How environmentally friendly is NFT mining?

A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unit of non-transferable data stored in a blockchain, a type of digital ledger. Although NFT ledgers claim to provide official certificates or proof of ownership, the legal rights granted by NFTs can be ambiguous. In other words, an NFT is a token that can be used to represent ownership of a unique item. Art, collectibles, and even real estate can be tokenized. But you can only have one official owner at a time, and the Ethereum blockchain protects it. You cannot change the ownership details or create a new NFT.

Thus NFT mining is, in a nutshell, the process of creating a new non-fungible token on the NEO blockchain. These tokens can be used as proof of ownership.

NFT mining and proof of work

The blockchain database uses a linear chain of blocks to store data. Each block has an encryption feature that retrieves information from the block that precedes the block, allowing you to validate the chain of transactions.

Therefore, if someone invests in an NFT or buys it, sells it to someone else, and then sells it to someone else, the blockchain can track all those transactions. This allows the original work of art to be traced back to its creator, even if it is digital. JPGs and animated GIFs alone, even if others have copies on their phones or computers, only one original has been proven to have been sold by the author. It’s all working, but the blockchain consumes a fair amount of energy.

To protect environment while mining

When mining on proof of work, you have spend considerable amount on sourcing expensive equipment. Thanks to amount of calculations involved, the validation cannot be completed with a regular computer. However, if the expensive equipment, that consumes heavy amount of electricity, is removed from the equation, environment can be protected when mining.

Comparison of VMining with Ethereum

Ethereum blockchain is used by most NFTs to set up and validate NFTs uses proof of work. Ethereum miners compete with other Ethereum miners by solving crypto puzzles using a computer. As a result, their computers generate various numbers to guess the answer to the riddle as soon as possible.

The first Ethereum miner who gets the correct answer wins and adds the block to the blockchain. The problem is that winning is not easy. It’s very competitive, and a computer system fast enough to compete for those blocks costs about $ 100,000. Miners were trying to produce more than 170 trillion new blocks per second by mid-April 2021.

It is challenging to maintain profitability because this process uses 1 ton of electricity, and the miner pays for a lot of electricity. And there are many competing computers to perform calculations at the fastest speed, which consumes a lot of power to solve meaningless crypto puzzles, and only one of those computers is the most. You will get the correct answer quickly. All the energy used by the other computers of these miners that participated in the contest was utterly wasted.

Fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, oil), nuclear energy, and renewable energy sources are the three main energy types used for power generation. Steam turbines generate most electricity from fossil fuels, nuclear power, biomass, geothermal and solar heat.

As a result, blockchain is not environmentally friendly as it wastes power. According to the same NYT article, creating a typical NFT is equivalent to driving 500 miles on a standard petrol car. According to some studies, blockchain mining consumes more power than the whole country! This underlines why it is important to switch to blockchain that go friendly on environment.

Summing up

NFTs and their cryptocurrency cousins ​​share one negative feature: both consume energy. But in a world where most energy production still comes from fossil fuels, critics argue that cryptocurrencies and NFTs will continue to contribute to global warming unless immediate action is taken.

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