Featured in this episode of Tech News of the Week
There are many manias that have gripped the American populace in my lifetime. There were Beanie Babies, baseball cards, and even Pogs for a very short window. But by far the dumbest and most environmentally destructive has been NFTs. Here at Chaos Lever, we have always considered them a deeply stupid idea with essentially zero merit, and I think we’re just going to take a little victory lap here.
According to a report from Crypto Gambling site dappGambl- which I would wager you wouldn’t be able to spell correctly give infinite time and monkeys- the vast majority of NFTs are effectively worthless. They scanned 73k NFT collections of which 95% have a market cap of 0 Ether. Not only that, but only 21% of the collections had full ownership, meaning the other 79% have unsold inventory.
But wait, it gets so much worse. dappGambl also identified almost 200k collections that were minted with no apparent owner or market share, so they’re worthless and unsold. And yet those NFTs had to be minted, which adds up to an equivalent of the yearly CO2 emissions of 2048 homes. NFTs are worse than useless, overhyped garbage like Tickle Me Elmo. At the end of the day, you have nothing to show for it, nothing to play with, and no one to blame but yourself.