that video is very superficial and imho woke fearmongering

the following is from ethereum.org

The environmental impact of NFTs
NFTs are growing in popularity which means they're also coming under increased scrutiny – especially over their carbon footprint.

To clarify a few things:

• NFTs aren't directly increasing the carbon footprint of Ethereum.
• The way Ethereum keeps your funds and assets secure is currently energy-intensive but it's about to improve.
• Once improved, Ethereum's carbon footprint will be 99.98% better, making it more energy efficient than many existing industries.

To explain further we're going to have to get a little more technical so bear with us...

Don't blame it on the NFTs
The whole NFT ecosystem works because Ethereum is decentralized and secure.

Decentralized meaning you and everyone else can verify you own something. All without trusting or granting custody to a third party who can impose their own rules at will. It also means your NFT is portable across many different products and markets.

Secure meaning no one can copy/paste your NFT or steal it.

These qualities of Ethereum makes digitally owning unique items and getting a fair price for your content possible. But it comes at a cost. Blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum are energy intensive right now because it takes a lot of energy to preserve these qualities. If it was easy to rewrite Ethereum's history to steal NFTs or cryptocurrency, the system collapses.

 

That's like saying gasoline is harmless to the environment because BP says so lol

 

how many elephant tusks do you need to make the keys for a piano?

 

This alone is already telling, but I feel that there's more to be said.
NFTs are dependent on new ethereum tokens being mined. By using them, you not only incentify the energy consumption, but also you drive the ongoing worldwide chip shortage further, with all the negative impact of silicon mining and processing to boot. Using any proof-of-work blockchain is incredibly destructive. And ethereum people in particluar promise improvements for a better half of a decade already with no results.

 

That's deep, man. Very philosophical.

 

wHeRe dO yOu ThInK yOuR sHoEs ArE eVeN mAdE , mAaaaN ?!? !
Each Nike swoosh is cut from the dried, cured skin of smashed-in giraffes. Smell them! They're salty, see?

My literally worthless NFTs are different scams 'cuz I'm a cunt DJ who travels on private yachts, not jets!

 

This is a wrong way of thinking about it,
It's like you have a black lotus magic card.

It can be sold multiple times, someone can even make a 1:1 photo copy.
but still, the card holds it's value because of created scarcity of the original.

I "think" it does not work like that, because nft's are made on top of blockchain tech.

The blockchain would take note of how many NFT there actually are and which endpoint (wallet?) has it.
there does not have to be centralized server location where they are located and you would not lose them as long as the chain lives.

it could be as simple a piece of software that translates the code to the actual thing you bought (beeing a piece of music/picture/video)

 

anguishing is not music for the ears.

at least you can fish

 

University of Cambridge:

• The popular “energy cost per transaction” metric is regularly featured in the media and other academic studies despite having multiple issues.
  
  First, transaction throughput (i.e. the number of transactions that the system can process) is independent of the network’s electricity consumption. Adding more mining equipment and thus increasing electricity consumption will have no impact on the number of processed transactions.
  
  Second, a single Bitcoin transaction can contain hidden semantics that may not be immediately visible nor intelligible to observers. For instance, one transaction can include hundreds of payments to individual addresses, settle second-layer network payments (e.g. opening and closing channels in the Lightning network), or potentially represent billions of timestamped data points using open protocols such as OpenTimestamps.
  

 

You know why I didn't refer to that metric, even if that guy in the video mentions it?
Because it's irrelevant. Mining is the problem. The more people use proof-of-work-based NFT, the more tokens will have to be mined. Simple as that.
Now why do you mention an irrelevant metric? To point out its irrelevancy and... then what? The mining issue still stands.

 

thats exactly the thing, it doesnt matter how many people use it, the miners get paid for solving a block, the block difficulty does not depend on the number of transactions nft whatever and will NOT change if there is more people using nfts...

 

the amount of ETH mined will not change if more people decide to mine... block difficulty is determined by previous block time, adding more GPUs/Miners/WATTS/CO2s will not increase the amount of ETH output, so how can there be a correlation between demand and energy comsumption?

In order for the blocks to be generated consistently, the difficulty must be increased or decreased, this is called a difficulty re-target.

On a difficulty re-target block (every block or every number of blocks), the difficulty is increased if the previous blocks where generated faster than the specified block time and decreased if the previous blocks where generated slower than the specified block time.

 

.

 

So if people stopped using ETH it would still consume the same amount of energy?

 

not only that, most blockchains are migrating to Proof of stake instead of proof of work.

 

Wow, that's some mental gymnastics. Now, instead of trying to derail the topic into irreleancy for the third time in a row, any chance you'll actually address the mining issue? Who am I kidding, your intentions are quite clear by that point.
The higher the demand, the higher the price and an incentive to mine.
The more people mine, the more energy the process consumes, regardless of the outcome. The difficulty re-target makes it worse, if anything, since an absurd amount of hardware and energy (and that means coal and rare-earth elements, realistically) is wasted on bloody nothing.
Ethereum NFT usage heightens the demand. No fancy logic contortionism will allow to escape the fact. If you really wanna indulge in it, at least go proof-of-stake.

 

sure it would unless miners would stop mining, the other way around it would stop using energy if miners stop despite people using it :D

the only thing that could increase the energy consumption is the factor that nfts contribute to the interest of to buy in to ethereum, but where the hell do they increase the demand and for what even??

 

Last edited: May 5, 2021

might be easier to just sell a painting or a sculpture.

 

Even putting the environmental issues aside for a moment, NFTs are fucking stupid.