NFTs have been chastised for "killing the world," a contentious issue that should be resolved when Ethereum switches consensus mechanisms this year, reducing the impact on the environment.

Real-world assets, on the other hand, are being destroyed as their owners replicate them using NFTs in the expectation of selling them for greater money.

It's a bad habit that needs to be broken.

The first notable example was NFT platform Burnt Finance, which really burnt a certified Banksy piece named Morons before replicating it as an NFT and selling it for $400,000 – four times the physical artwork's worth.

The owner of a Jean-Michel Basquiat drawing then offered an NFT of the artwork for sale, with the option of destroying the original if the buyer so desired. Fortunately, this was cancelled after the estate stated that the owner lacked the rights to construct such a derivative piece.

Natasha Che, the founder of audiobook platform MySoundWise, tweeted a few months later: "If you make an NFT of a real diamond, and the diamond itself is destroyed in a fire tomorrow, you still have the same asset." Che set out to accomplish exactly that after much mocking of the idea. She paid $5,000 for a diamond, broke it with a hammer, and sold an NFT of it for $17,600. (However, the judgement is still out on whether this supported her thesis.)

While there haven't been many victims of this tokenization tendency, the concept is still alive and well. The most recent plan is to destroy a valuable book, which has undoubtedly raised some eyebrows.

Dune is a rare copy of the book

According to Buzzfeed, in November 2021, NFT collector Soban Saqib spent $2.9 million on a rare copy of the novel Dune — one that was offered in order to market the notion of converting it into a screenplay. He did so on behalf of SpiceDAO, a group of cryptocurrency aficionados pooling their finances in a similar manner to the proposal to purchase an early copy of the United States Constitution.

The purchase piqued the group's interest, and they had huge plans for it. They planned to make the book available to the public, create an animated series based on it, and fund community-driven derivative projects based on it.

There was only one problem: they owned the book but not the copyright. This suggests that the group will struggle to implement any of the three ideas offered.

While the organisation appears to be moving forwards nonetheless, one of its members has given an alternative solution (although one not necessarily void of the same problems).

He intends to destroy the book, as you may have surmised

A strategy has been devised to burn the book.

The idea was offered by a former electrical engineer who goes by the alias Xatarrer. They are well-known for attempting to upload a 1 MB image to the Ethereum blockchain via a series of progressive uploads (with each successive image improving in quality). A project that has gotten about 25% of the way there thus far.

Xatarrer wishes to apply a similar concept to the Dune novel. Except, unlike other NFTs, which merely save URLs to images kept elsewhere on the web, they intend to upload photos of every page of the book to the Ethereum blockchain in its entirety.

It's unclear how many pages are in the book, but Xatarrer thinks that each page will cost 18 ETH ($56,000) in transaction fees. So, if the book had 200 pages, the NFTs would cost $11.2 million.

Once the complete book has been uploaded on the blockchain, it will be accessible to anybody. This would include all of the pages, which would be slightly more than what is currently available online (uploaded to simply the regular web), but not by much, raising the question of whether it's really worth it.

The book might then be destroyed as a "great marketing gimmick," according to Xatarrer, with the purpose of increasing the value of the book's on-chain photographs.

They told The Block that in the DAO's early days, many members joked about doing this, and he thought he'd make a serious suggestion with the option of burning the book. "On-chain storage, in my opinion, is more likely to survive than the physical object itself. It also fits well with a science fiction book "They stated.

Only the proposal was not well received.

"And we're wondering why people despise cryptocurrency." "I'm ashamed to have allowed someone to even consider doing this," Ethereum tech head Péter Szilágyi remarked.

Lefteris Karapetsas, the creator of the Rotki app, concurred. "We non-normies here think this is a pretty horrible decision," he remarked. Some of the information you present in your post is truly cool. Don't muddy it by actually destroying a physical copy of the book."

With this opposition, it appears that the idea to burn the book is unlikely to gain traction. "It states in the proposal, and so far the sentiment is fairly negative, so I don't think you need to worry about the book," Xatarrer remarked.

So, for the time being, the rare relic should be protected.

Perhaps what should be eliminated instead is the mentality of burning rare artefacts like books in the hope of making a little extra money.

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