system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Cryptoart and NFT being bad for environment

I tried to read an article and google, but I still don't get it. Also, as a freelance artist should I make this? Is this a fad? Is it like pixel art?
gpt
>	Is this a fad?

Probably yes, it is certainly a bubble. But it will probably stick around like a bad rash like cryptocurrency.

>	Is it like pixel art?

No.

>	I still don't get it.

It is “art” where ownership is secured by blockchain. Blockchain is a kind of database that is structured as it sounds, in a linear chain of blocks. Each block has a cryptographic hash which relates to the preceding block, meaning a chain of transactions can be verified without any central authority.

The way it does this is extremely wasteful. The cryptographic hash is a mathematical process which is easy to do one way but extremely difficult to do the other direction. Anyone looking at the blockchain gets the easy side of the equation and can verify all the hashes are correct for each block in the chain. But how do you add new blocks if figuring out what the next hash should be is so difficult?

You guess. Or rather a lot of people guess, over and over, billions of times a second until someone finally hits on the answer by chance. They then publish this new block to the entire community of independent blockchain peers who all easily check to see the hash is correct, and update their chains with the new block. As this happens over and over the blocks add up, and the most legitimate chain is considered to be the longest one. If someone wanted to alter the chain they would need to be able to figure out the cryptographic hashes for not just the block they wanted to change but also all the following ones, enough to get a chain longer than the current length. That would be prohibitively difficult since there are lots of people already guessing on the current end block so you would need more computing power (guess faster) than the collective group of people guessing (“mining”) on the chain.

On the plus side this is a way of verifying a chain of events (such as ownership of a piece of art) without any central authority to keep track and in a way essentially impossible to alter after the fact. With thousands of independent records and a prohibitive calculation barrier it is effectively impossible to change and extremely secure.

Unfortunately it also is killing the planet. All those people who are “guessing” for that hash solution are using computers to perform huge numbers of calculations, spending electricity to solve pointless math problems hoping one is eventually going to be correct.

Imagine for example that you bought a painting. What is unique about this NFT painting is that when you buy it several people around the world light campfires specifically for your painting. They are going to keep burning those campfires, consuming fuel, *forever* because if those fires ever go out people won’t be sure who owns that painting anymore. This is essentially the same thing which is happening with bitcoin or any other blockchain cryptocurrency, it is a currency where each unit of currency starts several of those eternally burning fires across the world.

Someone decided “Hey, what if we made a new system of currency which depends on and financially motivates the creation of an endless forest fire!”