[rspeer]

I can't stand the proliferation of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies in a world where people don't have to pay for the externalities of the energy they use.

Let me know when there's a cryptocurrency based on proof-of-carbon-sequestration or something.

[DennisP]

I'm working a coin minted for proof of carbon sequestration. It'd be implemented as a ledger on Ethereum (which is currently PoW but moving to proof of stake). Pay ether to a smart contract, it forwards the ether to approved organizations doing sequestration, and you get new minted coins.

A couple weeks ago I presented the idea at MIT's Solve conference, and I've got a writeup at MIT's ClimateColab that made finalist this year.

http://climatecolab.org/contests/2016/shifting-behavior-for-...

http://solvecolab.mit.edu/challenges/2016/fuel-carbon-price

(The Solve writeup is pretty old, the Colab is recent but I've done more thinking about the minting schedule since then and made some changes.)

[rspeer]

Neat.

Aside from the fact that it's built on a bug-prone foundation (Ethereum), the idea at least gives me some hope that cryptocurrencies don't have to have a negative impact.

[DennisP]

Cool :)

As for Ethereum, so far the bugs in the underlying platform have been minor; right now they're dealing with DoS attacks resulting from mispriced opcodes but that's getting fixed. Most issues have been due to poorly-written smart contracts rather than the platform. That's not entirely the fault of the contract authors; it's taking some time to figure out the attacks and best practices.

I'm not planning to launch in the near future anyway, because Ethereum is going through some major changes next year for scalability, and contracts will need to be coded differently to take advantage of that. In the meantime I've gotten a job doing Ethereum app work, so I should be reasonably well-prepared to get the technical side of things right.

I think the bigger challenge is making sure the climate action is actually effective. Something I learned from people at the MIT conference is that while carbon offsets are readily available in the voluntary market, even the certified offsets are often very poor quality, or even outright scams.

Also I'd like to figure out a governance system that doesn't rely on central administration, but that may not be workable; a more democratic system could end up funding charismatic projects that don't actually do much good. I've got some ideas though.

[DINKDINK]

>I can't stand the proliferation of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies in a world where people don't have to pay for the externalities of the energy they use.

Not a fare comparison; all of visa/mc's servers have externalities, all of the money trucks driving around physically collecting cash have carbon externalities, building ATMs and printing plastic credit cards have carbon externalities, building banks and running them have carbon externalities.

You have to compare the relative carbon impact. Cryptocurrency miners obviate all of those things.

[rspeer]

Have you compared the relative carbon impact? You're making it sound like the things you're "obviating" are on at all the same scale.

Visa et al. are incredibly efficient compared to Bitcoin. I heard a Bitcoin advocate point out that all it would take to make Bitcoin have enough throughput that everyone could use it is 1% of the power in the entire world.

[nickik]

That is the case for Bitcoin but not for all blockchains, particularly prove of stake systems. BitShares for example has an extremely efficient system.

The tradeoff is that the 'peer' need to be relatively high performance servers (just normal commodity servers, nothing special).

Its impossible to achieve with the concept of everybody running their own nodes on a laptop.

In BitShares the Shareholders (people who own BitShares) can vote on either improving the performance and decreasing the distribution or the other way around.

So you are still gone be somewhat less efficient compared to Mastercard but you can achieve the same the scalability with a reasonable amount of extra power usage.

[wyager]

Good luck getting anything like that into a cryptosystem.

Do you actually understand the utility of proof-of-work? Whenever someone proposes something silly like "proof of recycling" or "proof of solar power" I can't imagine they do.

[rspeer]

I understand the negative utility of proof-of-work. It takes useful resources and turns them into nothing.

I didn't claim it would be straightforward to make a cryptosystem whose mining process causes a benefit instead of a harm. I didn't claim I had such an idea. But let's rank some options in order of goodness:

1. Figure out a cryptocurrency with a real-world benefit

2. Don't use cryptocurrencies

3. Use cryptocurrencies

You may have chosen the worst option. I'm content with option #2.

[wyager]

> I didn't claim I had such an idea

Hint: it's impossible.

But regardless, I seriously doubt that Bitcoin mining actually has negative utility even after taking into account any negative externalities introduced by the relatively small electricity use from mining. My suspicion is it's more or less negligible compared to manufacturing or transportation.