[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.