Hi Vanessa, interesting essay. I have been researching and investing a lot in the crypto space and you make some good points. While I enjoyed your introductory paragraph because I had prior knowledge of the link between blockchain technology and energy use, I do feel it probably comes off a little bit ambiguous and unclear for most readers. Though the final sentences of the introductory paragraph are evocative and draw me in further to the piece, I leave the paragraph not really knowing what the issue is or where you stand on it. I also feel the use of the second person POV gets in the way of you making your point in the intro paragraph.
At some point you say:
“A NFT is a type of bitcoin”
NFTs are not bitcoins, but they exist on blockchains. Perhaps it’s more accurate to call it a digital asset. There are also multiple blockchains which all compete with one another for market share. Bitcoin is just the largest, least efficient, most expensive and slowest.
Second paragraph: “Lets first catch you up on what this NFT thing is, and why it warrants such cause for alarm.”
Second paragraph does not talk much about NFTs or about anything to be alarmed about. Perhaps make the topic sentence of this paragraph lead into exclusively about what blockchains are as that seems to be the majority of this paragraph’s content.
Third paragraph: Here you could segue from blockchain to talking about NFTS with the same topic sentence you had for the second paragraph.
“Now lets catch you up on what this NFT thing is, and why it warrants such cause for alarm. A NFT, or Non-Fungible-Token, is a name given to works of art, or in some cases other external media, that is represented by a code that is connected to a block chain.”
Fourth Paragraph: As I already touched upon, this is the first clear mention of your argument. I feel it needs to happen earlier in the piece.
Final paragraph: “The only conclusion we can come to when presented with all these facts is that bitcoin mining and NFT arts are, by their very definition, unsustainable.”
An overarching comment I have is that bitcoin mining is absolutely unsustainable and environmentally harmful, but NFTs do not need to exist on the bitcoin blockchain. The conflation of these two separate things is not accurate and weakens the argument.
Bitcoin is the oldest, least efficient, most expensive, and slowest blockchain in existence today. It exists primarily as a novelty and a collectors item— digital gold. Nobody is building anything on it anymore, but it is still being mined and talked about in the media sphere because of its name recognition and large market cap. Developer Apps that can host NFTs are mainly built on the Ethereum blockchain.
NFTs can exist on the Ethereum blockchain. They can exist on the Binance Smart Chain, they can exist on Algorand, they can exist on Hedera hash graph. Some of those technologies have created cryptographic networks which maintain decentralization through proof of stake instead of proof of work and require less computational power than a credit card swipe. Perhaps in addition to your counter argument, you could qualify your own argument and suggest a way forward for NFTs that would be beneficial for everyday artists, and the environment.