Intervention - NFTs

 If you use the internet, you may have heard of NFTs. NFTs, which stand for Non-Fungible Tokens, are an incredibly trending topic among artists, tech experts, and anyone with a social media account. Imagine you see a piece of art you wish to buy. You pay the artist money for this piece, and you receive it. That’s how basic sales take place. Except with NFTS, when you purchase the art, you still don’t really own it. After all, you’re buying digital art on a marketplace. But you don’t even own the JPEG to it, either. Anyone who knows how to right-click on their screen can download the same image onto their computer as well. 

So what exactly are you purchasing? 

What you own is the spot this art occupies on the Ethereum blockchain that operates the bid you just used. To put it in simpler terms, you own the receipt to the art you just purchased, proving you own the art, without actually possessing the art. 

Blockchains are what enables cryptocurrency transactions. When you purchase art as an NFT, the data these files are using comes from this blockchain. Blockchains are made and ran by a proof of work system, where miners solve these mathematical problems through computers to earn data. Except the computers used are made to burn incredible amounts of energy and release incredible amounts of carbon emissions. A single transaction using Ethereum uses as much energy you, or an average US citizen,  would have spent in roughly a week, but the purchase of NFTs can use much more. Some big-sale purchases use as much energy an average person would go through over the course of several months due to the complexities of the marketplace. And Ethereum as a whole regularly uses as much energy as the country of Libya. 

So, imagine your transaction like this. You see a piece of art you wish to buy, but to do so, rather than paying with money, you have to pay up by deforesting your local park.

I would like to center around the question: How do you give art value? Is your purchase of something enough to give it the value you bought it at? After all, most NFTs purchases aren’t centered around supporting art, but more so the potential resale that art can have. Additionally, you don’t even need to be the creator of art to sell it online as an NFT. What is art, what makes art valuable, and is it ethical to purchase or sell art if our environment has to pay the price of its value?