesn’t come at a massive cost to the environment.
posted by paulcole at 5:54 AM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
I'm having trouble understanding this. The block chain computers use a ton of energy?
Yes. Blockchain maintenance requires thousands if not millions of computers which carry the blockchain to ALL do heavy calculations individually to maintain the chain, especially if an entry gets made to the ledger (which requires new calculations along the entire network). It's a shockingly energy-heavy thing to do.
The town of Wenatchee, WA is located close to several hydroelectric dams and has become a major hub of Bitcoin mining because the energy is nearby and is low-cost. But those mining operations use some HUGE percentage of all the power generated, enough for it to be a problem for the region. Here's a Politico article from 2018 talking about that whole situation.
posted by hippybear at 6:08 AM on March 3, 2021 [22 favorites]
Yes. Blockchain maintenance requires thousands if not millions of computers which carry the blockchain to ALL do heavy calculations individually to maintain the chain, especially if an entry gets made to the ledger (which requires new calculations along the entire network). It's a shockingly energy-heavy thing to do.
The town of Wenatchee, WA is located close to several hydroelectric dams and has become a major hub of Bitcoin mining because the energy is nearby and is low-cost. But those mining operations use some HUGE percentage of all the power generated, enough for it to be a problem for the region. Here's a Politico article from 2018 talking about that whole situation.
posted by hippybear at 6:08 AM on March 3, 2021 [22 favorites]
It was recently estimated that Bitcoin uses over 120 terawatts of electricity per year. For comparison, Ireland uses about 27.
posted by justkevin at 6:17 AM on March 3, 2021 [22 favorites]
posted by justkevin at 6:17 AM on March 3, 2021 [22 favorites]
I wonder if Bitcoin etc. wouldn't be so highly valued, if the people who use it have to pay the real costs.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:18 AM on March 3, 2021 [14 favorites]
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:18 AM on March 3, 2021 [14 favorites]
isn't the energy-use issue going to kill this thing? Or, this thing as it currently exists?
Because this is a point that isn't going to go away, isn't going to get better when it scales up, isn't a loss-leader, etc.
It does/could confer the scarcity that has been objectively missing until now - that it takes so freaking much energy to turn over any given interaction means interactions are only reluctantly engaged in, voila! scarcity.
But it curbs it pretty heavily as a useful thing. Or is Ether something going to 'fix' that?
posted by From Bklyn at 6:22 AM on March 3, 2021
Because this is a point that isn't going to go away, isn't going to get better when it scales up, isn't a loss-leader, etc.
It does/could confer the scarcity that has been objectively missing until now - that it takes so freaking much energy to turn over any given interaction means interactions are only reluctantly engaged in, voila! scarcity.
But it curbs it pretty heavily as a useful thing. Or is Ether something going to 'fix' that?
posted by From Bklyn at 6:22 AM on March 3, 2021
I wonder if Bitcoin etc. wouldn't be so highly valued, if the people who use it have to pay the real costs.
Bitcoin's value is based on its scarcity, not on any inherent utility. If it became more expensive to mine gold, gold would not become less valuable.
posted by justkevin at 6:30 AM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
Bitcoin's value is based on its scarcity, not on any inherent utility. If it became more expensive to mine gold, gold would not become less valuable.
posted by justkevin at 6:30 AM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
Huh. I thought Ethereum's algorithms were significantly more energy efficient than Bitcoin's. Maybe it is, given that Bitcoin is now estimated at 120 TWh/year and Ethereum is under 8, but I suppose that could also be a function of scale since Bitcoin has been around longer.
Bitcoin's value is based on its scarcity, not on any inherent utility. If it became more expensive to mine gold, gold would not become less valuable.
Well, there goes my idea of exponentially increasing energy costs above a certain threshold to discourage mining all day.
posted by thecaddy at 6:33 AM on March 3, 2021
Bitcoin's value is based on its scarcity, not on any inherent utility. If it became more expensive to mine gold, gold would not become less valuable.
Well, there goes my idea of exponentially increasing energy costs above a certain threshold to discourage mining all day.
posted by thecaddy at 6:33 AM on March 3, 2021
I follow a bunch of digital artists, creative coders, etc. which is normally an oasis of "look at this cool thing" and "check out this amazing open source code" and now it is all fighting about NFTs. It's so depressing.
It's a cursed confluence of a bunch of things:
- most artists are woefully underpaid
- this community has a long tradition of sharing/giving away code
- which they do even though they are "surrounded" (in the tech sector) with hypercapitalists
- but now everyone is yelling at the broke ass artists because they figured out a way to make some dough using a method that is being used all over the place to mint money
- certain artists (e.g. Beeple) became millionaire "overnight" (scare quotes because of course he's been releasing art every day for ten years)
My feeling here is that if you're against NFTs then put your energies (ha) into regulating cryptocurrencies not yelling at artists for trying to make a living.
posted by gwint at 6:37 AM on March 3, 2021 [7 favorites]
It's a cursed confluence of a bunch of things:
- most artists are woefully underpaid
- this community has a long tradition of sharing/giving away code
- which they do even though they are "surrounded" (in the tech sector) with hypercapitalists
- but now everyone is yelling at the broke ass artists because they figured out a way to make some dough using a method that is being used all over the place to mint money
- certain artists (e.g. Beeple) became millionaire "overnight" (scare quotes because of course he's been releasing art every day for ten years)
My feeling here is that if you're against NFTs then put your energies (ha) into regulating cryptocurrencies not yelling at artists for trying to make a living.
posted by gwint at 6:37 AM on March 3, 2021 [7 favorites]
Bitcoin, blockchain, cryptoart, whatever this is...none of it will ever really make any sense to me. I asked a friend who claims to understand it to forward me the For Dummies-est articles on the subject he could find, and it was still too many layers of abstraction for me.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:39 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:39 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
Well, there goes my idea of exponentially increasing energy costs above a certain threshold to discourage mining all day.
Increasing energy costs does decrease mining (until bitcoin prices rise). At this point, the mining bottleneck is hardware. You cannot buy the latest generation of video cards right now. People are buying 5 year old cards on ebay for more than they originally cost new.
posted by justkevin at 6:43 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
Increasing energy costs does decrease mining (until bitcoin prices rise). At this point, the mining bottleneck is hardware. You cannot buy the latest generation of video cards right now. People are buying 5 year old cards on ebay for more than they originally cost new.
posted by justkevin at 6:43 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
Bitcoin's value is based on its scarcity, not on any inherent utility. If it became more expensive to mine gold, gold would not become less valuable.
Bitcoin’s value is based on demand for it — in the past, it’d spike as new regional markets opened up for it, and then it’d settle back to close to it’s cost to mine. Today it’s spiking because the world is awash in cash and debt and there’s no “good” place to put it and get a decent return.
It’s the confluence of hype and illth, in the Ruskin sense of it (mounds of idle cash “causing various devastation and trouble around them in all direction”).
posted by notyou at 6:52 AM on March 3, 2021 [7 favorites]
Bitcoin’s value is based on demand for it — in the past, it’d spike as new regional markets opened up for it, and then it’d settle back to close to it’s cost to mine. Today it’s spiking because the world is awash in cash and debt and there’s no “good” place to put it and get a decent return.
It’s the confluence of hype and illth, in the Ruskin sense of it (mounds of idle cash “causing various devastation and trouble around them in all direction”).
posted by notyou at 6:52 AM on March 3, 2021 [7 favorites]
I agree that the anger is better directed at regulating crypto/blockchain, but I have been disappointed to see a lot of these folks use their platforms as artists to promote cryptocurrency generally and greenwash its energy impact.
posted by little onion at 6:53 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by little onion at 6:53 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
My feeling here is that if you're against NFTs then put your energies (ha) into regulating cryptocurrencies not yelling at artists for trying to make a living.
As Memo Atken himself notes, their title is accurate - artists aren't harming the planet - businesses such as Superrare, that aren't being transparent and aren't taking responsibility for the impact of their business models, are.
posted by secretdark at 6:57 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
As Memo Atken himself notes, their title is accurate - artists aren't harming the planet - businesses such as Superrare, that aren't being transparent and aren't taking responsibility for the impact of their business models, are.
posted by secretdark at 6:57 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
The explaining-cryptocurrency only-partially-joking explainer blurb I've always liked was:
You know that one spreadsheet your employer has? That one that's got like a million rows in it and nested macros in macros and don't even think about how much storage space it takes up and it's a fifty-fifty shot whether excel hangs for five minutes attempting to open it, and while someone probably understands how it all works together but practically speaking no one there has any idea who that someone is or how to contact them if they did, and if anything ever happened to that spreadsheet the company might as well immediately shut down? The Blockchain's big idea is to take that monstersheet and every time anyone touches it, to email a copy of it to everyone in the company.
Crypto enthusiasts will Well Actually that joke with such intensity that, like crypto itself, it's not worth the energy to engage by any sane metric.
posted by Drastic at 7:04 AM on March 3, 2021 [46 favorites]
You know that one spreadsheet your employer has? That one that's got like a million rows in it and nested macros in macros and don't even think about how much storage space it takes up and it's a fifty-fifty shot whether excel hangs for five minutes attempting to open it, and while someone probably understands how it all works together but practically speaking no one there has any idea who that someone is or how to contact them if they did, and if anything ever happened to that spreadsheet the company might as well immediately shut down? The Blockchain's big idea is to take that monstersheet and every time anyone touches it, to email a copy of it to everyone in the company.
Crypto enthusiasts will Well Actually that joke with such intensity that, like crypto itself, it's not worth the energy to engage by any sane metric.
posted by Drastic at 7:04 AM on March 3, 2021 [46 favorites]
The Blockchain's big idea is to take that monstersheet and every time anyone touches it, to email a copy of it to everyone in the company.
I’ll “well, actually” that because the analogy makes it sound like simply distributing and maintaining multiple copies of the ledger is the primary cause of the energy inefficiency, when the real cause is that confirming additions to the ledger is made intentionally inefficient, as a security measure.
posted by atoxyl at 7:17 AM on March 3, 2021 [8 favorites]
I’ll “well, actually” that because the analogy makes it sound like simply distributing and maintaining multiple copies of the ledger is the primary cause of the energy inefficiency, when the real cause is that confirming additions to the ledger is made intentionally inefficient, as a security measure.
posted by atoxyl at 7:17 AM on March 3, 2021 [8 favorites]
This reminds me that ten years I used to fantasize that I'd buy 50,000 gallons of diesel fuel, and just burn it in a flare with no work done, as performance art. I imagined the outrage and protests I'd get could mobilize a lot of resistance to energy use/waste. Apparently, we've blown way past that scenario with nary a peep. Good thing I didn't waste my retirement account.
posted by hypnogogue at 7:35 AM on March 3, 2021 [10 favorites]
posted by hypnogogue at 7:35 AM on March 3, 2021 [10 favorites]
For the confused, one thing to know about blockchain is however wasteful you may understand it to be, you should increase the waste by at least one order of magnitude. Almost all the energy a computer uses, no matter what it's doing, just becomes waste heat. There's been some research into using the waste heat to do something else but it's not happening on any scale at all. Any mining operation in a climate that already requires air conditioning will more than double its energy expenses by having to run wasteful cooling equipment 24/7. The cooling equipment will transfer its waste heat to the environment, but that's somebody else's problem.
Blockchain (and Bitcoin in particular) is a way of converting huge amounts of energy into staggering amounts of waste heat, with maybe a small profit for people who can afford to establish mining operations near sources of cheap power, assuming they can also sell their gains for less volatile assets when the timing is right. Optimal location for a Bitcoin mine: someplace with cheap electricity that's cold year round, so cooling costs are mitigated. Sorry if your planet was depending on that permafrost!
posted by fedward at 7:39 AM on March 3, 2021 [17 favorites]
Blockchain (and Bitcoin in particular) is a way of converting huge amounts of energy into staggering amounts of waste heat, with maybe a small profit for people who can afford to establish mining operations near sources of cheap power, assuming they can also sell their gains for less volatile assets when the timing is right. Optimal location for a Bitcoin mine: someplace with cheap electricity that's cold year round, so cooling costs are mitigated. Sorry if your planet was depending on that permafrost!
posted by fedward at 7:39 AM on March 3, 2021 [17 favorites]
At this point, the mining bottleneck is hardware. You cannot buy the latest generation of video cards right now. People are buying 5 year old cards on ebay for more than they originally cost new.
When I went to build up a new PC for the first time in over a decade I was really confused by the cost of new videocards. Typically in the past I would buy whatever the hot video card was a year ago because I could pick one up for $50 or so yet still have enough 'future proofing' to ensure I'll get at least 10+ years out of the machine. I ended up settling for something that wouldn't have been hot even 5 years ago to keep the price reasonable. I'm not a gamer but plan to start editing videos in the near future.
posted by drstrangelove at 7:44 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
When I went to build up a new PC for the first time in over a decade I was really confused by the cost of new videocards. Typically in the past I would buy whatever the hot video card was a year ago because I could pick one up for $50 or so yet still have enough 'future proofing' to ensure I'll get at least 10+ years out of the machine. I ended up settling for something that wouldn't have been hot even 5 years ago to keep the price reasonable. I'm not a gamer but plan to start editing videos in the near future.
posted by drstrangelove at 7:44 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
Another thing to know is that if the computing efficiency increases, that doesn't save any energy, it just ratchets up the competitiveness. The same amount of maximum-the-market-will-bear waste will continue to occur.
posted by notoriety public at 7:45 AM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by notoriety public at 7:45 AM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
Another thing to know is that if the computing efficiency increases, that doesn't save any energy, it just ratchets up the competitiveness. The same amount of maximum-the-market-will-bear waste will continue to occur.
This is effectively Jevon's Paradox.
posted by drstrangelove at 7:48 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
This is effectively Jevon's Paradox.
posted by drstrangelove at 7:48 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
This is effectively Jevon's Paradox.
Possibly, but I might argue against it. Jevon's Paradox is that increased efficiency opens up new ways to use the resource to make useful things happen. No such benefit here, it literally results in exactly the same number of bitcoins popping out the other end, regardless of how many calculations occurred to make that happen.
posted by notoriety public at 7:54 AM on March 3, 2021 [5 favorites]
Possibly, but I might argue against it. Jevon's Paradox is that increased efficiency opens up new ways to use the resource to make useful things happen. No such benefit here, it literally results in exactly the same number of bitcoins popping out the other end, regardless of how many calculations occurred to make that happen.
posted by notoriety public at 7:54 AM on March 3, 2021 [5 favorites]
When I walk through the streets of my city I see many works of art. There's almost nowhere you can look where you won't see a work of art. I can walk out of my building right now, and if I look left, I will see an 18 meter wide digital display extolling the virtues of buying a Playstation. Or beer. Or sexily enticing me to buy a new car to increase my fuckability rating. The bus shelters around here have 75" 4k screens flogging, I shit you not, diamond rings. Like you're waiting for a bus when you finally decide on diamonds.
I call this mercenary art. I don't deny the talent where it exists, but that's rare. If you're a mediocre artist with more interest in eating and paying rent than not fucking up humanity, the entire capitalist world is your gallery.
I don't deny this crypto stuff is a problem, but why are you focusing on this last drop in a sea of mercenary art that is drowning us? You need to think big, and the problem is way bigger than this.
posted by adept256 at 8:06 AM on March 3, 2021 [6 favorites]
I call this mercenary art. I don't deny the talent where it exists, but that's rare. If you're a mediocre artist with more interest in eating and paying rent than not fucking up humanity, the entire capitalist world is your gallery.
I don't deny this crypto stuff is a problem, but why are you focusing on this last drop in a sea of mercenary art that is drowning us? You need to think big, and the problem is way bigger than this.
posted by adept256 at 8:06 AM on March 3, 2021 [6 favorites]
The other week I had a dream about someone named "Beepliani" and then I woke up and read about some guy named "Beeple" making an absurd amount of money selling animgifs to crypto enthusiasts. And I was like, okay, lemme get in on this, so I applied for accounts on a couple of the "trade art on the Ethereum blockchain" sites. Still haven't gotten anything back besides "thanks for your application" auto-mails.
And I had some people go from "you should totally do this, it would be a crime to not sell copies of the entirety of the art for your Tarot deck this way" to "omfg don't do it it's a giant ecological crime". It's really kind of hilarious how fast this is spinning.
If I get on any of these sites, my plan is to list stuff for prices that are high enough that I will be able to pay my rent after buying carbon offsets with half the take, until such time as the Etherium blockchain moves to a less power-hungry mode. Which is supposedly in the works. I will of course believe that when I see it.
On the gripping hand, I currently already work in an environment where a lot of my money comes from IT folks who get paid a couple orders of magnitude than me to work at Amazon, Facebook, Google, or one of the zillions of smaller online companies that are frantically trying to insert themselves as middlemen in as many parts of the economy as they can. All of which run huge datacenters frantically converting energy into waste heat. I find myself wondering where *that* compares to the energy usage of entire countries. Plus of course the social costs of stealing ad revenue from other people, fighting against raising the minimum wage for warehouse workers in a Taylorist hell, and generally collecting all the world's information and trying to make a buck off of it without really caring about the veracity of any of it. I draw furry porn for the higher-paid minions of these places.
And there is also probably a discussion to be had about the hidden costs behind where the money for the traditional Fine Art scene comes from. Exploiters and oligarches, as far as the eye can see, looking for places to store value outside of banks and away from the taxman.
posted by egypturnash at 8:30 AM on March 3, 2021 [9 favorites]
And I had some people go from "you should totally do this, it would be a crime to not sell copies of the entirety of the art for your Tarot deck this way" to "omfg don't do it it's a giant ecological crime". It's really kind of hilarious how fast this is spinning.
If I get on any of these sites, my plan is to list stuff for prices that are high enough that I will be able to pay my rent after buying carbon offsets with half the take, until such time as the Etherium blockchain moves to a less power-hungry mode. Which is supposedly in the works. I will of course believe that when I see it.
On the gripping hand, I currently already work in an environment where a lot of my money comes from IT folks who get paid a couple orders of magnitude than me to work at Amazon, Facebook, Google, or one of the zillions of smaller online companies that are frantically trying to insert themselves as middlemen in as many parts of the economy as they can. All of which run huge datacenters frantically converting energy into waste heat. I find myself wondering where *that* compares to the energy usage of entire countries. Plus of course the social costs of stealing ad revenue from other people, fighting against raising the minimum wage for warehouse workers in a Taylorist hell, and generally collecting all the world's information and trying to make a buck off of it without really caring about the veracity of any of it. I draw furry porn for the higher-paid minions of these places.
And there is also probably a discussion to be had about the hidden costs behind where the money for the traditional Fine Art scene comes from. Exploiters and oligarches, as far as the eye can see, looking for places to store value outside of banks and away from the taxman.
posted by egypturnash at 8:30 AM on March 3, 2021 [9 favorites]
For the confused, one thing to know about blockchain is however wasteful you may understand it to be, you should increase the waste by at least one order of magnitude. Almost all the energy a computer uses, no matter what it's doing, just becomes waste heat.
Which is why my former coworker only mined etherium in the winter. Because the landlord was paying the electricity bill and this way he didn't have to pay for the heat.
posted by subdee at 8:35 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
Which is why my former coworker only mined etherium in the winter. Because the landlord was paying the electricity bill and this way he didn't have to pay for the heat.
posted by subdee at 8:35 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
I long for the good old days, when the only ecological disaster associated with mining was the incidental poisoning of an entire drainage basin due to toxic runoff, and of course the associated human impact of poverty-level wages and/or slave labor...
posted by caution live frogs at 8:47 AM on March 3, 2021 [8 favorites]
posted by caution live frogs at 8:47 AM on March 3, 2021 [8 favorites]
isn't the energy-use issue going to kill this thing? Or, this thing as it currently exists?
So, if it starts costing more in energy to produce bitcoins than the bitcoins are worth, people will stop mining so much (the people in higher-cost areas will drop off, the people with cheap electricity will keep mining).
The network will then lower the amount of computation required to mine bitcoins until it incentivizes people to come back. This is called a "difficulty adjustment".
So the energy use of the Bitcoin network scales more or less directly in line with how much Bitcoin is worth in dollars.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:51 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
So, if it starts costing more in energy to produce bitcoins than the bitcoins are worth, people will stop mining so much (the people in higher-cost areas will drop off, the people with cheap electricity will keep mining).
The network will then lower the amount of computation required to mine bitcoins until it incentivizes people to come back. This is called a "difficulty adjustment".
So the energy use of the Bitcoin network scales more or less directly in line with how much Bitcoin is worth in dollars.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:51 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
(Ethereum- the network that these NFTs are on- has been promising to swap from the hilariously inefficient proof-of-work setup that Bitcoin has to something less so, but it hasn't happened yet and may never happen)
posted by BungaDunga at 8:53 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by BungaDunga at 8:53 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
Two responses to SuperRare's disingenuous excuses. First, it's simply untrue that activity like NFT art trading doesn't increase mining emissions, there's just one layer of indirection. Mining is driven by the value of Ethereum, which has more than doubled since Jan 1 based largely on NFT art hype. Second, if SuperRare is genuinely concerned about the environmental impact and believes that it will be resolved in the near future by the network moving to proof-of-stake, they could have simply waited to launch until proof-of-stake was in place.
posted by skymt at 8:55 AM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by skymt at 8:55 AM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
I had to get pretty far into TFA to understand what cryptoart was. I was expecting it to involve fractals or random number generators or something. But it sounds like it’s just a way to sign a copy of a piece of digital art so someone can say they own the “real” copy. Is that right? If so, how is this different from:
Adele records song and it’s available as mp3 or whatever.
Some people pay to download for $10 and some pay to stream on Spotify premium for $9 a months.
Some people pirate and pay nothing.
(New concept) Adele uses crypto to sign a copy of the file. I buy it for $1000 so I can say I’m listening to the “real” one.
It seems that without physical media like a painting or vinyl album or signed book copy, artists have an uphill battle here. Paying for an identical original is missing the point of art in the first place isn’t it?
posted by freecellwizard at 9:12 AM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
Adele records song and it’s available as mp3 or whatever.
Some people pay to download for $10 and some pay to stream on Spotify premium for $9 a months.
Some people pirate and pay nothing.
(New concept) Adele uses crypto to sign a copy of the file. I buy it for $1000 so I can say I’m listening to the “real” one.
It seems that without physical media like a painting or vinyl album or signed book copy, artists have an uphill battle here. Paying for an identical original is missing the point of art in the first place isn’t it?
posted by freecellwizard at 9:12 AM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
Another thing... isn't much of this cryptoart, well, just ... bad?
posted by Saxon Kane at 9:13 AM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by Saxon Kane at 9:13 AM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
The thing you're missing, freecellwizard, is that cryptoart is designed mainly as (most charitably) an investment vehicle. The art is secondary, the important part is that you can buy a unique thing and sell it later.
posted by skymt at 9:16 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by skymt at 9:16 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
Paying for an identical original is missing the point of art in the first place isn’t it?
I mean, I think it works to replicate the concept of an authenticatable limited edition in a purely digital form. Does the history of such things always show them to hold value? Certainly not.
posted by atoxyl at 9:17 AM on March 3, 2021
I mean, I think it works to replicate the concept of an authenticatable limited edition in a purely digital form. Does the history of such things always show them to hold value? Certainly not.
posted by atoxyl at 9:17 AM on March 3, 2021
Paying for an identical original is missing the point of art in the first place isn’t it?
Yeah it is more or less exactly the same as paying for a numbered print signed by the artist, except that it's even more identical.
The weird thing to me is that, technically, the only thing stopping an artist from breaking the agreement and minting more copies is social. The only actually unique thing is the random number attached to the image and the transaction assigning it to you.
It really is a rarified version of fine-art speculation, managing to almost completely elide the actual art in favor of pure speculation.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:21 AM on March 3, 2021 [9 favorites]
Yeah it is more or less exactly the same as paying for a numbered print signed by the artist, except that it's even more identical.
The weird thing to me is that, technically, the only thing stopping an artist from breaking the agreement and minting more copies is social. The only actually unique thing is the random number attached to the image and the transaction assigning it to you.
It really is a rarified version of fine-art speculation, managing to almost completely elide the actual art in favor of pure speculation.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:21 AM on March 3, 2021 [9 favorites]
As a parallel (or perhaps corollary) to "the cruelty is the point", when it comes to crypto the wastefulness is the point-- non-proof-of-work crypto currencies will never catch on because crypto hype is powered by a psychological alchemy that turns resource destruction into value. A hypothetical cryptocurrency that did everything Bitcoin does but magically consumed no electricity would never see the kind of speculative bubble we're now seeing.
posted by Pyry at 9:55 AM on March 3, 2021 [14 favorites]
posted by Pyry at 9:55 AM on March 3, 2021 [14 favorites]
Can you imagine how much worse this would all be today if people invented or got into blockchains/cryptocoins back when Napster was still new and the dotcom bubble was bubbling and there was all kinds of high weirdness like the eToy artpunk group?
Imagine if Elon Musk became a billionaire through bitcoin or ethereum instead of PayPal and a bunch of those kinds of technorati were actually at the top of these pyramid schemes instead of the relatively low-vision hapless doofuses that run bitfinex and Tether?
Granted, on the other hand this isn't going away any time soon, and I think our future holds some wild Expanse style interplanetary conflict that's going to be directly related to and/or fueled by cryptocoins.
Why? A cryptocoin wallet can technically have the extremely low weight of a sheet of paper or a bunch of electrons. Try taking several million or billion dollars worth of gold to another planet. You'd likely be better off and more profitable hauling something useful like water, atmosphere or living plant or animal life.
Sure, there's no reason why normal electronic banking would not function in space but that assumes state power backing it or that the person using it wants to be loyal to that state or system.
You can bet your sweet ass that Musk has already thought about this and might explain his recently huge 1.5 billion dollar buy-in with Tesla.
posted by loquacious at 9:56 AM on March 3, 2021
Imagine if Elon Musk became a billionaire through bitcoin or ethereum instead of PayPal and a bunch of those kinds of technorati were actually at the top of these pyramid schemes instead of the relatively low-vision hapless doofuses that run bitfinex and Tether?
Granted, on the other hand this isn't going away any time soon, and I think our future holds some wild Expanse style interplanetary conflict that's going to be directly related to and/or fueled by cryptocoins.
Why? A cryptocoin wallet can technically have the extremely low weight of a sheet of paper or a bunch of electrons. Try taking several million or billion dollars worth of gold to another planet. You'd likely be better off and more profitable hauling something useful like water, atmosphere or living plant or animal life.
Sure, there's no reason why normal electronic banking would not function in space but that assumes state power backing it or that the person using it wants to be loyal to that state or system.
You can bet your sweet ass that Musk has already thought about this and might explain his recently huge 1.5 billion dollar buy-in with Tesla.
posted by loquacious at 9:56 AM on March 3, 2021
crypto hype is powered by a psychological alchemy that turns resource destruction into value
Rolling coal, for nerds.
posted by clew at 9:58 AM on March 3, 2021 [28 favorites]
Rolling coal, for nerds.
posted by clew at 9:58 AM on March 3, 2021 [28 favorites]
Sympathetic with anyone trying to adequately convey how stupid the structure of these systems is; unfortunately they failed to capture it, leaving the reader with the mistaken sense that there’s some “propulsive” / useful work being done with all that energy. This is wrong. All the energy waste is structurally required to *be* wasted. It’s not doing useful work at all, it’s solving intentionally meaningless puzzles that automatically recalibrate difficulty to remain just hard enough to not be easily solved by all the power currently being wasted, but still easy enough to be solvable in about ten minutes.
To complete the authors’ metaphor: imagine the train had some risk of a criminal derailing it, and the “clever” way they came up with to solve it is to require that “riding a train” is accomplished by driving several thousand trains up an artificial mountain pass, in parallel, every ten minutes, and every passenger switches to the train that gets to the top of each ten minute sprint every ten minutes, and any time there’s an improvement in engine technology or economic benefit to winning the race the artificial mountain passes automatically get longer and steeper. This is considered a “solution” because it’s statistically unlikely the derailing criminal gang will be able to win the races consistently,
Doesn’t feel quite as reasonable as “train is already going”, does it? It sounds like a train network made by an imbecile.
posted by ead at 10:04 AM on March 3, 2021 [7 favorites]
To complete the authors’ metaphor: imagine the train had some risk of a criminal derailing it, and the “clever” way they came up with to solve it is to require that “riding a train” is accomplished by driving several thousand trains up an artificial mountain pass, in parallel, every ten minutes, and every passenger switches to the train that gets to the top of each ten minute sprint every ten minutes, and any time there’s an improvement in engine technology or economic benefit to winning the race the artificial mountain passes automatically get longer and steeper. This is considered a “solution” because it’s statistically unlikely the derailing criminal gang will be able to win the races consistently,
Doesn’t feel quite as reasonable as “train is already going”, does it? It sounds like a train network made by an imbecile.
posted by ead at 10:04 AM on March 3, 2021 [7 favorites]
our future holds some wild Expanse style interplanetary conflict
You must be incredibly optimistic to think humans will survive long enough to get off this rock...
posted by Saxon Kane at 10:05 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
You must be incredibly optimistic to think humans will survive long enough to get off this rock...
posted by Saxon Kane at 10:05 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
The Card Cheat Here's my attempt at a real for dummies Bitcoin explainer that explains what's happening without any actual technical details:
Bitcoin hates central banking with a passion, but wants to be secure.
Bitcoin therefore makes lots and lots of computers use deliberately and intentionally long, complex, and energy intensive math every time someone gives a bitcoin to someone else.
Through cryptography magic having all those computers do all the hard math at the cost of a fuckton of energy makes the transaction supposedly secure without a central bank.
*********
Note also that much of what I wrote is also totally bullshit. Contrary to the claims of bitcoin fanatics there are several central locations, some of which have been broken resulting in massive losses for bitcoin holders.
Likewise contrary to their claims that the magic of using a fuckton of power to do lots of intentionally very hard math makes it secure there's been exploits of the blockchain.
So not only is bitcoin a massive con that requires a truly obscene carbon footprint, the supposed founding principles that supposedly justify all the energy being wasted turn out to be largely BS.
One of the more famous central banks that bitcoin had despite pretending it doesn't, was MtGox [1]. It was exploited and about $450 million of bitcoin was stolen.
In a separate event bitcoing bank Quadriga CX lost $145 million of their customers money when the CEO died unexpectedly and it was discovered that the core passwords existed only in his skull. The money still, theoretically, exists in some vague state. But the customers can't get it because techbro was too smart and clever to write down the passwords and put them in a secure location in case he died.
TL;DR Bitcoin claims it needs to exist to avoid things that it actually contains.
[1] Which was a pseudo-acronym for "Magic The Gathering eXchange" because it started as a place for people to trade (virtual) Magic the Gathering cards. And then evolved into a bitcoin bank. Without any actual security checks, verification, or any of that horrible evil messy government stuff bitcoin fanatics hate so much.
posted by sotonohito at 10:13 AM on March 3, 2021 [6 favorites]
Bitcoin hates central banking with a passion, but wants to be secure.
Bitcoin therefore makes lots and lots of computers use deliberately and intentionally long, complex, and energy intensive math every time someone gives a bitcoin to someone else.
Through cryptography magic having all those computers do all the hard math at the cost of a fuckton of energy makes the transaction supposedly secure without a central bank.
*********
Note also that much of what I wrote is also totally bullshit. Contrary to the claims of bitcoin fanatics there are several central locations, some of which have been broken resulting in massive losses for bitcoin holders.
Likewise contrary to their claims that the magic of using a fuckton of power to do lots of intentionally very hard math makes it secure there's been exploits of the blockchain.
So not only is bitcoin a massive con that requires a truly obscene carbon footprint, the supposed founding principles that supposedly justify all the energy being wasted turn out to be largely BS.
One of the more famous central banks that bitcoin had despite pretending it doesn't, was MtGox [1]. It was exploited and about $450 million of bitcoin was stolen.
In a separate event bitcoing bank Quadriga CX lost $145 million of their customers money when the CEO died unexpectedly and it was discovered that the core passwords existed only in his skull. The money still, theoretically, exists in some vague state. But the customers can't get it because techbro was too smart and clever to write down the passwords and put them in a secure location in case he died.
TL;DR Bitcoin claims it needs to exist to avoid things that it actually contains.
[1] Which was a pseudo-acronym for "Magic The Gathering eXchange" because it started as a place for people to trade (virtual) Magic the Gathering cards. And then evolved into a bitcoin bank. Without any actual security checks, verification, or any of that horrible evil messy government stuff bitcoin fanatics hate so much.
posted by sotonohito at 10:13 AM on March 3, 2021 [6 favorites]
"What if idling your car 24/7 produced sudoku you could trade for heroin saying you have an exclusive non-legally-binding claim to a gif of LeBron James making a sick dunk, which you can trade hoping someone else is willing to pay a half million dollars for it"
posted by CrystalDave at 10:36 AM on March 3, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by CrystalDave at 10:36 AM on March 3, 2021 [6 favorites]
About 10 years ago I was teaching university classes in new media art – I used to be super excited about the possibilities of digital art and internet art, creative coding, games-as-art, etc. But this inevitable-but-pointless trainwreck of bitcoin-meets-art just sounds depressing to me. You can't spell "non-fungible token" without "no fun".
posted by oulipian at 10:50 AM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by oulipian at 10:50 AM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
How difficult would it be to just tax the f*ck out of miners? The power company knows who's doing it, so why not have a "luxury" tax on exorbitant power usage, to price the miners out of business or recoup huge tax dollars?
posted by OHenryPacey at 10:51 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by OHenryPacey at 10:51 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
I can't define art for anyone else. I do have a strong feeling that I want some clarity and truth from art personally. The way blockchains work is so saturated with scamminess and scam-adjacency that it hurts my brain.
I wish some (artists/one) could explain more clearly what's going on here. Analogizing this to a sale is pretty off to me. Isn't it more like a transferrable token of patronage? The art is like the bitchin engraving on a stock certificate.
The capital gains side of it is going to be saturated with the crumminess of art as investment per usual. The part where people give money to artists, not so bad.
posted by Wood at 10:53 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
I wish some (artists/one) could explain more clearly what's going on here. Analogizing this to a sale is pretty off to me. Isn't it more like a transferrable token of patronage? The art is like the bitchin engraving on a stock certificate.
The capital gains side of it is going to be saturated with the crumminess of art as investment per usual. The part where people give money to artists, not so bad.
posted by Wood at 10:53 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
Darn, now that I read what I wrote (I know, I know) a transferrable token of patronage is actually a pretty good description of much of the sale of original art throughout history. Maybe I'm too much of a kneejerk contrarian.
posted by Wood at 10:55 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Wood at 10:55 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
But it sounds like it’s just a way to sign a copy of a piece of digital art so someone can say they own the “real” copy. Is that right?
That's more or less it. For a recent, "real world" example of this idea, there's the banana taped to the wall at Art Basel. Two editions of this art were sold for $120,000 each. There's nothing stopping anybody, anywhere, from taping a banana to a wall, and in fact the people who bought an edition of "Comedian" didn't buy the literal banana or the literal duct tape. They bought the "art" part of it, which to some extent was just an artist saying "this is art. That'll be $120,000" (but it wasn't really "worth" $120K until somebody paid for it, thus securing its stature). Nobody's going to stop me from taping a banana to my wall (net cost to me, around 25¢), but I can't claim that I have an edition of Cattelan's "Comedian." If I did try to claim that, the Art World could research the editions that were sold and/or my own finances to figure out whether I had, somehow, acquired one. That's kind of a pain. I mean, they'd start by saying I'm not likely to have an authentic edition, but I could still make them have to prove it.
Where the blockchain comes in is as a method to authenticate the edition. Instead of the Art World looking into the history of every edition sold, they can look at the blockchain, which in theory is public record and easily searched. That part actually makes some kind of sense as a way to identify a specific digital record. But since the type of blockchain currency they use for this is, by design, an immense energy waste, the overall utility is much more questionable. Instead it seems like people in the art world and people who would buy art are getting played for chumps by people who stand to profit off the blockchain, and the biggest loser in all of it is the planet.
posted by fedward at 10:59 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
That's more or less it. For a recent, "real world" example of this idea, there's the banana taped to the wall at Art Basel. Two editions of this art were sold for $120,000 each. There's nothing stopping anybody, anywhere, from taping a banana to a wall, and in fact the people who bought an edition of "Comedian" didn't buy the literal banana or the literal duct tape. They bought the "art" part of it, which to some extent was just an artist saying "this is art. That'll be $120,000" (but it wasn't really "worth" $120K until somebody paid for it, thus securing its stature). Nobody's going to stop me from taping a banana to my wall (net cost to me, around 25¢), but I can't claim that I have an edition of Cattelan's "Comedian." If I did try to claim that, the Art World could research the editions that were sold and/or my own finances to figure out whether I had, somehow, acquired one. That's kind of a pain. I mean, they'd start by saying I'm not likely to have an authentic edition, but I could still make them have to prove it.
Where the blockchain comes in is as a method to authenticate the edition. Instead of the Art World looking into the history of every edition sold, they can look at the blockchain, which in theory is public record and easily searched. That part actually makes some kind of sense as a way to identify a specific digital record. But since the type of blockchain currency they use for this is, by design, an immense energy waste, the overall utility is much more questionable. Instead it seems like people in the art world and people who would buy art are getting played for chumps by people who stand to profit off the blockchain, and the biggest loser in all of it is the planet.
posted by fedward at 10:59 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
There are a couple comments in here along the lines of “Well everything we do on the Internet uses power so who can say that Bitcoin is really bad?” Or like “well Google has a lot of servers. Maybe they generate whole countries worth of greenhouse gasses too.”
And I would just like to push back on that a little bit: You are totally wrong and you have no concept of how fucked up this blockchain bullshit is.
Yes, everything uses energy, but we can actually research this and find out how much!
"the energy footprint of one bitcoin transaction is equivalent to 453,000 payments on the Visa network." Visa does something like 150 million transactions per day, and there are currently about 330k Bitcoin transactions per day. The stupid Bitcoin network is getting almost nothing done and using more energy than the entire global Visa credit card network that actually powers the world financial system. It’s not even comparable.
posted by chrchr at 11:13 AM on March 3, 2021 [17 favorites]
And I would just like to push back on that a little bit: You are totally wrong and you have no concept of how fucked up this blockchain bullshit is.
Yes, everything uses energy, but we can actually research this and find out how much!
"the energy footprint of one bitcoin transaction is equivalent to 453,000 payments on the Visa network." Visa does something like 150 million transactions per day, and there are currently about 330k Bitcoin transactions per day. The stupid Bitcoin network is getting almost nothing done and using more energy than the entire global Visa credit card network that actually powers the world financial system. It’s not even comparable.
posted by chrchr at 11:13 AM on March 3, 2021 [17 favorites]
I especially liked the article I saw a few days ago breathlessly proclaiming the amazing creative possibilities of having art react to subsequent blockchain transactions, highlighting someone whose art changes backgrounds based on the time of day. I thought that was satire at first since that hasn’t been novel for many decades but, no, there really are people who think it’s innovative to spend close to two day’s power usage for the average American family than checking the system clock.
posted by adamsc at 11:47 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by adamsc at 11:47 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
isn't the energy-use issue going to kill this thing? Or, this thing as it currently exists?
Bitcoin and its variants are already super dead as an actual way of transferring money, beyond crime related activities. Yes, yes, Venezuela, etc etc etc, still, it's dead. It's only exists now for speculation purposes.
And since "speculation" just requires a shared belief in value by multiple parties with absolutely no requirement said belief be grounded in reality, well, might as well just try to kill off religion. It'd probably be easier.
Good news is that so many more people get just fucked into the ground than make money by trying the ride the crypto tiger, so eventually all the suckers will get used up and something else (hopefully with fewer energy costs) will take over as the next "oh man, just got to get in on the ground floor!" thing, like tulips.
posted by sideshow at 11:54 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
Bitcoin and its variants are already super dead as an actual way of transferring money, beyond crime related activities. Yes, yes, Venezuela, etc etc etc, still, it's dead. It's only exists now for speculation purposes.
And since "speculation" just requires a shared belief in value by multiple parties with absolutely no requirement said belief be grounded in reality, well, might as well just try to kill off religion. It'd probably be easier.
Good news is that so many more people get just fucked into the ground than make money by trying the ride the crypto tiger, so eventually all the suckers will get used up and something else (hopefully with fewer energy costs) will take over as the next "oh man, just got to get in on the ground floor!" thing, like tulips.
posted by sideshow at 11:54 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
Another thing... isn't much of this cryptoart, well, just ... bad?
This painting here? I bought it ten years ago for sixty thousand dollars, I could sell it today for six hundred. The illusion has become real, and the more real it becomes, the more desperately they want it. Capitalism at its finest.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:31 PM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
This painting here? I bought it ten years ago for sixty thousand dollars, I could sell it today for six hundred. The illusion has become real, and the more real it becomes, the more desperately they want it. Capitalism at its finest.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:31 PM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
Where the blockchain comes in is as a method to authenticate the edition. Instead of the Art World looking into the history of every edition sold, they can look at the blockchain, which in theory is public record and easily searched.
I think it's important to stress that there is functionally zero difference between doing something on a blockchain and doing something via a centralized authority. In both cases a transaction is performed between two people and it is validated by a third party. It's just in one case the third party is actually a decentralized group of people crunching numbers and adding the transaction to a blockchain.
There's nothing stopping anyone from making UltraMegaRare.cool and selling unique digital art where they validate ownership via a public ledger that they operate. This is in fact how the vast majority of digital ownership works, via central authorities like Steam and Amazon and Epic. Steam even has a system for reselling things you own digitally, Valve could exactly replicate SuperRare's functionality for a tiny fraction of the energy cost.
There's also nothing stopping folks from just directly supporting artists instead of participating in all this nonsense, but of course commissioning an artist or joining their Patreon doesn't hold the same appeal as needlessly replicating the way greed and capitalism has insinuated itself into the physical art world.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 12:41 PM on March 3, 2021 [12 favorites]
I think it's important to stress that there is functionally zero difference between doing something on a blockchain and doing something via a centralized authority. In both cases a transaction is performed between two people and it is validated by a third party. It's just in one case the third party is actually a decentralized group of people crunching numbers and adding the transaction to a blockchain.
There's nothing stopping anyone from making UltraMegaRare.cool and selling unique digital art where they validate ownership via a public ledger that they operate. This is in fact how the vast majority of digital ownership works, via central authorities like Steam and Amazon and Epic. Steam even has a system for reselling things you own digitally, Valve could exactly replicate SuperRare's functionality for a tiny fraction of the energy cost.
There's also nothing stopping folks from just directly supporting artists instead of participating in all this nonsense, but of course commissioning an artist or joining their Patreon doesn't hold the same appeal as needlessly replicating the way greed and capitalism has insinuated itself into the physical art world.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 12:41 PM on March 3, 2021 [12 favorites]
Can we get a low-energy distributed virtual currency that's mined by carbon capture or renewable energy generation? Maybe we can find a way to genetically engineer algae to perform cryptographic calculations.
posted by NMcCoy at 12:46 PM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by NMcCoy at 12:46 PM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
Maybe we can find a way to genetically engineer algae to perform cryptographic calculations.
It took 3.5 billion years the first time, maybe the second time we can do it a little faster.
posted by notoriety public at 12:51 PM on March 3, 2021 [6 favorites]
It took 3.5 billion years the first time, maybe the second time we can do it a little faster.
posted by notoriety public at 12:51 PM on March 3, 2021 [6 favorites]
Can we get a low-energy distributed virtual currency that's mined by carbon capture or renewable energy generation? Maybe we can find a way to genetically engineer algae to perform cryptographic calculations.
My back of the envelope calculations about algae-rythmic processing power indicate that would require a planet's worth of algae. Quite by co-incidence, I happen to have here ownership papers for Venus. Now, normally I wouldn't part with it, as it was my grandfather's, but seeing as it's you, I'm sure we could come to an arrangement...
posted by Sparx at 12:53 PM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
My back of the envelope calculations about algae-rythmic processing power indicate that would require a planet's worth of algae. Quite by co-incidence, I happen to have here ownership papers for Venus. Now, normally I wouldn't part with it, as it was my grandfather's, but seeing as it's you, I'm sure we could come to an arrangement...
posted by Sparx at 12:53 PM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
I remember visiting an exhibition of a bunch of Turner prize winners and among them was a section of Damien Hurst's work including Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, which was in essence an art work consisting of him auctioning off his works for a shit-ton of money. The catalog for that auction was really nice. It was fun and had things to say about the relationship between art and capitalism. I would think that someone with similar levels of talent or audacity could do something with crypto-currencies or these NFTs but I strongly suspect that the stuff that's out there right now isn't that.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:00 PM on March 3, 2021
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:00 PM on March 3, 2021
It'll be interesting seeing how audiences react to artists getting in on this.
Matt Bors (The Nib) announced he was getting in on it with an NFT "We Should Improve Society Somewhat", but given both the response on Twitter and how much the funding model for The Nib was "Hey, if you give us money we can give a greater portion to our artists, we're all in it together"; I wouldn't be surprised if those two pitches/monetization schemes ended up somewhat in conflict.
After all, if you're angling for the big-bucks "There's always a greater fool" market, surely you don't need the micro-donations anymore.
posted by CrystalDave at 1:08 PM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
Matt Bors (The Nib) announced he was getting in on it with an NFT "We Should Improve Society Somewhat", but given both the response on Twitter and how much the funding model for The Nib was "Hey, if you give us money we can give a greater portion to our artists, we're all in it together"; I wouldn't be surprised if those two pitches/monetization schemes ended up somewhat in conflict.
After all, if you're angling for the big-bucks "There's always a greater fool" market, surely you don't need the micro-donations anymore.
posted by CrystalDave at 1:08 PM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
Bitcoin isn't energy as currency, but rather ashes as currency.
posted by acb at 1:27 PM on March 3, 2021 [12 favorites]
posted by acb at 1:27 PM on March 3, 2021 [12 favorites]
I would think that someone with similar levels of talent or audacity could do something with crypto-currencies or these NFTs but I strongly suspect that the stuff that's out there right now isn't that.
I think the KLF did this sort of thing with real money, if they are to be believed.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:52 PM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
I think the KLF did this sort of thing with real money, if they are to be believed.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:52 PM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
Doing some back of the envelope calculations, 1 mile of driving is roughly equal to maybe 0.5 kwh of electricity in terms of carbon footprint.
So buying something with bitcoin is no worse than driving to the store and back. (Assuming the store is 750 miles away)
posted by justkevin at 2:09 PM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
So buying something with bitcoin is no worse than driving to the store and back. (Assuming the store is 750 miles away)
posted by justkevin at 2:09 PM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
As far as cryptographically signed art goes, I think the founders here are just jumping on the hype train for various blockchain BS to try to get some publicity.
Because there is a really, really, simple and low energy cost method of actually validating ownership and signing digital art: digital certificates. The infrastructure is there, easily understood, cheap, and low energy.
If Person A wants to buy the only "authentic" copy of Person B's digital art, the easiest, simplest, way to do it would be for the art broker to have a certificate which is used to sign a deed to the art for Person A. Badabing, and it would take so little extra electricity over and above just having a website that it's literally not worth counting.
But that's not sexy and headline grabby so they don't do it.
It's secure enough for the military to use for important stuff like validating attack orders and the like, so I'm pretty sure it's secure enough for rich Person A's ego in knowing they have the only authroized or valid copy of the art.
Hell, embed a hash of the signed deed into the art itself using steganography just for extra fun and to assure that the very specific JPG they have is the true JPG.
Validating ownership is a long solved problem. There's no need at all to get any blockchain crap involved except that saying blockchain gets the rubes all riled up.
posted by sotonohito at 2:22 PM on March 3, 2021 [11 favorites]
Because there is a really, really, simple and low energy cost method of actually validating ownership and signing digital art: digital certificates. The infrastructure is there, easily understood, cheap, and low energy.
If Person A wants to buy the only "authentic" copy of Person B's digital art, the easiest, simplest, way to do it would be for the art broker to have a certificate which is used to sign a deed to the art for Person A. Badabing, and it would take so little extra electricity over and above just having a website that it's literally not worth counting.
But that's not sexy and headline grabby so they don't do it.
It's secure enough for the military to use for important stuff like validating attack orders and the like, so I'm pretty sure it's secure enough for rich Person A's ego in knowing they have the only authroized or valid copy of the art.
Hell, embed a hash of the signed deed into the art itself using steganography just for extra fun and to assure that the very specific JPG they have is the true JPG.
Validating ownership is a long solved problem. There's no need at all to get any blockchain crap involved except that saying blockchain gets the rubes all riled up.
posted by sotonohito at 2:22 PM on March 3, 2021 [11 favorites]
Likewise contrary to their claims that the magic of using a fuckton of power to do lots of intentionally very hard math makes it secure there's been exploits of the blockchain.
The integrity that proof of work is supposed to provide doesn’t really have anything to do with the security that Mt. Gox did not provide.
I’d argue that a problem with proof of work is that it’s a pretty decent, simple solution for the problem it’s trying to solve - but in the real world there are externalities to all that make-work. Well, sort of - it’s vulnerable to consolidation of mining capacity, and my understanding is that there has been a lot of consolidation of mining capacity because it is so favorable to do it in places with cheap electricity? But the proposed alternatives are more complicated and harder to trust.
posted by atoxyl at 3:44 PM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
The integrity that proof of work is supposed to provide doesn’t really have anything to do with the security that Mt. Gox did not provide.
I’d argue that a problem with proof of work is that it’s a pretty decent, simple solution for the problem it’s trying to solve - but in the real world there are externalities to all that make-work. Well, sort of - it’s vulnerable to consolidation of mining capacity, and my understanding is that there has been a lot of consolidation of mining capacity because it is so favorable to do it in places with cheap electricity? But the proposed alternatives are more complicated and harder to trust.
posted by atoxyl at 3:44 PM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
If you read one article on NFT art or cryptocurrency, it should be this one.
posted by skymt at 3:52 PM on March 3, 2021 [9 favorites]
posted by skymt at 3:52 PM on March 3, 2021 [9 favorites]
Nobody's going to stop me from taping a banana to my wall (net cost to me, around 25¢), but I can't claim that I have an edition of Cattelan's "Comedian." If I did try to claim that, the Art World could research the editions that were sold and/or my own finances to figure out whether I had, somehow, acquired one. That's kind of a pain. I mean, they'd start by saying I'm not likely to have an authentic edition, but I could still make them have to prove it.
and then you could say that this was all a piece of performance art, with the banana symbolizing truth, the wall being the world and the tape representing the relatively weak mind of humanity trying to understand the truth of the world - by commoditizing this representation, our minds fail to attach truth to the world any more and the art market is created, to insist the truth separated from the world is more authentic and valuable than the original symbolism
you of course will insist that your banana, wall and tape have more meaning because of how i have chosen to interpret them
then of course we will insist that the world take up the practice of taping bananas to walls as a form of art strike, a protest against the falsifying commerce of the art world
we might even buy a church and take down jesus and his cross for a big banana taped to the wall
who knows what could happen?
posted by pyramid termite at 3:53 PM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
and then you could say that this was all a piece of performance art, with the banana symbolizing truth, the wall being the world and the tape representing the relatively weak mind of humanity trying to understand the truth of the world - by commoditizing this representation, our minds fail to attach truth to the world any more and the art market is created, to insist the truth separated from the world is more authentic and valuable than the original symbolism
you of course will insist that your banana, wall and tape have more meaning because of how i have chosen to interpret them
then of course we will insist that the world take up the practice of taping bananas to walls as a form of art strike, a protest against the falsifying commerce of the art world
we might even buy a church and take down jesus and his cross for a big banana taped to the wall
who knows what could happen?
posted by pyramid termite at 3:53 PM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
Anything using blockchain is massively destructive relative to the benefits it brings
As I've noted before, there is nothing inherently destructive about blockchain in general; ridiculous energy consumption is a feature of proof-of-work blockchain protocols specifically. Using a protocol based on federated byzantine agreement instead gets rid of that issue entirely.
For those seeking to wrap their heads around blockchain who have not yet managed to do so, this video from 3Blue1Brown is very good. It only covers proof-of-work but it does so in a careful, step-by-step way that should at least give you a good grounding in the kinds of problems that blockchains can address.
That said: many, many, many of the problems for which blockchain gets hyped as a game changing solution can be handled far more efficiently using traditional centralized databases managed by trusted parties. Because when it comes right down to it, the overwhelming majority of blockchain users will not be not "trusting an algorithm" as the hype would have us all believe; they'll be trusting the development community responsible for their particular blockchain's published implementations. I can think of no particular reason why it makes more sense to trust the politics of self-selecting communities of software developers over that of, say, democratic national governments.
posted by flabdablet at 4:21 PM on March 3, 2021 [6 favorites]
As I've noted before, there is nothing inherently destructive about blockchain in general; ridiculous energy consumption is a feature of proof-of-work blockchain protocols specifically. Using a protocol based on federated byzantine agreement instead gets rid of that issue entirely.
For those seeking to wrap their heads around blockchain who have not yet managed to do so, this video from 3Blue1Brown is very good. It only covers proof-of-work but it does so in a careful, step-by-step way that should at least give you a good grounding in the kinds of problems that blockchains can address.
That said: many, many, many of the problems for which blockchain gets hyped as a game changing solution can be handled far more efficiently using traditional centralized databases managed by trusted parties. Because when it comes right down to it, the overwhelming majority of blockchain users will not be not "trusting an algorithm" as the hype would have us all believe; they'll be trusting the development community responsible for their particular blockchain's published implementations. I can think of no particular reason why it makes more sense to trust the politics of self-selecting communities of software developers over that of, say, democratic national governments.
posted by flabdablet at 4:21 PM on March 3, 2021 [6 favorites]
There's a movement in crypto away from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake blockchains, which don't require that much energy consumption. Many (most?) crypto currencies already use it, and Ethereum is supposed to switch over to it soon.
posted by mikeand1 at 5:16 PM on March 3, 2021
posted by mikeand1 at 5:16 PM on March 3, 2021
Ethereum “has been moving” to proof of stake for almost as long as it has existed. It has been so long that “Eth 2.0 PoS Coming Soon!” is something of a running joke. In all that time, any time the ecological cost of PoW is brought up, PoS is touted as the redemption just over the hill- if we can just hang on another few months, the whole network will be green.
Much like commercially-viable fusion reactors, it's always "coming next year"
posted by CrystalDave at 5:42 PM on March 3, 2021 [7 favorites]
Much like commercially-viable fusion reactors, it's always "coming next year"
posted by CrystalDave at 5:42 PM on March 3, 2021 [7 favorites]
Much like commercially-viable fusion reactors, it's always "coming next year"
There are already plenty of cryptos that use proof-of-stake. Ethereum can't delay it too much longer because it will lose out to them. It might anyway, as there are additional reasons why many others are superior to it.
posted by mikeand1 at 6:17 PM on March 3, 2021
There are already plenty of cryptos that use proof-of-stake. Ethereum can't delay it too much longer because it will lose out to them. It might anyway, as there are additional reasons why many others are superior to it.
posted by mikeand1 at 6:17 PM on March 3, 2021
Something I've always wondered about Bitcoin--maybe someone here knows the answer.
If I understand correctly, the mining process is designed to be finite--eventually all the coins will be mined. The increasing difficulty is meant to incentivize early adopters, not to approach infinity.
Now the proof-of-work is based on finding SHA-256 hash collisions. Where did the 256 come from? Why not some hash with 192 bits, or 128? Did the author really do any detailed analysis of how much energy/time it would take to complete the mining, or was 256 just an arbitrary guess?
If 128 bits had been chosen, would we have reached the end years ago, at far less environmental cost? Is the choice of 256 bits the single worst, most disastrous, most destructive "this number seems good enough" lazy guess in the history of software?
posted by equalpants at 6:59 PM on March 3, 2021
If I understand correctly, the mining process is designed to be finite--eventually all the coins will be mined. The increasing difficulty is meant to incentivize early adopters, not to approach infinity.
Now the proof-of-work is based on finding SHA-256 hash collisions. Where did the 256 come from? Why not some hash with 192 bits, or 128? Did the author really do any detailed analysis of how much energy/time it would take to complete the mining, or was 256 just an arbitrary guess?
If 128 bits had been chosen, would we have reached the end years ago, at far less environmental cost? Is the choice of 256 bits the single worst, most disastrous, most destructive "this number seems good enough" lazy guess in the history of software?
posted by equalpants at 6:59 PM on March 3, 2021
equalpants,
I don't know the exact reasoning but SHA-256 was probably chosen because hashes with shorter bit-lengths (e.g. SHA-1) are no longer considered secure. A shorter hash length wouldn't really make a difference to the power needed because the proof-of-work isn't based on finding a hash collision per se but on finding a value which when hashed with a block results in a hash with a certain number of consecutive zeros at the start. You can see an example here with 19 zeros (bearing in mind each digit is 4 bits). The number of zeros required increases as the "difficulty" increases, so even if a shorter hash length was used, that would just mean that individual hashes used less power by a fractional one-off saving, then as the difficulty was adjusted by adding another zero or two any savings to the total power consumption would be negated as the total number of hashes requires increases exponentially.
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 7:17 PM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
I don't know the exact reasoning but SHA-256 was probably chosen because hashes with shorter bit-lengths (e.g. SHA-1) are no longer considered secure. A shorter hash length wouldn't really make a difference to the power needed because the proof-of-work isn't based on finding a hash collision per se but on finding a value which when hashed with a block results in a hash with a certain number of consecutive zeros at the start. You can see an example here with 19 zeros (bearing in mind each digit is 4 bits). The number of zeros required increases as the "difficulty" increases, so even if a shorter hash length was used, that would just mean that individual hashes used less power by a fractional one-off saving, then as the difficulty was adjusted by adding another zero or two any savings to the total power consumption would be negated as the total number of hashes requires increases exponentially.
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 7:17 PM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
Yeah SHA-256 is just one of the more standard and respectable cryptographic hash functions. And the computing power sink involved is, again, fully intentional, intentionally maintained and increased.
posted by atoxyl at 8:27 PM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by atoxyl at 8:27 PM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
You can see an example here with 19 zeros (bearing in mind each digit is 4 bits). The number of zeros required increases as the "difficulty" increases, so even if a shorter hash length was used, that would just mean that individual hashes used less power by a fractional one-off saving, then as the difficulty was adjusted by adding another zero or two any savings to the total power consumption would be negated as the total number of hashes requires increases exponentially.
And to add on to this: the difficulty ratchets up if it takes less than 10 minutes for someone win the SHA-256 lottery on average. So if, say, the electricity cost of SHA-256 got magically halved, you'd see a bunch of people in slightly higher electricity-cost areas buy mining rigs and the hash rate would go up... and then the difficulty would increase to match, bringing the rate of block creation down to 10 minutes but with more people mining, probably using just as much electricity as they did before the halving.
Specialist hardware designed just for calculating SHA-256 hashes are more energy efficient per hash, but they're used because that efficiency also makes them a bit more profitable, so there are warehouses full of the things churning away.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:37 PM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
And to add on to this: the difficulty ratchets up if it takes less than 10 minutes for someone win the SHA-256 lottery on average. So if, say, the electricity cost of SHA-256 got magically halved, you'd see a bunch of people in slightly higher electricity-cost areas buy mining rigs and the hash rate would go up... and then the difficulty would increase to match, bringing the rate of block creation down to 10 minutes but with more people mining, probably using just as much electricity as they did before the halving.
Specialist hardware designed just for calculating SHA-256 hashes are more energy efficient per hash, but they're used because that efficiency also makes them a bit more profitable, so there are warehouses full of the things churning away.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:37 PM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
Or do you mean would we have mined all the bitcoins already? I don’t think the diminishing rewards and hash difficulty are directly tied together but I forget exactly how it works.
posted by atoxyl at 8:39 PM on March 3, 2021
posted by atoxyl at 8:39 PM on March 3, 2021
The increasing difficulty is meant to incentivize early adopters, not to approach infinity.
This isn't quite right either. Difficulty was very low when it was just one guy on a desktop. If it had been as high as it is now, Satoshi Nakamoto would never have managed to mine even a single block. If difficulty had stayed that low, the Bitcoin blockchain would become totally unmanageable once the network gained computing power, it would fracture into a thousand blockchains in a minute and nobody would be able to decide what the "real" blockchain was. It's only the relatively stable heartbeat of blocks that lets Bitcoin cohere.
That is, imagine if it takes 10 minutes to mine a block on one computer, it will take 1 minute if you have 10 computers, and once you have a thousand there'll be a new block every second or faster. That won't work- bitcoin works by publishing a block and everyone else using that block as a starting point; when a new one is found, that's the new starting point to mine off. This totally collapses if there's no temporal breathing room between mined blocks for newly-mined blocks to propagate around to the whole network.
I don’t think the diminishing rewards and hash difficulty are directly tied together but I forget exactly how it works.
There is a mechanism that periodically halves rewards, but it's on a different schedule than the difficulty adjustment. Miners are also rewarded with transaction fees, so it's complicated.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:58 PM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
This isn't quite right either. Difficulty was very low when it was just one guy on a desktop. If it had been as high as it is now, Satoshi Nakamoto would never have managed to mine even a single block. If difficulty had stayed that low, the Bitcoin blockchain would become totally unmanageable once the network gained computing power, it would fracture into a thousand blockchains in a minute and nobody would be able to decide what the "real" blockchain was. It's only the relatively stable heartbeat of blocks that lets Bitcoin cohere.
That is, imagine if it takes 10 minutes to mine a block on one computer, it will take 1 minute if you have 10 computers, and once you have a thousand there'll be a new block every second or faster. That won't work- bitcoin works by publishing a block and everyone else using that block as a starting point; when a new one is found, that's the new starting point to mine off. This totally collapses if there's no temporal breathing room between mined blocks for newly-mined blocks to propagate around to the whole network.
I don’t think the diminishing rewards and hash difficulty are directly tied together but I forget exactly how it works.
There is a mechanism that periodically halves rewards, but it's on a different schedule than the difficulty adjustment. Miners are also rewarded with transaction fees, so it's complicated.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:58 PM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
Yes, I know the power sink is intentional, but isn't the precise amount of power required somewhat arbitrary, was my question. Choose a different function and maybe it's easier because it's been cracked, or maybe less specialized hardware is available, but in the end everyone's on the same playing field. You're proving "I did X amount of work", and who cares about the precise value of X as long as it's the same for everybody.
...But I didn't know about the difficulty adjustment though. I can see how it has to go slow enough that people don't fork all over the place.
I'm not sure which is the more depressing possibility. That a relatively arbitrary choice ends up costing us a couple degrees of global warming and millions of additional deaths, or that a cynical thought "this will waste tons of power, but that's necessary to make it slow enough" ends up costing the same.
posted by equalpants at 9:08 PM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
...But I didn't know about the difficulty adjustment though. I can see how it has to go slow enough that people don't fork all over the place.
I'm not sure which is the more depressing possibility. That a relatively arbitrary choice ends up costing us a couple degrees of global warming and millions of additional deaths, or that a cynical thought "this will waste tons of power, but that's necessary to make it slow enough" ends up costing the same.
posted by equalpants at 9:08 PM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
Kings of Leon Will Be the First Band to Release an Album as an NFT
posted by hippybear at 9:53 PM on March 3, 2021
posted by hippybear at 9:53 PM on March 3, 2021
I forget exactly how it works.
The network continuously adjusts the difficulty level (i.e. the number of leading zero bits that the SHA256 hash of a newly mined block must have in order to be acceptable) in such a way as to keep the time it takes to add a new block to the end of the chain roughly constant at around ten minutes. So as the total worldwide amount of computing power devoted to block mining increases, the difficulty increases to compensate.
This establishes a fairly tight relationship between the economic value of the Bitcoin amount a miner is rewarded with for winning the contest to add a new block to the end of the chain, and the acquisition and running cost of the hardware required to do that. At some point it stops being worth spending non-Bitcoin money on mining rigs and electricity because the expected rate of return in Bitcoin can't justify the cost.
Overall this is a negative feedback that maintains a pretty tight relationship between the economic cost of the energy required to run a rig to mine a block and the expected Bitcoin reward for doing so. Miners who find themselves making less than that have an incentive to shut themselves down or at least throttle back, leaving the work to those set up to do it at lower cost.
Given all of the above, it should be pretty clear that it really doesn't make any difference what the particular hash function involved is or how energy-efficient the state of the mining art can get. The network will just cancel out the specific per-calculation difficulty in order to preserve the aggregate equality between total energy expended and total Bitcoin rewards issued.
The other thing that's going on at the same time is the "halvening". Every 210,000 blocks, the miner's reward per block (denominated in Bitcoin) gets halved. That reward started out at 50BTC. There have been three halvenings since (the last was last year) so the miner's reward is currently 6.25BTC. It's this halvening that gives rise to the hard cap on the total BTC amount that will ever be issued; even if BTC were infinitely divisible, which they're not, the fact that the sum of an infinitely halvening series is mathematically finite would impose that cap.
But the exchange value of BTC in ordinary fiat currencies has been rising faster than the block reward has been decaying. 6.25BTC is currently equivalent to about US$300,000. Which means that, to a pretty good first approximation, the Bitcoin network is currently burning roughly $300k worth of electricity every ten minutes.
Exactly how much energy that is depends on exactly where most of the mining activity is happening, but it's a lot. If we make the assumption that large mining operations can get access to electricity at wholesale rates and estimate the cost at around $100/MWh it comes to 3GWh per ten minutes, roughly 20GW continuous. 20GW continuous works out to 600PJ (petajoules) per year (for comparison, total Australian electricity production for 2018-2019 was 950PJ). The true figure could be an order of magnitude either side of that but you get the idea. It's a lot.
When Bitcoin was first released, 1BTC was worth about six cents. That would make the 50BTC miner's reward come to less than a dollar, translating to a worldwide expected energy expenditure correspondingly half a million times smaller, say 40kW. That's not a lot, in absolute terms; not worldwide, anyway. But it's still a hell of a lot more than would be required by protocols that don't have proof-of-work as their fundamental principle.
Bitcoin was a proof-of-concept that got completely out of hand, and now it's what everybody wants because everybody wants it, regardless of the existence of newer cryptocurrency protocols that are technically superior to Bitcoin by every conceivable measure. It's well past time it died but, just like every other totally fucked-up aspect of modern existence dominated by network effects (Microsoft operating systems and office suites, Facebook, Twitter...) it shows no signs of doing so.
Me, I bought Stellar Lumens at a smidge under ten cents apiece. They're doing OK. Not as OK as Bitcoin, but at least I don't need Elonic levels of utter shamelessness to keep holding them.
posted by flabdablet at 10:00 PM on March 3, 2021 [9 favorites]
The network continuously adjusts the difficulty level (i.e. the number of leading zero bits that the SHA256 hash of a newly mined block must have in order to be acceptable) in such a way as to keep the time it takes to add a new block to the end of the chain roughly constant at around ten minutes. So as the total worldwide amount of computing power devoted to block mining increases, the difficulty increases to compensate.
This establishes a fairly tight relationship between the economic value of the Bitcoin amount a miner is rewarded with for winning the contest to add a new block to the end of the chain, and the acquisition and running cost of the hardware required to do that. At some point it stops being worth spending non-Bitcoin money on mining rigs and electricity because the expected rate of return in Bitcoin can't justify the cost.
Overall this is a negative feedback that maintains a pretty tight relationship between the economic cost of the energy required to run a rig to mine a block and the expected Bitcoin reward for doing so. Miners who find themselves making less than that have an incentive to shut themselves down or at least throttle back, leaving the work to those set up to do it at lower cost.
Given all of the above, it should be pretty clear that it really doesn't make any difference what the particular hash function involved is or how energy-efficient the state of the mining art can get. The network will just cancel out the specific per-calculation difficulty in order to preserve the aggregate equality between total energy expended and total Bitcoin rewards issued.
The other thing that's going on at the same time is the "halvening". Every 210,000 blocks, the miner's reward per block (denominated in Bitcoin) gets halved. That reward started out at 50BTC. There have been three halvenings since (the last was last year) so the miner's reward is currently 6.25BTC. It's this halvening that gives rise to the hard cap on the total BTC amount that will ever be issued; even if BTC were infinitely divisible, which they're not, the fact that the sum of an infinitely halvening series is mathematically finite would impose that cap.
But the exchange value of BTC in ordinary fiat currencies has been rising faster than the block reward has been decaying. 6.25BTC is currently equivalent to about US$300,000. Which means that, to a pretty good first approximation, the Bitcoin network is currently burning roughly $300k worth of electricity every ten minutes.
Exactly how much energy that is depends on exactly where most of the mining activity is happening, but it's a lot. If we make the assumption that large mining operations can get access to electricity at wholesale rates and estimate the cost at around $100/MWh it comes to 3GWh per ten minutes, roughly 20GW continuous. 20GW continuous works out to 600PJ (petajoules) per year (for comparison, total Australian electricity production for 2018-2019 was 950PJ). The true figure could be an order of magnitude either side of that but you get the idea. It's a lot.
When Bitcoin was first released, 1BTC was worth about six cents. That would make the 50BTC miner's reward come to less than a dollar, translating to a worldwide expected energy expenditure correspondingly half a million times smaller, say 40kW. That's not a lot, in absolute terms; not worldwide, anyway. But it's still a hell of a lot more than would be required by protocols that don't have proof-of-work as their fundamental principle.
Bitcoin was a proof-of-concept that got completely out of hand, and now it's what everybody wants because everybody wants it, regardless of the existence of newer cryptocurrency protocols that are technically superior to Bitcoin by every conceivable measure. It's well past time it died but, just like every other totally fucked-up aspect of modern existence dominated by network effects (Microsoft operating systems and office suites, Facebook, Twitter...) it shows no signs of doing so.
Me, I bought Stellar Lumens at a smidge under ten cents apiece. They're doing OK. Not as OK as Bitcoin, but at least I don't need Elonic levels of utter shamelessness to keep holding them.
posted by flabdablet at 10:00 PM on March 3, 2021 [9 favorites]
Oops. Fifty times six cents is about three dollars, not less than one. But the argument stands.
posted by flabdablet at 10:26 PM on March 3, 2021
posted by flabdablet at 10:26 PM on March 3, 2021
The thing that's frustrating about massive art world fiascos is that they often reinforce the general perception that "art is bullshit, and artists don't really do anything," when the lesson is "capitalism and its accompanying social structures are sick and pervert everything."
posted by Saxon Kane at 10:39 PM on March 3, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by Saxon Kane at 10:39 PM on March 3, 2021 [6 favorites]
...wait, so when all the Bitcoin-ses are 'mined' what will the energy expenditure be to maintain the 'book?'
posted by From Bklyn at 12:32 AM on March 4, 2021
posted by From Bklyn at 12:32 AM on March 4, 2021
> I can think of no particular reason why it makes more sense to trust the politics of self-selecting communities of software developers over that of, say, democratic national governments.
from the federal reserve bank of st. louis :P
Decentralized Finance: On Blockchain- and Smart Contract-Based Financial Markets - "DeFi still is a niche market with certain risks but... it also has interesting properties in terms of efficiency, transparency, accessibility, and composability. As such, DeFi may potentially contribute to a more robust and transparent financial infrastructure."
also btw!
India has a backdoor entry into digital currency. Will it take it? - "India's central bank is opening its balance sheet to the public. Retail investors will have online access to the government bond market via investment accounts with the Reserve Bank."
posted by kliuless at 12:56 AM on March 4, 2021
from the federal reserve bank of st. louis :P
Decentralized Finance: On Blockchain- and Smart Contract-Based Financial Markets - "DeFi still is a niche market with certain risks but... it also has interesting properties in terms of efficiency, transparency, accessibility, and composability. As such, DeFi may potentially contribute to a more robust and transparent financial infrastructure."
also btw!
India has a backdoor entry into digital currency. Will it take it? - "India's central bank is opening its balance sheet to the public. Retail investors will have online access to the government bond market via investment accounts with the Reserve Bank."
posted by kliuless at 12:56 AM on March 4, 2021
Call me a skeptic but it just seems to me that there are better uses for electricity than yet another get-rich-quick, something-for-nothing scheme.
posted by drstrangelove at 4:44 AM on March 4, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by drstrangelove at 4:44 AM on March 4, 2021 [2 favorites]
...wait, so when all the Bitcoin-ses are 'mined' what will the energy expenditure be to maintain the 'book?'
As far as I know, it's hard to say. In addition to the mining reward, people who make transactions can include a transaction fee. Miners receive the transaction fees from all of the transactions included in their block, but the size of a block is limited, so if your transaction fee is too small, you might have to wait for the next block. One of the problems with Bitcoin and Ethereum is that when there are a lot of people making transactions, transaction fees go up a lot. This is why artists are paying $20-$100 to mint NFTs, accept bids, etc. (see the thread linked in the FPP.) When all of the coins are mined, miners get paid off of transaction fees.
Here's the problem: Bitcoin isn't designed so that the network is unbreakable, it's designed so that the cost of breaking the network is the same as the amount of money that miners are spending. Every ten minutes, there's a lottery to see who mines the next block, and if you do enough computation, you can buy 51% of the lottery tickets and take over the network.
So, in order for the network to be secure, the energy expenditure has to be more than what an attacker might gain from breaking the network. Maybe that's 1% of the total value of Bitcoin transactions? As long as Bitcoin keeps on growing, its energy cost will keep on growing.
posted by ectabo at 6:59 AM on March 4, 2021 [3 favorites]
As far as I know, it's hard to say. In addition to the mining reward, people who make transactions can include a transaction fee. Miners receive the transaction fees from all of the transactions included in their block, but the size of a block is limited, so if your transaction fee is too small, you might have to wait for the next block. One of the problems with Bitcoin and Ethereum is that when there are a lot of people making transactions, transaction fees go up a lot. This is why artists are paying $20-$100 to mint NFTs, accept bids, etc. (see the thread linked in the FPP.) When all of the coins are mined, miners get paid off of transaction fees.
Here's the problem: Bitcoin isn't designed so that the network is unbreakable, it's designed so that the cost of breaking the network is the same as the amount of money that miners are spending. Every ten minutes, there's a lottery to see who mines the next block, and if you do enough computation, you can buy 51% of the lottery tickets and take over the network.
So, in order for the network to be secure, the energy expenditure has to be more than what an attacker might gain from breaking the network. Maybe that's 1% of the total value of Bitcoin transactions? As long as Bitcoin keeps on growing, its energy cost will keep on growing.
posted by ectabo at 6:59 AM on March 4, 2021 [3 favorites]
Other than societal crash brought on by the climate crisis, which Bitcoin etc. and related speculation exchanges are helping bring about, I wonder if there are good ways to regulate pyramid schemes built entirely for the purpose of evading government regulation. Is there a future where there is a kind of indirect war-on-drugs-like fight against cryptospeculation transactions; for instance, where marijuana growing is still illegal, unusual power usage may be seen as a location for grow sites — that sort of thing, but applied to the outsized energy usage required here.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:05 PM on March 4, 2021
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:05 PM on March 4, 2021
As far as I know, it's hard to say. In addition to the mining reward, people who make transactions can include a transaction fee. Miners receive the transaction fees from all of the transactions included in their block, but the size of a block is limited, so if your transaction fee is too small, you might have to wait for the next block. One of the problems with Bitcoin and Ethereum is that when there are a lot of people making transactions, transaction fees go up a lot.
I believe mining rewards aren’t supposed to converge to zero for like a hundred years, anyway?
posted by atoxyl at 1:15 PM on March 4, 2021
I believe mining rewards aren’t supposed to converge to zero for like a hundred years, anyway?
posted by atoxyl at 1:15 PM on March 4, 2021
Yeah, it's set to halve every four years and it's currently 6.25 BTC/block. It looks like transaction fees are currently about 10-15% of the block reward, so maybe they won't make up a majority of miner revenue for twelve years?
posted by ectabo at 4:06 PM on March 4, 2021
posted by ectabo at 4:06 PM on March 4, 2021
As long as Bitcoin keeps on growing, its energy cost will keep on growing.
Quite so. From a miner's point of view it really doesn't matter whether the reward they collect for successfully mining a block is delivered in the form of an explicit block reward or from aggregated transaction fees. The relationship between the Bitcoin obtainable by mining a block and the cost of the energy expended on mining remains the critical point to analyze, both for the miner contemplating adjusting the size of their operation and for those of us more concerned about total energy consumption.
As more and more people pile into Bitcoin, two things are happening. The first is that the dollar value of a Bitcoin keeps getting bigger, and the second is that Bitcoin is becoming decreasingly workable as an actual currency; it's built to handle only of the order of a few thousand transactions every ten minutes, worldwide, by design.
So in any future where cryptocurrencies have achieved general acceptance anywhere close to what fiat currencies have right now, Bitcoin is going to be operating as a pure store of value, more like a gold bar than a dollar note (this has arguably already happened) and most of the trade in Bitcoin will be happening off-network. From which it follows that relatively high transaction fees on the Bitcoin network itself will, over time, see decreasing competitive pressure from other payment methods.
I would expect to see on-network transactions becoming almost totally dominated by relatively huge amounts being transferred between concentrated wealth reserves such as Bitcoin exchanges; and even at quite low transaction fee percentages I would expect this to be enough to keep per-block mining rewards high in dollar terms, and energy consumption correspondingly huge.
posted by flabdablet at 4:29 PM on March 4, 2021 [3 favorites]
Quite so. From a miner's point of view it really doesn't matter whether the reward they collect for successfully mining a block is delivered in the form of an explicit block reward or from aggregated transaction fees. The relationship between the Bitcoin obtainable by mining a block and the cost of the energy expended on mining remains the critical point to analyze, both for the miner contemplating adjusting the size of their operation and for those of us more concerned about total energy consumption.
As more and more people pile into Bitcoin, two things are happening. The first is that the dollar value of a Bitcoin keeps getting bigger, and the second is that Bitcoin is becoming decreasingly workable as an actual currency; it's built to handle only of the order of a few thousand transactions every ten minutes, worldwide, by design.
So in any future where cryptocurrencies have achieved general acceptance anywhere close to what fiat currencies have right now, Bitcoin is going to be operating as a pure store of value, more like a gold bar than a dollar note (this has arguably already happened) and most of the trade in Bitcoin will be happening off-network. From which it follows that relatively high transaction fees on the Bitcoin network itself will, over time, see decreasing competitive pressure from other payment methods.
I would expect to see on-network transactions becoming almost totally dominated by relatively huge amounts being transferred between concentrated wealth reserves such as Bitcoin exchanges; and even at quite low transaction fee percentages I would expect this to be enough to keep per-block mining rewards high in dollar terms, and energy consumption correspondingly huge.
posted by flabdablet at 4:29 PM on March 4, 2021 [3 favorites]
Unrelated to the cryptocurrency angle, but what's the first article's problem with art fairs? The art fairs I am familiar with are not the sorts of places where you buy art-as-an-investment. More like a bunch of random artists from within a few states of the fair setting up tents along a road that's been closed off. Is this a phrase with different meanings in different places?
posted by vibratory manner of working at 12:43 AM on March 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by vibratory manner of working at 12:43 AM on March 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
I'm wondering what happens to people who participate in blockchains who are knocked offline for an extended time. I'm thinking about the Texas power outage. If you're participating in a blockchain that updates every 10 minutes, and you're offline for 3 days, what happens when you log back in? How you gain all the updates to the chain then? Do you just get a new copy, or do all the calculations have to be done for your computer to be updated?
Just a passing thought of wondering...
posted by hippybear at 5:21 AM on March 5, 2021
Just a passing thought of wondering...
posted by hippybear at 5:21 AM on March 5, 2021
Art Fairs is, in certain circles, a swear word. Art Fairs means (roughly) Art Basel which is largely about ratifying and cementing the status quo.
posted by From Bklyn at 7:04 AM on March 5, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by From Bklyn at 7:04 AM on March 5, 2021 [2 favorites]
I'm wondering what happens to people who participate in blockchains who are knocked offline for an extended time. I'm thinking about the Texas power outage. If you're participating in a blockchain that updates every 10 minutes, and you're offline for 3 days, what happens when you log back in? How you gain all the updates to the chain then? Do you just get a new copy, or do all the calculations have to be done for your computer to be updated?
Assuming that by "participate in" you mean mining:
My understanding is that if you were a miner you'd just need the latest copy and check that it was valid. Proof of work is "hard to solve, easy to verify" so the hard part has been done for you. By way of analogy, a maze is hard to solve, but if someone shows you the solution you can quickly check it.
posted by justkevin at 8:21 AM on March 5, 2021
Assuming that by "participate in" you mean mining:
My understanding is that if you were a miner you'd just need the latest copy and check that it was valid. Proof of work is "hard to solve, easy to verify" so the hard part has been done for you. By way of analogy, a maze is hard to solve, but if someone shows you the solution you can quickly check it.
posted by justkevin at 8:21 AM on March 5, 2021
Thank you for the clarification! Searching around a little suggests that what I had in mind is usually called an "art festival", which isn't interchangeable with "art fair". TIL
posted by vibratory manner of working at 4:04 PM on March 5, 2021
posted by vibratory manner of working at 4:04 PM on March 5, 2021
Bids reach $2m for Jack Dorsey's first tweet
posted by oulipian at 8:57 AM on March 6, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by oulipian at 8:57 AM on March 6, 2021 [1 favorite]
WTF, I mean what the fuck man. This makes me feel roughly 117 years old. XR in Europe is planning various activities later in the month because mass extinction is in the works and some folks want to pay 2 million for a certificate claiming that they own Dorsey’s first tweet. Yeah, that seems sustainable. Enjoy.
posted by Bella Donna at 12:57 AM on March 7, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by Bella Donna at 12:57 AM on March 7, 2021 [4 favorites]
I don't see how this goes any direction other than a few big names getting tons of money followed by thousands of no-name artists spending the gas to mint tokens that nobody is going to buy. It took me two minutes to find this guy, who spent $65 to mint 20 tokens that unsurprisingly didn't sell for his original asking price of $3600, kept lowering the price over and over, and is now offering them for less than the service fee the website charges. This artist is not alone. Lots of people are jumping on the hype train, pumping money into Ethereum via gas fees, and ending up with nothing to show for it other than some worthless entries on a blockchain certifying their ownership of something nobody wants.
On the bright side, I think there's a good chance whoever pays $2.5 million for that stupid tweet will either never sell it or sell for a big loss after the hype dies down and most people give up on NFTs.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 4:44 PM on March 10, 2021 [2 favorites]
On the bright side, I think there's a good chance whoever pays $2.5 million for that stupid tweet will either never sell it or sell for a big loss after the hype dies down and most people give up on NFTs.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 4:44 PM on March 10, 2021 [2 favorites]
NFTs: crypto grifters try to scam artists, again, David Gerard
Bitcoin boom: what rising prices mean for the network’s energy consumption, Alex de Vries
An important rule of crypto is: every number that can be faked is faked. NFTs are the sort of con where a shill appears to make a ton of money, so you’ll think you can too.
Put a large price tag on your NFT by buying it from yourself — then write a press release talking about your $100,000 sale, and you’re only out the transaction fee. Journalists who can’t be bothered checking things will write this up without verifying that the buyer is a separate person who exists. Just like the high-end art world!
Bitcoin boom: what rising prices mean for the network’s energy consumption, Alex de Vries
With 60% of this income going to pay for electricity at a price of $0.05 per kWh, the total network could consume up to 184 TWh per year; this is not far from the amount of energy consumed by all data centers globally (200 TWh per year).posted by ectabo at 5:53 PM on March 10, 2021 [1 favorite]
Um, JPG File Sells for $69 Million, as ‘NFT Mania’ Gathers Pace.
Sixty. Nine. Million. Dollars.
holy fuck, indeed.
posted by gwint at 8:09 AM on March 11, 2021
Sixty. Nine. Million. Dollars.
holy fuck, indeed.
posted by gwint at 8:09 AM on March 11, 2021
1. 69,000,000 is ... senseless- as in literally makes no sense at all. It's irrational. The usual framework for valuation of an artwork (aside from the subjective but not irrelevant, "I like it") is context, historical precedent, artists historical valuation, place in the 'academy'/ contemporary art-world (what museums/galleries show their work, what collectors collect it) influence the work has had on other, subsequent works and etc - This piece, by a relatively un-known artist has (I think I'm right in saying this) none of those. Which leaves us at the Leonardo forgery ("Salvator Mundi") bought and sold anonymously... that is, the money means nothing and the sale will mean only that the agents made money and the artist made money - not bad, but for the greater art market, probably ineffectual. Which is good.
2. A smart essay by Everest Pipkin about NFT's and their egregious environmental costs.
posted by From Bklyn at 8:27 AM on March 11, 2021
2. A smart essay by Everest Pipkin about NFT's and their egregious environmental costs.
posted by From Bklyn at 8:27 AM on March 11, 2021
IIRC aren't some of the more odd prices on art linked to money laundering?
How better to make it happen when you don't even need to move a framed painting around and you can just send someone a file?
That could explain some of the irrational prices.
Or it could just be rich people doing their usual thing and throwing money at the newest shiny object.
posted by sotonohito at 8:31 AM on March 11, 2021 [3 favorites]
How better to make it happen when you don't even need to move a framed painting around and you can just send someone a file?
That could explain some of the irrational prices.
Or it could just be rich people doing their usual thing and throwing money at the newest shiny object.
posted by sotonohito at 8:31 AM on March 11, 2021 [3 favorites]
Auuuugh this whole thing. I got grumpy on twitter a few days ago and tweeted a little rant and then that got some traction (I think mostly because jwz blogged about it, heh) and so I've kept thinking about the whole thing for a few days now, and, blarg. It's so tiring, both because several notionally distinct things are wrapped up in this and because the wasteful stupidity of in particular PoW-based cryptocurrency is so overwhelmingly obvious that notionally non-shitty people jumping on board is just wwwhHHHYYYY.
The Everest Pipkin essay people have mentioned a couple times is very good and gets at why there's more than just a "cryptocoins are dumb and faddish" issue at play here. There's a couple things I can actually sympathize with in the interest in the idea of NFT art—the draw of a new aesthetic/conceptual space, the idea of a robust digital ledger of an artwork's life, the promise of a way to handle art sales (digital and otherwise) outside of the established system of art market middlemen—but (a) nothing about any of that actually requires cryptocurrency to function and (b) the traditional art world is very very good at capitalizing on and inserting itself into any new space, because having money and doing art speculation and money laundering is extremely medium-agnostic, so the notion that NFT sales on a decentralized blockchain register will finally break the system is absolutely goofy magical thinking. Deliberately recreating scarcity is not the way you break out of a system of commodified scarcity.
Here's a recent collection of micro-essays about crypto art that is more helpful I think in seeing more of the Art side of crypto art than the well-trod Crypto side. I disagree with a lot of what folks in there end up saying and think there's a lot of self-deluding boosterism of the novelty of it because being on the edge and novel is enticing (how many ways do some of those folks manage to say "yes, well, there ARE problems, but what if at some point there aren't?") but it is at least folks talking about it in terms of coming to the subject from an artmaking perspective rather than a currency speculation or technoliberatarian clout direction.
posted by cortex at 10:50 AM on March 14, 2021 [3 favorites]
The Everest Pipkin essay people have mentioned a couple times is very good and gets at why there's more than just a "cryptocoins are dumb and faddish" issue at play here. There's a couple things I can actually sympathize with in the interest in the idea of NFT art—the draw of a new aesthetic/conceptual space, the idea of a robust digital ledger of an artwork's life, the promise of a way to handle art sales (digital and otherwise) outside of the established system of art market middlemen—but (a) nothing about any of that actually requires cryptocurrency to function and (b) the traditional art world is very very good at capitalizing on and inserting itself into any new space, because having money and doing art speculation and money laundering is extremely medium-agnostic, so the notion that NFT sales on a decentralized blockchain register will finally break the system is absolutely goofy magical thinking. Deliberately recreating scarcity is not the way you break out of a system of commodified scarcity.
Here's a recent collection of micro-essays about crypto art that is more helpful I think in seeing more of the Art side of crypto art than the well-trod Crypto side. I disagree with a lot of what folks in there end up saying and think there's a lot of self-deluding boosterism of the novelty of it because being on the edge and novel is enticing (how many ways do some of those folks manage to say "yes, well, there ARE problems, but what if at some point there aren't?") but it is at least folks talking about it in terms of coming to the subject from an artmaking perspective rather than a currency speculation or technoliberatarian clout direction.
posted by cortex at 10:50 AM on March 14, 2021 [3 favorites]
Metakovan, the mystery Beeple art buyer, and his NFT/DeFi scheme
At the end of the day, this is all about “number go up.” The B20 token is pumped up in value, so holders and Metapurse can benefit when they go to sell the token—get more ETH, buy more NFTs, rinse, repeat.posted by BungaDunga at 12:44 PM on March 14, 2021 [2 favorites]
The distribution is something to pay attention to. Metakovan has 59% of all the B20 tokens. Why does he own the majority of tokens? As he explains it, that’s so that no one person can own 100% of all of the B20 tokens—and snatch up all this wonderful artwork for themselves. No, this is meant to be decentralized, if you can get your head past Metakovan controlling the token supply.
What’s interesting is that Beeple, the creator of the artwork, is actually a business partner of MetaKovan’s. He owns 2% of all the B20 tokens. I’m sure there is no conflict of interest here.
This whole idea is screaming, "if it seems too good to be true, it probably is," and, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."
posted by rhizome at 1:00 PM on March 14, 2021
posted by rhizome at 1:00 PM on March 14, 2021
This is really only art-adjacent because it's apparently just another good-old-fashioned story of poor personal security + Unregulated Market Is Unregulated, but apparently yesterday a number of people including this guy had their accounts on NFT brokerage platform Nifty Gateway broken into, their NFT holdings looted, and their associated credit cards maxed out on further fraudulent purchases.
I first saw this going round as "Nifty Gateway hacked!", but their terse-and-then-let's-move-on statement about the situation boils down to "we weren't hacked, someone logged in with your clearly previously pwned user credentials and you didn't use 2FA, do a better job with passwords buds, this isn't our problem".
Guy in the original tweet thread has successfully recovered the $10K in fraudulent charges it sounds like, because traditional regulated financial institutions do that sort of thing. In the mean time, though he can track the series of blockchain transactions involved in liquidating his NFTs, there's nothing to *do* about that because fucking of course there isn't, you're using an alternate currency designed specifically to be decentralized and unregulated. When you intentionally eliminate a "someone" from the process, there's no someone to demand to speak to.
posted by cortex at 10:17 AM on March 15, 2021 [3 favorites]
I first saw this going round as "Nifty Gateway hacked!", but their terse-and-then-let's-move-on statement about the situation boils down to "we weren't hacked, someone logged in with your clearly previously pwned user credentials and you didn't use 2FA, do a better job with passwords buds, this isn't our problem".
Guy in the original tweet thread has successfully recovered the $10K in fraudulent charges it sounds like, because traditional regulated financial institutions do that sort of thing. In the mean time, though he can track the series of blockchain transactions involved in liquidating his NFTs, there's nothing to *do* about that because fucking of course there isn't, you're using an alternate currency designed specifically to be decentralized and unregulated. When you intentionally eliminate a "someone" from the process, there's no someone to demand to speak to.
posted by cortex at 10:17 AM on March 15, 2021 [3 favorites]
Kinda nuts that Nifty lets you set up an account without 2FA. But that would increase friction, so they let people sign up without it and then blame them for not turning it on.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:23 AM on March 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by BungaDunga at 10:23 AM on March 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
I heard about this from Ten Hundred, a YouTuber and artist who was about to jump on this train (and could have made a lot of money) but decided not to after learning more about it.
posted by Glinn at 10:25 AM on March 15, 2021
posted by Glinn at 10:25 AM on March 15, 2021
Sixty. Nine. Million. Dollars.
holy fuck, indeed.
pssst
i found a site on the dark web handing out totally unique tokens for free
grab a few of these before they find out about this and shut it down and in a few years you'll be selling them for millions
not too many though
wouldn't want to flood the market
posted by flabdablet at 11:28 AM on March 15, 2021
holy fuck, indeed.
pssst
i found a site on the dark web handing out totally unique tokens for free
grab a few of these before they find out about this and shut it down and in a few years you'll be selling them for millions
not too many though
wouldn't want to flood the market
posted by flabdablet at 11:28 AM on March 15, 2021
there's no someone to demand to speak to
To be fair, this approach has always worked well for Google.
posted by flabdablet at 11:30 AM on March 15, 2021 [2 favorites]
To be fair, this approach has always worked well for Google.
posted by flabdablet at 11:30 AM on March 15, 2021 [2 favorites]
i found a site on the dark web handing out totally unique tokens for free
I... don’t understand.
posted by From Bklyn at 11:42 AM on March 15, 2021
I... don’t understand.
posted by From Bklyn at 11:42 AM on March 15, 2021
every time you go there you get a different result
just don't tell anybody what they handed out to you and you're golden
they won't ever serve the same thing to anybody else because math
everything they give you is totally yours forever
posted by flabdablet at 12:06 PM on March 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
just don't tell anybody what they handed out to you and you're golden
they won't ever serve the same thing to anybody else because math
everything they give you is totally yours forever
posted by flabdablet at 12:06 PM on March 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
That's all well and good, but I prefer my integers to be artisanal or locavore.
posted by fedward at 2:21 PM on March 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by fedward at 2:21 PM on March 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
Oh, turns out Artisan Integers were discussed previously, because of course they were.
posted by fedward at 2:51 PM on March 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by fedward at 2:51 PM on March 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
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