> They use an astonishing amount of electricity to create and trade. Together, they are already using more than is consumed by some states in the US. Imagine building a giant new power plant just to make Christie’s or the Basel Art Fair function. And the amount of power wasted will go up commensurate with their popularity and value. And keep going up. The details are here. The short version is that for the foreseeable future, the method that’s used to verify the blockchain and to create new digital coins is deliberately energy-intensive and inefficient. That’s on purpose. And as they get more valuable, the energy used will go up, not down.
Binance Smart Chain has many NFTs and doesn't use Proof of Work. Ethereum is migrating to Proof of Stake soon and will eliminate the power waste argument. If he wanted to attack NFTs he should have used a better argument.
"Don't worry, we'll be on PoS soon!" is what the crypto space has been saying for years, and as far as I can tell right now the majority of NFTs are done on PoW chains, and still people doing them trumpet "but soon!!" instead of putting their money where their mouth is and actually using a PoS setup today. As mentioned elsewhere, some actually do, props for that, but the overall impression of the crypto space is that they're completely fine with deflecting to some point in the future, and then they shouldn't be surprised if people judge what's actually done and not what's possible and are a bit tired of that argument.
Even without proof of stake, it's possible to make transactions low-cost.
Bitcoin is going to burn power whether or not you attach your token-tracker to it. If you design a system with thousands to millions of users that makes one bitcoin transaction per day to secure itself, then it's responsible for a pretty negligible amount of wasted power.
> Even without proof of stake, it's possible to make transactions low-cost.
only at the cost of reversibility.
the central thesis of proof of work is that an attacker must expend more energy than the "main" chain, across the duration of time they want to be able to reverse a transaction (older transactions require more time).
The amount of energy expended is determined by mining rewards - over time, mining profit will converge to zero, miners will expend however much energy the mining rewards buy.
as such - any reduction in energy expenditure (i.e. a reduction in mining rewards) will lead to a reduction in security, making it easier to reverse transactions.
Binance Smart Chain has many NFTs and doesn't use Proof of Work. Ethereum is migrating to Proof of Stake soon and will eliminate the power waste argument. If he wanted to attack NFTs he should have used a better argument.