Given the number of big name photographers and huge brands jumping on board the NFT bandwagon, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the plethora of problems surrounding the NFT market had evaporated. You’d be wrong. NFTs are a still terrible idea, riddled with problems.
Last year, I published an article entitled NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money. I still stand by every word in that article. A year on, the criticisms continue to be valid, and if anything, they’ve only grown more serious.
1. Environmental Impact
Let’s get this debate out of the way early. Arguments over energy consumption and CO2 are complex at every level, from crypto and bitcoin miners being kicked out of China and buying their own coal-fired power plants, to how little of ETH’s energy use NFTs actually constitute. Some of the arguments are beautifully naive, such as this article that among a number of weak points (checkbooks? Seriously?), conflates the banking system with wealth, somehow assuming that it is banks alone that decide to invest in fossil fuels, and not the people, corporations, and institutions whose wealth they hold.
Other articles are more compelling, such as this well-constructed piece from Nic Carter (notably, another individual who stands to make a lot of money as crypto scales up). Unlike most defenses, there’s no whatboutism (“Yeah, but fridges also use electricity!”); however, what it doesn’t deny is that crypto uses a huge amount of…
