Like from artist’s perspective they feel like something that should exist, but once one gets into details like energy use and cryptocurrencies things get ugly.
Can someone who understands blockchains answer that question?
NFTs often are made on stolen art and the money never reaches back to the original creator. They aren’t really great for a lot of artists.
But yes, cryptocurrency and NFTs could exist on the same blockchain or separate ones. Putting an NFT on a blockchain that doesn’t have a cryptocurrency doesn’t change the energy usage of that blockchain though.
Not really, the primary advantage of using blockchain based technologies is that essentially “hard calculations” are used to “protect” it. Without this you can easily forge/fake transactions on the public ledger, and thus invalidate it.
So the only way to side-step around this energy intensive step is to use something that isn’t reliant on blockchain.
Which moves you away from the whole idea of NFTs.
I always thought NFTs was just another instance of fancy blockchain tech trying to be applied to a problem that has been usually solved with watermarks.
Watermarks wont protect your image from forgery, but it will make it more annoying to copy and re-use. However, NFTs don’t really protect your work either, only the “idea” of an original.
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I missed the mining part of the question. Yeah, mining is how blockchain works, with or without a currency on that blockchain.
Edit: in theory yes and yes. In practice, no to no cryptocurrency, otherwise what’s the point? In practice as of now, no to no mining (although I guess 99% of the people trading NFTs wouldn’t have anything to do with mining).
There are specific {things} that don’t really physically exist as a unique item or don’t have any intrinsic value but for which it is useful to attach some {other thing} that provides a form of uniqueness (and in turn, value). This can allow the {things} to be traded. Many forms of art fall into this category, same with basically any digital-only goods.
If you can overlay onto the world a virtual system, and the virtual system is of the form taken by Ethereum [in particular], then the mechanics of that system allow you to use what is called an NFT to be the thing that provides uniqueness and allows trading of {things}.
It makes no sense outside of that virtual system, because a. there’s generally no need for it and b. it is basically dependent on how one style of virtual system (Ethereum et al) is designed to work.
So yeeees you could not involve cryptocurrency. Ethereum is not a cryptocurrency. But as the point is to attach a tradeable value to something that would otherwise be difficult to attach a value to, this seems pointless, particularly as the system the trading occurs on requires cryptocurrency to buy and sell stuff. (Edit: I realise there are other mooted uses but they generally all seem very contrived vs. just “a way to make collectible digital goods tradeable for money”).
Re mining, again, in theory, not needed because the system that requires mining will be replaced with one that doesn’t by the end of this year (waves hands vaguely), probably definitely, although I think they said that last year as well, and possibly the year before that.
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Just butting in because I have spent far too much time studying the Web3 space:
So far, there is not one single blockchain implementation that does not require mining.
The main contenders and differences have been:
- Proof of Work - Many nodes mining the same block - whoever wins, wins.
- Proof of Stake - One node is chosen to mine the block.
Mining always occurs. If cryptography is involved, someone has to do a lot of computation.
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I was assuming mining as in mining cryptocurrency, rather than just processing generally. So yes, it’s always got to be processed. But that technically doesn’t have to involve currency (so nobody is mining, nothing to mine for). And PoS in theory could allow that work to be removed because the condition for transactions being added to the block is dependent on validations, not proof of work. Still got to be processed somewhere but that only need happen once in one place, I wouldn’t really say that’s mining.
In practice, yes, this is all semantics, only answers are either highly qualified “yes, but”, based on theoretical applications or “no, not at all” based on reality.
Couldn’t they be validated by a Visa transation or something like that?
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