A member of the DigitalRosh community, Tanya Zhelezniak, a digital marketing expert and entrepreneur, has been researching the NFT issue for several months, to understand what exactly it is about and why there is so much noise around the issue. With its approval and support, DigitalRosh publishes here the summary of the issue of environmental pollution from its work, as it published on social networks (February 19, 2022).
HResearch was done as part of academic studies and as a result several papers were written on the subject. Quite a few problems and issues were discovered during the research: technological, legal and ethical.
One of the strongest arguments against NFT technology and Bitcoin is the use of blockchain platforms based on the principle of PoW calculations, which consumes a lot of energy in a computer network, energy obtained from burning coal and as a result causes air pollution. This argument was caught after an article was published with the announcement that Bitcoin will cause global warming and an increase of more than 2 degrees in the earth in the coming years (Mora et al., 2018 ). That is why until today there are surveys that show that the energy consumption of blockchain is equal to the energy consumption of an entire country.
On the other hand, if you look at the surveys that compare, for example, energy consumption of a traditional financial sector against crypto, these are very low percentages, even in relation to Bitcoin ( Nambiampurath, 2021). In fact, the argument is the opposite and shows that blockchain technology is more economical not only in terms of the players in the network who issue crypto or NFT and prefer PoS and clean energy based solutions, because it is cheaper, and even contribute from their profit to the improvement in the field of clean energy, but also in terms of platforms, such as Ethereum which switches from a PoW approach to the more economical PoS, and Bitcoin, which even if it continues to work according to a PoW approach will strive to use clean energy solutions (Coin Bureau, 2021).
And finally, according to the marketing law of demand and supply, the more the demand for blockchain increases, the cheaper its use will be, because this situation encourages the market to switch to cheaper services based on clean energy and to invest in the development of this field.
There is no doubt that this is an important issue, which rightly concerns us and especially the younger generation. The responsibility is ours, technically and morally.
Additional sources:
Proof of Work vs. Proof of Stake & the Battle for Blockchain Consensus
Bitcoin: Final Nail in the Coffin of Climate Change? | Lars Dittmar TEDxRWTHAachen – YouTube
The Devastating Environmental Impact of Bitcoin (and other myths) DEBUNKED! Event by Christian Kameir
