Ok, i don't normaly make posts or threads, but I feel i need to make one here.

Currently, several companies have been caught considering adding NFT's and Crypto.

For those not aware, these literaly kill the planet with pollution due to ecryption, are a massive scam, and worst of all for here, put a (Admittidly currently useless) tag on art.

Caught companies are:

EA
Ubisoft
Konami
Square Enix
Discord
Reddit
Disney

If you have an accout with any of these companies, consider sending in a feedback email telling then not to add these. If you are paying any of these, also consider telling them you will cancel any purchases or subs over this.

Sorry for the hassle everyone.

Add Disney to that list. They're selling a WALL-E one, ironically enough

Maybe someone here can actually explain this to me.

How do NFTs damage the environment more than other images?

Like, yeah. Normal cryptos have a more obvious means to do so. People mine them by using fucking warehouses full of laptops and shit. Still don't get how "mining" works but the damage makes sense.

But from what I understand, NFTs are just... image files? And only one person can buy each NFT. So like... it's not like they can be mined or require an entire server hub to maintain.

So how does adding (presumably) .nft to something make it so much more damaging than, say, .jpg?

Like, I'm not trying to be a dick. I genuinely do not understand. It's something I've tried to Google before and I've only been able to get articles that begin with something like "We all know NFTs are bad for the environment" and I'm like "FUCKING. HOW?! I GOOGLED 'how are NFTs bad for the environment' AND NOBODY WILL FUCKING TELL ME"

Basically. An NFT is crypto. When you mint an NFT you add a token to the blockchain (Bit like mining) and when you buy or sell one it's a crypto transaction.

Also it's not just the mining that's wasteful. Even spending and buying crypto uses insane amounts of electricity.

Even moving past the environmental issues NFTs are just really really stupid. They're an overenginered way of trying to introduce the ideas of scarcity and ownership to the internet.

Everything they can do can be done much easier and cheaper with a relational database. The one advantage is supposed to be the decentralisation but they fail at that when the actual content needs to be stored somewhere outside the blockchain.

NFTs are also theorized to be a money laundering scheme after a correlation between the passing of a law to crack-down on laundering and the introduction of Crypto currency a few months later...

NFTs? More like No Fucking Thanks

An NFT is not an image. It's a token saying that (in the context of this conversation) you purchased X image from Y user on Z date for N monies.

That token is generated by the same method as mining cryptocurrency: using computers to solve complex puzzles/codes.

As more coins (or tokens) get mined, the complexity of the puzzles go up, requiring more computers processing for longer times (i.e. more energy)

This has been going on for over a decade (Bitcoin was introduced in 2008).

As far as I know there is not an upper bound for how much this complexity scales.

The classic quote about crypto is "imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin."

Since you asked about the 'mining' -- that's basically the answer to the question of "how do we make it possible for anyone to add transactions, but without being able to spam them?" Computers play a sort of lottery: pick a number, add it to the 'block' of transactions you want to add to the record, and add the signature of the previous block of transactions. Put all that through a "hash function" (essentially a sort of random-number function), and if the result comes out with a bunch of zeroes on the front -- congratulations, you win! The block of transactions gets added to the ledger ("blockchain"), and you get a few bitcoins for your trouble. If it doesn't, pick another number and try again. Back in the day, basically anyone could do this with a spare laptop or whatever, but economies of scale are a thing, and so nowadays there's warehouses full of GPUs and ASICs using up more electricity than the country of Ireland.

An NFT is basically a special entry in a blockchain (thus incurring the use of those warehouses), but instead of saying 'Alice sends 10 bitcoins to Bob', the transaction record says 'Alice sends this image (or whatever) to Bob'. Except, because it's important to not take up too much space on the blockchain, the image itself isn't stored in the chain, it's usually just the URL to the image, so Bob had better hope that other website doesn't go down. Also, Alice isn't transferring the copyright to Bob, and in fact may not even own the copyright to the image herself, so it's not like Bob can earn any royalties on the image or anything. The only way for him to make money is to sell the NFT to someone else for more, but that only goes so far.

If all of this sounds stupid to you...yes. Yes it is. You're not missing anything, it really is just that stupid, and like Defcon7 said, it's probably all a big money-laundering shell game.