NFTP, the World’s First Non-Fungible Toilet Paper
rarible.com
rarible.com
You might as well go, 'I have eleventy billion dollars, prove me wrong' and save a heck of a lot of energy. It will all come down to how many weapons you can bring to bear, regardless.
This is true of all kinds of tokens. The real takeaway is that cryptocurrencies are now so valuable that there are a plurality of individuals with over $100M, no taste, and no sense. This is a result of massive flows of money into the space. Fungible tokens are trivial replacements for large swaths of any financial system. There are great things going on adjacent to this sideshow.
It's the art market, digitized.
The best perspective I've come across on NFTs so far. Looking at it from this framework suddenly it makes more sense to me how something like this could potentially survive
Seems closer to trading cards than just about anything else so I haven't even done enough research to wrap my head around the technical side of what people are doing with them yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N1AamI__Rg&ab_channel=MarcC...
The advantage to the game maker, over just storing ownership in a SQL database, would be making it more like physical collectable cards (with 'limited printings' and 'first editions') that some chumps will pay six-figure sums for.
The direct advantage to the player of owning the NFT would be playing the card in-game, and the benefit of an NFT over normal digital items would be letting them "invest" while feeling assured them the game maker wasn't 'printing' more cards.
Obviously, a lot of people aren't interested in 'collectables', pay-to-win, skins/hats/lootboxes and so on. I'm certainly not. But there is an existing market for digital hats, baffling though it may seem, so there's precedent for people trading in-game digital items for real money.
"Thinking out loud here", so this may be wrong, obvious, or both.
I wonder how that would work. Presumably, the game maker would create a rare "card" and put it on the blockchain, and transfer it to a player in a transaction. That player could then transfer it to some other player, etc.
To be used in a game, a player would have to be able to prove that they are the rightful owner. The player would be represented as their private key ("wallet"), and any "card" that is sent to the player would need a chain of signatures that lead back to the creation of the card by the game maker. I think that blockchain would only be able to represent the custody of the "card", the barter would likely have to happen off-chain. ie, you send me $100 or 1mBTC or whatever and I will sign over my card to you...
The blockchain bubble has had enough speculators pump money in that there’s a whole industry creating things like NFTs trying to prop up valuations, and that part of the cycle always lasts longer than seems possible to anyone prone to thinking about the market analytically rather than emotionally.
I can see a use for NFTs such as for concert tickets but a JPG or GIF? Sorry but we already have good protocols in place to transfer ownership, copyright, etc. of artwork to someone that has been used for centuries. A blockchain isn't needed for a god damn GIF sorry.
In seriousness though, it's great that the money for these is going to charities. I expect a swath of brands to follow suit. It's essentially free advertising plus free good will, and it seems like they must be having fun making the artwork.
* Non-Fungible Tulips https://opensea.io/collection/non-fungible-tulips
* Pringles CryptoCrisp https://rarible.com/token/0xd07dc4262bcdbf85190c01c996b4c06a...
* And this dude selling NFTs of his fart noises: https://nypost.com/2021/03/18/nyc-man-sells-fart-for-85-cash...
Just as it's expected to add the year to a HN post title if it's old, or [pdf] if it's a pdf link, pages with rapidly flashing images should be marked with a seizure warning too.
What’s an NFT?
NFTs allow you to buy and sell ownership of unique digital items and keep track of who owns them using the blockchain. NFT stands for “non-fungible token,” and it can technically contain anything digital, including drawings, animated GIFs, songs, or items in video games. An NFT can either be one-of-a-kind, like a real-life painting, or one copy of many, like trading cards, but the blockchain keeps track of who has ownership of the file.
Podcast: https://www.npr.org/2021/03/12/976513031/the-69-million-jpeg
Another episode of interest: https://www.npr.org/2021/03/09/975450173/the-200k-nba-nft
So I guess it depends how much of the increase in Ethereum's energy consumption you put down to NFTs/their popularity. No idea how you'd calculate that but it's increased hugely the past few months: https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption
It’s not like we need the history of all UTXOs ever, the coin may have changed hands like 100 times max, so it has an easily checked history. Same principle on Ethereum.
If I understand correctly, this is what sidechains are about? https://github.com/memo/eco-nft#still-using-ethereum.
Using other blockchains:
Instead of Ethereum, other blockchains are used. This can be up to hundreds of times better for the environment in terms of carbon footprint. Some of these chains include Algorand, Tezos, Polkadot and other PoS networks.
Also, NFTs are built on the ERC721 standard, which is a contract standard that allows composability between different NFTs and contracts.
https://www.llnl.gov/news/us-energy-use-rises-highest-level-...
The wasted energy there is taking about inefficiencies in electronics and motors in general.
Mining BTC is not 100% efficient either. If it was, the mining hardware wouldn't get hot, and it does get hot.
So mining operations are producing a ton of waste heat as well.
Since those Bitcoin blockchain calculations are pretty intense, they make your processor work hard. In doing so there is extra energy that literally gets wasted bc it heats up the processor, and again just like the bulb heat isn't the intended function so that heat byproduct is just wasted energy.
Bitcoin Mining uses 120 TWh/year[1] which is way to much imo. The problem is that bitcoin uses the Hashcash proof of work system[2]. But there are mechanisms like proof of stake which can solve this problem.[3] Its about time to convert all blockchains to energy-saving mechanisms..
[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/lawrencewintermeyer/2021/03/10/...
[2]https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work
[3]https://coincentral.com/could-proof-of-stake-mend-bitcoins-e...
> Selling work on a blockchain can be a technically challenging task. For this reason, many platforms and websites have emerged, aiming to make this process as seamless and easy as possible for artists. Unfortunately, currently many of these websites are based on the Ethereum blockchain, which is very inefficient and ecologically costly by design. E.g. selling just a single-edition artwork on Ethereum has a carbon footprint starting at around 100 KgCO2, which is equivalent to a 1 hour flight (and depending on the platform, can reach a long-haul flight) [2]. Selling an edition of 100 works has a carbon footprint of over 10 tonnes CO2, which is more than the per capita annual footprint of someone in the EU - including all emissions from industry and trade [3].
And what about all the carbon from all the hot air produced by all the people repeating "this whole carbon footprint concern is going to go away" again and again, for so many years?
0:https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c2484200...
What was their marketing department thinking?!