Hey, Im Julin and this is FutureNow. Imaginea world in which beings are buying and selling digital artistry, digital trading posters, and evendigital moor. Well, youre already living in it, all of that and more is being done with NFTs.Youre either in the know and have been into NFTs for months or even times, or youve suddenlynoticed that everyones talking about them, or you have no idea what Im talking about.If youre in that last camp youre gonna want to stick around because youre going to behearing a lot more about NFTs in the near future. Okay so what does NFT even planned? It stands forNon-Fungible Token , not as catchy. Non-fungible implies something that has a unique value attributedto it, as opposed to something fungible. In most cases, a dollar bill is fungible, because if Ihave a dollar and you have a dollar and we sell, we both still have a dollar that is just asvaluable. I said in most cases, because some money is collectible and rare, at which point it becomesnon-fungible.Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are perhaps even more fungible because unlike physicalmoney, a Bitcoin cant become a collectible. A dollar bill could have some sort of misprint orbe from a specific year that is highly valuable and collectible, but a Bitcoin is just some datain a computer and it will always be worth just as much as another Bitcoin. Thats fungibility.Morecommon examples of non-fungible items are things like a rare Pokmon card, the year it was stirred, whether or not its holographic, the condition its in, and even previous illustrious owners areall important factors in the value of the card. Okay so thats what the non-fungible partmeans, but whats a sign? That segment just means that it represents some sort of value.Poker chippings are a great example of a token, you can turn them in at a casino forcash. The same repairs for endowment posters and even cryptocurrencies themselves likeBitcoin, and like Bitcoin, NFTs are digital.So an NFT is a digital itemthat is unique and maintains quality that you can exchange with somebody else for coin. Likewise like Bitcoin, NFTs are bought and soldon the blockchain, although on the Ethereum blockchain. Youve probably heard of blockchaintechnology and its decentralized structure. The blockchain is essentially a digital record thatkeeps a record of every transaction that is made and that information is held on multiple computersacross a system of computers, rather than in one single place. And because all this information isviewable publicly by anyone and its not possible to change it, it acquires fraud nearly impossible.You know that the NFT youre buying is authentic, unlike say a Pokmon card that is much moredifficult to verify and easier to create bullshits of. Sure you can send it off to an expert thirdparty, but that takes a lot more time and fund. Meanwhile this verification isdone in seconds on the blockchain. So you may be thinking that digital assets arenta novel thing, heck you definitely previously own some! Most video games these days are chock fullof the stuff, most famously in the form of skins, like in Fortnite.Skins are basically appearancechanges for your reputation that you can buy in the game. Similarly activities like Runescapelet you buy cosmetic components and super uncommon items that are worth a lot in video games. Othercommon digital assets are concert tickets. You buy them on Ticketmaster and pay some exorbitantconvenience fees. But you cant sell those tickets outside of Ticketmaster. And similarly you cantbuy and sell Fortnite barks with other participates outside of video games and you dont ever really ownthem, the game makes could remove them at any point. These are all centralized interactionscontrolled by these individual programmes. And in fact one of the first, and probablymost famous implementations of NFTs was a game called CryptoKitties. The premiseof the game is pretty simple, you can buy, sell, and breed virtual “cat-o-nine-tails” that comein all sorts of different illusions. Each feline is an NFT on the blockchain, meaningeven video games developers cant take out or conversion your CryptoKitty once you have it.Thereare about 4 billion possible types of “cat-o-nine-tails” thanks to the multitude of mannerisms that were coded intothem, or cattributes as they call them. Some are rarer and more coveted than others. Honestlyit reminds me a lot of when I dallied Neopets. In Neopets, there were paintbrushes you could buyin the game employing Neopoints, the in-game currency, that would change the appearing of your Neopet.Some were fairly basic, like a blue paintbrush that extended for a few thousands neopoints, butothers are an integral part of the most expensive and rare entries in video games like the Stealthy paintbrushwhich could go for millions of Neopoints.Well, in the CryptoKitties life, some ofthese felines have sold for over $100,000. Thats real money , not game money. It seemstotally wild that what is essentially a digital register of an image of a charming cat can be soldfor that much money, or even any coin at all. Were used to being able to copy any digitalfiles we want and share them with friends. If I have an image on my computer and Iwant to send it to a friend, I can simply make share on the document and Airdrop it to a friendor text it to them or share it through Google Drive or Dropbox or something. But in all of thosesituations, I still have my transcript on my computer. With CryptoKitties and other NFTs, if you givesomeone else your NFT, you no longer have it. Sure, you can send someone theimage of the feline, if you want, but what actually demonstrates ownership is the codebehind that persona that is only on the blockchain.And so NFTs have become a way to create scarcityout of digital goods, something that simply didnt exist before. Its what saw infringement such a massiveproblem for record labels and movie business. Before the internet, if you bought a hard copyof an book or a movie it was much harder to make a copy and give it to a friend. If you commit afriend your prized follow of Princess Bride on VHS, they now had it and you didnt.Obviously, these days you can just send someone an MP4 file of the movie oreven a link to stream it online somewhere. This digital dearth has alloweddigital enters, NFTs, to necessitate actually high prices just like Pokmon cards, Beanie Babies, and other physical collectibles.And perhaps my favorite employ of NFTs is for artiststhat can create digital art or photographs and sell them as NFTs online as unique originals justas they might sell at a real-world art gallery. But even more awesome is that the codeof NFTs and the facts of the case that every marketing is recorded on the blockchain, lets craftsmen toset a royalty fee. This necessitates an craftsman can sell their digital art for $200 to someone and specified a10% royalty fee and if that person turns around and resells it for $400 to someone else, theoriginal creator still impels $40 on that sale. This kind of thing is very difficult to replicatein real life. An creator may sell an original decorate for a duet hundred bucks when theyrestarting out and it could abruptly become a highly valuable work of art in the future, selling forhundreds of thousands of dollars that the original craftsman will never get a penny of.In this wayNFTs can create a passive income for artists. And NFTs can basically be any kind of file, a video, a photo, a piece of music, whatever. You can check some of these out for yourself ormake your own NFTs on marketplaces like OpenSea and Rarible, where they are bought and sold usingEther, the reputation for the Ethereum cryptocoin. A game called Decentraland, which looks a lot likeMinecraft, sort of integrates the art and game uses, giving tribes buy and selldigital plots of land, lives, and other items, and expose the NFTsthey buy elsewhere in these digital residences. Right now all this nonsense seems pretty niche andsuper weird and hard to understand for new people getting into it.But I make as it ripens andthe technology is more developed itll become more accessible to mass-market shoppers, justas Bitcoin has, except I visualize NFTs have the advantage of being likened to collectibles andother real-world components parties previously buy, whereas most people are still unsure what exactly to dowith Bitcoin besides buy and sell it as if it were a stock. Personally, Im hesitant to actually payfor anything with Bitcoin because you might, say, buy a pizza with $20 merit of Bitcoin and thenext day Elon Musk makes a tweet and that $20 you wasted is now worth $40. Thats not going tohappen with a stable money like the dollar. What I think is really going to make NFTs abig deal is the inevitable arrival of good AR engineering. Currently VR is becoming reallypopular through cheaper headsets like Oculus, but you cant precisely are walking with a VRheadset on.Companies like Apple have been working on bringing AR glass to purchasers for years andits very possible that in the next decade or so we will be able to walk around with glassesthat display information and objects overlayed in the real world. Suddenly, you can placeNFT art in your actual residence or maybe even wear NFT clothing around that other peoplewith AR glass can be found in. If AR becomes as pervasive as smartphones, AR components you buy willbe just as valuable as real-world entries, because you no longer have to show people the cool artyou bought exerting your computer or phone. Theres a whole lot more to NFTs than some of the morebasic trash that you may start realise at first, like Logan Paul creating his own collectible NFTs.Thats not very exciting. Another NFT use you may have heard of recently are NBA Top Shots, which is basically the NBA selling collectible foreground videos of moments in NBA recreations, like LeBron shooting a game-winning 3 cursor. NBA Top Shots has so far been generatedover $31 million in sales.Wild. Regrettably, just like Bitcoin, theres a bitof a light place to NFTs that I think is important to mention and that people should be aware ofbecause, in my opinion, it threatens the viability of the whole thing. Currently, mostly anythingthat happens on the blockchain is massively wasteful of electricity, which worldwideis still largely produced via fossil fuel. I feel like I dont need to explain in this videothat burning fossil fuel like coal and natural gas is the main cause of the world-threateningclimate change we seem not to think enough about.I know that Ive likely once angered a cluster ofcrypto devotees that are currently in the comments of this video. Happening of the matter is I actuallyreally like the idea of cryptocurrencies, I even own some Dogecoin for the memes, infact initially I was going to make a video about Dogecoin but halfway through writing thescript both MKBHD and Graham Stephan made videos and it seemed unnecessary for me to do so too.Anyway, the point is that while cryptocurrencies and NFTs seem like really awesome theories, itsundeniable that their underlying infrastructure is incredibly power intensiveand harmful to the environment.For those of you who arent aware, the blockchainis built on the principle of proof of work. Every time someone buys or sells NFTs or acryptocurrency or every time a brand-new NFT or coin is created, known as minting, it setsoff a bond of wars for verification. Explaining exactly how this works is beyond thescope of this video, but virtually computers various regions of the world, known as miners, compete tosolve a complicated math difficulty. Once they solve it properly, theyre able to verify it againsta certain placed of conditions it needs to meet. Then the miner programmes this to the networkand others can also has confirmed that the count is correct. Hence, proof of work. This systemmakes it nearly impossible for someone to add a fraudulent transaction to the blockchain, because it would take an incredible sum of computational make that is not only unfeasible, but likewise exactly not worth any potential reward. This organisation runs really well to keep NFT andcryptocurrency transactions and minting ensure, but doing that computational work to solve themath difficulties takes a ton of computer power, which helps a ton of energy, producedby a ton of fossil fuels, that apply a ton of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere andspeed up the disasters of climate change.So, how much electricity is being used when a newNFT is created, bought, or sold? Well, it goes, but as of the writing of this video, an averagesingle transaction on the Ethereum blockchain uses up 48 kWh of power. Thats more dominance thanthe average US household downs in a entire era. And each NFT can lead to dozens of thesetransactions. Minting the NFT, entreat on the NFT, even canceling your offer, and of course the sales.Ive settle some joins in the description to folks who have done the math on all of these thingsif youre interested in looking into it further. Its is of the view that the median NFT artist isusing 3 MWh of influence per year, exhausting approximately 2 tons of CO2, equivalent to 4 transatlanticflights or about a third of the dominance being used by an American household over an entire year.If youre an NFT artist or collector, you can actually check the environmental costs of aparticular piece apply the website cryptoart.wtf.It seems there are some alterations that can bemade going forward to significantly reduce this power consumption and I hope they areimplemented, as currently it just seems wholly ridiculous to be adding so much carboninto the air to buy and sell digital art. Let me know in the comments what youthink about NFTs. Do you own any? Are you interesting to inducing or buyingsome? What are your thoughts on the environmental angle? Ill see you in thecomments and I’ll told you in the future ..
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