About the environmental impact of Uncut.FM

The energy consumption of blockchain is a classic argument against web3 and I thought it would be interesting to extend this important issue to the rest of you.

We are having an interesting convo on our Discord about the environmental impact of Uncut.FM.

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash

Uncut.fm uses Polygon, a “proof-of-stake” blockchain solution that requires dramatically less energy to process transactions compared with other blockchains. While estimates vary, individual transactions on Polygon use approximately 99.9% less carbon than an equivalent transaction on Ethereum's current proof-of-work blockchain. Upcoming work to shift Ethereum to a proof-of-stake blockchain will further reduce Polygon's aggregate carbon footprint.

This is great but someone in the community argued the following:

"This is good! But polygon is a side-chain thing, so basically what they do is run their own blockchain that is more energy-efficient, sure, but it acts more like a middle man - they process transactions on their own blockchain and then return them to the main ethereum blockchain ETH which is proof of work, and of course is you know not great"

And this person is right…

Based on 100 validators taking part in Polygon’s proof of stake network, the WWF recently concluded “each transaction on Polygon produces just 0.206587559 grams CO2,” which is a long way from the 124.34 kilograms of CO2 per transaction on the Ethereum network. The WWF therefore establishes that there is a “limited environmental impact of minting NFTs on Polygon.”

Unfortunately, this is partially true because Polygon is not operating independently.

In fact, Polygon operates a set of contracts on the main Ethereum network that facilitate essential services such as moving assets between Ethereum and Polygon and creating checkpoints. If you take in consideration this dependency the carbon footprint of a Polygon transaction is close to 430 grams of CO2.

BUT, Ethereum 2 is around the corner and the final merge is expected to be released by end of the summer. It means, Ethereum will be Proof of Stake as Polygon is and the transaction footprint will be reduced by 98%. So back to square one, around 0.2 grams CO2 per transaction!

This environmental argument is something used by blockchain haters all the time. I'm not saying they're wrong, it's true that blockchain as originally designed is BAD for the planet (like cars were when they were invented and still are by the way...) but we've seen a lot of progress and reducing environmental impact is a top priority for the blockchain community. We are seeing more and more chains embracing PoS (Proof of Stake) versus PoW (Proof of Work) and Ethereum is next and it's going to be a huge improvement.

Haters will always hate…

Now, no matter how much progress we make on this front, the haters will continue to hate us.

No innovation can escape the natural adoption curve...

When you innovate, you have to start with the early adopters, forget about mainstream adoption and understand that there will always be laggards.

The BIG mistake of the web3 community was to jump too quickly (greed) into the mainstream when the technology and the masses were not ready for it. And we are paying the hard price for it today…

At Uncut.FM we decided to focus on innovators first. This is why our product is still in private BETA. We are experimenting it with our Podcasters in Residency and building with them a web 2.5 user experience, a breathing space for consumers to become used to Web3 features.

Removing the complexity of web3, focusing on improving the underlying infrastructure and creating use cases that add real value to users is the only way to achieve widespread adoption.

It will certainly take time and resilience, but that's what we're committed to.