For NFT, I think the energy issue is close to irrelevant. The tokens live on ETH blockchain which exists anyway and is massively larger than these tokens. There are also plans to migrate ETH off of PoW soonish, so it may become irrelevant.
I hear this argument a lot and have a genuine question.
How does Bitcoin electricity usage compare to something that achieves a similar goal?
A good example is gold—many people compare Bitcoin to gold. What are the relative electricity costs of the two, and does that justify the cost of either asset? This would take into account the electricity costs of mining, labor, supply chain, storage, etc.
It's easy to quantify with Bitcoin, less so than gold. Transportation, security, all those things lead to gold being an inefficient store of value. At least with cryptocurrencies, many are being actively worked on that contribute much less to energy expenditure.
I think we should consider the possibility that Bitcoin greatly incentivizes saving and disincentivizes consumption, at least while prices are increasing as quickly as they are.
If people are unemployed or underemployed and you save regardless that waste of productive work doesn't reappear through magic in the future. It's just gone.
Visa operates out of just two datacenters. They are famously secretive about their operations so I don't know how much power they use. The most I've found is that they have 'multi-megawatt' datacenters, which means they probably use more than three megawatts and less than 100.
Bitcoin uses about 8.5 gigawatts. Clearly it uses at least a few orders of magnitude more electricity than Visa. It can process four transactions per second compared to about 25,000 for Visa, so the energy per transaction is even worse by a few more orders of magnitude.
The inefficiency of Bitcoin is truly mind-boggling. If I were trying to write a hit piece, I wouldn't have the guts to make up numbers as bad as the reality.
What about all the cascading costs to run all non-crypto financial systems? Not just data centers, but everything related like infrastructure, real estate, credit card readers, point of sale systems, office furniture, salaries, etc... The list goes on and on. If crypto was used globally, much of these costs and energy waste would disappear.
Also, some currencies like Ethereum are moving to proof of stake, which requires less energy.
The second most popular cryptocurrency, Ethereum, is making progress toward adopting proof-of-stake, which will obsolete the need for mining and therefore be much more eco-friendly. Hopefully other cryptocurrencies will do this too as PoS becomes more understood and proven.
