Ten days ago Beeple sold a jpeg collage for $69,346,250 at Christie's. You've probably heard about this already, "Everydays: The First 5000 Days," the guy who's been posting one drawing a day online since 2007, suddenly sitting alongside Jeff Koons and David Hockney on the list of most valuable living artists at auction. Every tech outlet and half the finance newsletters I subscribe to ran some version of the same piece the week of March 11th. I'm not going to write that piece again. What's been stuck in my head since isn't the price tag, it's the electricity bill nobody put on the invoice.
Around the same time as the Christie's sale, a digital artist named Memo Akten put together a little site (cryptoart.wtf, though I think he's since had to change the tone of it) that estimated the carbon footprint of a single NFT transaction on Ethereum. His numbers got argued over plenty, and I'm not qualified to referee a dispute between blockchain engineers and climate researchers, but the rough shape of the argument didn't need much precision to land: minting and trading NFTs on a proof-of-work chain burns a genuinely absurd amount of power per transaction, because that's how Ethereum secures itself right now, miners racing each other with GPUs and ASICs to solve throwaway math problems. A French artist named Joanie Lemercier pulled a planned NFT drop in late February over exactly this, saying the minting alone would've eaten more electricity than his studio uses in years.
I find this genuinely more interesting than the auction. Beeple getting rich is a story about one weird auction and one very online artist catching a wave at the right moment. The energy question is a story about what happens when a financial mania (and I don't think it's unfair to call it that, six months ago nobody but crypto forums had heard the term NFT) runs straight into infrastructure that wasn't built for this kind of load. Ethereum has been promising to move to proof-of-stake for something like four years now. Every time the crypto conversation gets loud again, people bring up "the merge" like it's imminent, and every time it slips. I'll believe it when I see it.
Here's my actual opinion, since apparently I'm contractually obligated to have one on this blog: I don't think the art is the problem, and I don't even think NFTs as a concept are dumb, even though "buying a receipt that points at a jpeg someone else can right-click save" is an easy thing to mock and I've mocked it plenty in group chats this month. Provenance and scarcity for digital work are actual unsolved problems and I get why artists are excited about a mechanism that might let them sell directly instead of going through a gallery that takes half. What bugs me is that almost nobody selling into this boom right now, and almost nobody breathlessly covering it, is pricing in the externality. It's the same move as ignoring a factory's runoff because the factory is making money. The cost didn't go away, it just isn't on anyone's invoice.
Small tangent, because it's my blog and I'll tangent if I want to: this is also, weirdly, tied up with why I still don't have a new graphics card. I've been trying to replace my aging GTX 1070 since November and every time something is briefly in stock at MSRP, it's gone in about ninety seconds to a bot, presumably headed straight into somebody's mining rig. The 30-series cards Nvidia shipped with the mining hash-rate limiter didn't really fix this, because leaked drivers going around in the last few weeks reportedly strip the limiter back out on some cards. So the same demand that's driving these absurd electricity numbers for NFT minting is also the reason I'm still gaming on a five-year-old card and refreshing Best Buy's stock page like it's a part-time job. It's a small, dumb, personal inconvenience next to "several gigawatt-hours a year," but it's the version of this story I actually live with.
I don't have a tidy fix to offer. Proof-of-stake will presumably show up eventually and make a lot of this argument moot, or at least much smaller. Until then I think the honest thing to do is just say the quiet part out loud when you're writing about the next eye-popping NFT sale: somebody's laptop fan spun up somewhere to make that number possible, and it wasn't the artist's.