As both Samdy and Jayo said:
Lack of understanding
and
Not many have found a good way of using them.
By my own admission, I'm trying to use them in a good way. I've set up a small start-up that creates NFTs (which also includes physical items shipped to people who buy) and for the value of each one sold, a ¹/³ of the sale goes into purchasing trees. So if it sells for £1k, we buy approx 330 trees.
I've found this is at least one way of offsetting any carbon produced inadvertently by us on the Ethereum Blockchain. However, fuck Carbon Neutral and the ETH & BTC Blockchains...we're planning on moving to more efficient, quicker and cheaper equivalents of those mentioned, which means much less processing power and in turn would mean we go Carbon Negative (that's a good thing, as it means we're offsetting more via carbon sequestration than there is produced by us).
Without going on too much, there's more to crypto than just Bitcoin and Ethereum, although to the man on the street that might be all they know. Crypto and digital assets get a bit of a bad rep but more so because in terms of use cases, Bitcoin isn't particularly very good, clean, cheap or efficient; similar can be said for ETH.
Two platforms we're looking to build on for NFTs and other projects is Aesthetes & KlimaDao. The former is specifically for the curation of fine art (and photography) via NFTs and runs on the XRPL (XRP Ledger - It's like the blockchain only much quicker and cheaper, also everything on there is transparent so you can see and trace every single transaction). The latter is a specific platform that purchases voluntary credits from the voluntary carbon market (but there's more to it than that) and runs on the Polygon/Matic Network (again another one that is much cheaper than traditional blockchain).
Some say that when ETH2.0 arrives, that will change things. It may but ETH2.0 appears to be somewhat AWOL at present. By the time it arrives, some of the networks mentioned above could already be well ahead of them (they already are), so for me ETH2.0 is a bit of a moot counter argument when trying to defend the astronomical fluctuation of ETH fees currently. A transaction of ETH can cost you several £100+ at different times of day. But even at the "cheapest" you can still be looking at anything from £8 to £40 - just for sending something as simple as ETH to ETH (in different wallets not talking exchanges). When it comes to "Smart Contracts" which is what most NFTs run on via ETH, you're talking higher fees still.
There are some bad actors in crypto and digital assets but I think that is true of anything where there is money to be made. There will always be hustlers and Lee Power types. But there are a lot of people trying to do good and integrating systems that run well on things like the XRPL. Like anything, we can read articles that will only focus on the "dark side" of the "dark web" (a cheap term I find that people with little knowledge like to appropriate to crypto without much balance) and that may sway our opinion or cause us to err on the side of caution but doing our own research will find many useful pieces of literature to ponder over.
My wondering is in some ways, crypto is very much a "gatekeeping" kind of place at times (a lot of that has come from people unwilling to listen or learn from those who know their DOGE from their DASH) but I do think some of these articles are written to stop some of joe public from getting in on the game early. Write a demeaning article about the "dangers" of crypto and push it enough times...sure enough people will shun it and it's easier to shun something that someone doesn't know or care much about and it's mission accomplished.
To the Mooooooon!
