Meet Larry, a very good boy, next addition to the McKay home and possibly the subject of one of the first cat tweets to live for eternity on the Ethereum blockchain.
Larry’s blockchain adventure is not his fault (quite the opposite, in fact). This weekend, we finalized arrangements to adopt Larry, and I was so excited that I tweeted some of his provided by shelter Photos; Larry is so photogenic and received 1,500 likes. It also attracted the attention of Twitter user @FatRaccoon, who offered to buy the rights to my tweet for $ 50 in the Etherium cryptocurrency, ether, through a process that I am still not completely clear on, but involves a unique cryptocurrency technology. called a fungible non-token (NFT).
Blockchain is a system for creating immutable databases through a distributed cryptographic process – competing computer networks solve complex mathematical problems in order to generate accurate records that cannot be changed retroactively. Theoretically, it has many uses, but it is predominantly deployed to convert raw computing power into semi-imaginary money from the internet (like bitcoin and ether) accumulated by speculators hoping to become unimaginably wealthy with the same degree of effort as a guy in Wall Street.
These cryptocurrencies are fungible, which means they are indistinguishable from each other – one bitcoin can be exchanged for another identical bitcoin. NFTs are small bits of data that are encoded on a blockchain (usually Ethereum) as a kind of cryptocurrency, but instead are entirely unique. They are still negotiable, which makes them like a signed baseball card.
G / O Media can receive a commission
In theory, just about anything digital can be packaged and sold as an NFT – comments on this article, random pictures of my future cat sent to Twitter, NBA game clips, or works of art. It is this latter use that has attracted the most attention lately. Several artists have made millions lately by selling digital art NFTs at unbelievably high prices; buyers get the blockchain-encoded business card instead of a physical copy of the art, which may not exist (depending on the terms of the sale, copyright and reproduction that would allow them to print a real copy).
This does not prevent additional copies of the sold artwork from circulating everywhere in .jpg or .gif format or elsewhere. What the buyer it’s really getting it’s less tangible: bragging rights, influence, a collector’s item or just a cool new form of money laundering. And because of the meteoric rise in cryptocurrencies, just attaching words like “token” or “blockchain” or “proof of work” to random crap can make your value soar.
Whether you are trading cryptocurrencies or NFTs, the transaction must be permanently encoded on the blockchain usually using a process called proof of work, the work being the mathematical problems mentioned above. As the blockchain grows over time, so does the overall level of work that needs to be done to keep it running, which translates directly into more physical processors sucking in juice from the site (often fossil fuel) electric power plant. This essentially means that when dealing with NFTs, you are shrinking the planet in an oven.
This brings us back to Larry, or rather, the tweet with him. @FatRaccoon said he offered to buy my post, using a Twitter-to-NFT service called Valuables by Cent, As a joke.
“I feel like I now own a stupid part of the world we live in and it’s fun,” wrote @FatRaccoon on Twitter DM. “Buying tweets on the blockchain is apparently at its peak online. Also, cute cat. “
“I hope this whole system will collapse in a week or turn 5 people into billionaires right away,” they added.
The legality of it all is completely confusing to me. You can sell the “property” of a tweet, which simply by posting it gave Twitter a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use it? What does it mean if, as in my case, it contains copyrighted material potentially owned by someone else? What happens if I delete the tweet? Likewise, the economics of all this are absurd. (@FatRaccoon said that, in the middle of the conversation with us, they received a fraudulent call apparently related to the fact that they registered to obtain a cryptocurrency wallet.)
A FAQ on the Cent website is not exactly comforting as to the stability of it all:
The tweet itself will continue to live on Twitter. What you are buying is a digital certificate of the tweet, unique because it was signed and verified by the creator … Owning any digital content can be a financial investment, have sentimental value and create a relationship between collector and creator. Like an autograph on a baseball card, the NFT itself is the creator’s autograph on the content, making it scarce, unique and valuable.
NFTs make digital content unique: you will be the only person who can claim ownership of an NFT that you own. This means that you will have control of the NFT, such as the ability to resell or distribute it, and it will have value or devaluation like any other asset.
But there is another problem. Remember that “proof of work” thing? Well, the higher the NFT sale, the more work needs to be done to code it on the blockchain and the more “work” needs to be put into future transactions on the blockchain. For example, according to digital artist Memo Atken’s CryptoArt.wtf trackerwho tries (approximately) approximate the overall carbon footprint of the NFTs, recording the recent sale of the artist Grimes for 303 editions of a short video called Earth for $ 7,500 in cryptocurrencies, each costs a total of 122,416 kWh of electricity. This is equivalent to the average total electricity consumption of a resident of the European Union over 34 years (presumably one who does not trade NFTs), or an extrapolation of 79 tons of carbon dioxide added to our slowly dying planet’s atmosphere. Suffice it to say that environmentalists are not fans.
According to CryptoArt.wtf, Larry’s transaction used the equivalent of about 11 kilowatt hours. This is equivalent to the average electrical consumption of a European Union resident for an entire day – or approximately 21 miles (34 kilometers) driving in a gasoline-powered vehicle, a month of using a laptop or a week and a half of using a desktop computer. . My last electricity bill for my residence (a two-story unit with two occupants) was 628 kWh, or 22 kWh per day, which means that essentially added an extra 50% to my electrical use on Monday.
These figures do not count, as CryptoArt.wtf noted, the energy cost of “producing or storing the works, or even hosting the web”. Nor do they include the energy cost of reselling the NFT, and they don’t include the infinitesimal amount I just contributed to make the blockchain suck even more energy in the future, which I’m assuming is incalculable.
Defenders argued that NFTs and blockchains in general represent, in fact, a very small amount of global fuel consumption worldwide and that it is more environmentally friendly than selling a dollar-equivalent amount of goods produced at lower prices, such as t-shirts and prints. The first defense is how to insist coal rolling mill it’s good compared to the damn power plants, a lazy guy who talks about the fact that NFTs still have a negative impact on the climate. In the second scenario, the biggest carbon footprint is because people actually have hundreds of T-shirts, that is, objects that actually exist.
I posed the question of waste to @FatRaccoon, who said to me: “I work with technology and for years I am convinced that it was all a house of cards about to collapse, but it doesn’t look like that will happen soon, so I may as well get on the grift while I can. If I get rich, I promise that I will donate 50% of my money to the environment. “
I asked @FatRaccoon if they agreed with my assessment that this appears to be “the result of some absolutely colossal stupidity process”.
“What keeps getting me is that it seems to do a lot of work for the end result to say, hey, this jpeg is now a jpeg,” they replied. “It only works because all the people who love this shit are so committed to it that they will never let it be useless. Any rational financial system would have closed bitcoin, but our government is like eh, whatever, and now it’s just chaos, the game without rules. “
“We cut 10 trees so that you have this LeBron gif making an unhealthy dunk,” concluded FatRaccoon. “If you sell, we will get some money and cut down several other trees.”
I apologize to Larry in advance for involving him in all of this. If anyone feels the need to buy any of my tweets in the future, however, I recommend this three for one package.