The carbon footprint of NFTs on Ethereum wasn’t looking great before The Merge, but it was nothing compared to on-chain Bitcoin NFTs
Yesterday Bitcoin mining company Luxor mined the largest block ever, containing almost exactly 4MB of data. Only 63 transactions could fit into the block, as the NFT used up the rest of the available space
The carbon footprint: ~888 metric tons of CO2, equivalent to the per passenger carbon footprint of taking a flight from New York to Tokyo and back - 466 times
@Flies4no1 @digiconomist You would likely need to make exchanging cryptocurrency for USD/EUD/etc. illegal and coordinate international efforts to shut down all exchanges.
Considering the level of institutional investment still in crypto, governments might have to offer a one-time "asset seizure" compensation, if only to prevent the subsequent value crash from spilling over into the non-crypto financial markets.
It could be pretty ugly all around.
@Flies4no1 @digiconomist Another possible (risky) path is to have 1 or more government(s) move to accept a single low-emissions crypto as an official secondary currency.
So much of bitcoin's value derives from its appearance of "legitimacy". With the backing of a large institution lending some of its legitimacy to a less energy-hungry alternative, it *might* be possible to cause a mass abandonment of energy-hungry cryptos to the "new legitimate" crypto.
@stuartbaldwin @Flies4no1 @digiconomist There are several cryptocurrencies which don't implement mining for network validation and don't build in intrinsic financial incentives.
Without being a cheerleader for it, one crypto which has interested me in the past has those traits, along with fast transaction times and a *relatively* equitable network validation scheme.
It's pretty much the only crypto I'd say I'm skeptically neutral towards.
Digiconomist
Frank Verhoeven
A.C. Tupper
StuartB