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Comment by srfilipek | Hacker News Reader

> before landing at Nori, a company addressing climate change with blockchain where he still works

Oh come on...

It's for buying and selling carbon offsets. Which in the grand scheme of "crypto for X" is not bad, since it's at least a thing that's actually exchanged in an existing market.

Farmers can sell their carbon credits to fund things that need to happen on their farm, to businesses that need to purchase carbon offsets because they're producing more than they should be.

Could it be done without crypto? Almost certainly. But I think the article's flyby description gives the thing room to sound much sillier than it really is.

> Could it be done without crypto? Almost certainly. But I think the article's flyby description gives the thing room to sound much sillier than it really is.

The particular irony here is that blockchains are a giant waste of energy compared to non-blockchain approaches, so of all the things to say “Do X with blockchain” about, “Reduce carbon emissions” is an odd choice.

If it were me I’d think you’d want to put I extra effort to not have a blockchain based solution, but I have a feeling the idea cane about from “what can we do with a blockchain” rather than “what is the best solution to this problem?”

So I am on record around here as kinda thinking that cryptocurrency people are worse than coal-rollers with the cavalier garbage they do to our planet, but it's worth pointing out that a "blockchain" need not do that--cryptocurrency needs to do that because it has to be "hard" to create some kind of phantom scarcity and therefore rarity and therefore perceived value for the Ponzi schemers at the top of them to sell to the next sucker in line.

Blockchain multi-party verification can be fairly fast when you take out the grift. Well, that grift. The buzzword-solution-searching-for-a-problem grift, as you note, is still very much in play.

> The particular irony here is that blockchains are a giant waste of energy compared to non-blockchain approaches

Not all blockchains are proof-of-work. Almost all modern implementations (particularly for federated blockchains like OPs) use more power-efficient consensus algorithms.

(I don't have an opinion on whether blockchains are the best solution to their problem, but a decentralized marketplace for carbon offsets does sound compelling.)

That's true. I did quickly skim their website, figuring if they were doing a particular efficient blockchain that it would be the kind of thing they'd want to brag about. Didn't see anything, but also didn't go digging into the whitepaper.

Why does the marketplace need to be decentralized? The NYSE is centralized, but that doesn't seem to inhibit trading. The EU has a carbon cap and trade system (ETS) and while there is a fair bit to criticize about it, I don't think its centralized nature is one.

Your question is very valid and good.

i think having it be decentralized is a good way to build trust and transparency. It also protects one against the marketplace-operator acting against the interests of or favoring any one party.

Consider how Amazon now exploits its marketplace for its own benefit by analyzing which products are doing well and making their own versions of these products. So, there is potential for the marketplace-operator to become non-neutral.

I'm not sure how the NYSE started, but i suspect there are financial regulations governing its operations. These regulations take time to get established, and so in new fields having a decentralized marketplace that can guarantee neutrality (collectively) of the operators feels worthwhile.

Does that make sense? i'm kinda on the fence myself, and trying to present the argument in-favor.

Okay, but you'd still have to compare it with the scheme used by certificate transparency, which also builds a public, verifiable log. I'd be pretty confident in an organization that does it that way.

That seems reasonable, but in a decentralized market don't we lose the ability to halt trading[1]?

1: https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answerstradinghalthtm.html

ooh that's a good question. I'd think of that on two levels:

1. a meta-level: all designs of systems have tradeoffs. There is no perfect system. So, by decentralizing we may have to tradeoff the ability to halt trading, in exchange for getting more openness, transparency and neutrality of the marketplace or its operators.

2. specific design: i think there may be ways of achieving this even in a decentralized fashion.

Many use-cases of smart-contracts (i.e. a program run in a blockchain transaction) have envisioned the need for having an "oracle" or external data source. For example, flight-delay insurance contracts (e.g. on etherisc.com) that payout in case of a flight delay would need to get information from some flight-info APIs. To serve this need, there are projects for building decentralized-oracles (e.g. https://chain.link).

Similarly, one can imagine the SEC creates an oracle through a system like ChainLink. This oracle has an api that indicates whether some asset's trading status is ON or OFF. Smart-contracts running the marketplace/exchange on the blockchain have code that reaches out to the SEC oracle before proceeding with a transaction to exchange or sell some asset (i'm describing this synchronously, but it could be done asynchronously).

Oh good, we replaced proof of work with a proof of stake system rife with conflicts of interest and unknown incentives. That’ll go well.

I know a guy who runs something similar, a marketplace where people can buy syndication rights (say, you run a rural TV station and want to buy rights to broadcast _Saved By the Bell_ or something). The whole thing is based on blockchain. It's doing extremely well, contracts and negotiations that used to take weeks can now be done in seconds.

There's no cryptocurrency angle, which I believe means that there's no gross energy expenditure, although I'm not an expert and never asked.

I'm honestly curious if blockchain alone improved their process that much. Could it be they had crappy processes that got overhauled with the blockchain adoption?

This is probably the case. I'm betting the company built a marketplace that allows stations to purchase distribution rights directly for a fixed price, as opposed to needing to call some salesperson and deal with weeks of verbal negotiation.

Those kind of systems have existed for awhile. Plenty of media is already licensed that way. No blockchain necessary.

How exactly does a blockchain help with those transactions?

Hype.

can you please share the name of this marketplace?

https://movierightsexchange.com

The TLS certificate is invalid and the site is backed by http://mrxtest-dev.us-east-1.elasticbeanstalk.com/catalog/ which is a fake/demo page and is claimed to be UI mockup by this person: https://www.karenchristoph.com/media-rights-exchange

Highly doubtful that they're "doing extremely well" when there's no functioning business.

another useless use of 'crypto'. this is better handled with traditional government registration/notary/title that kind of thing.

> Could it be done without crypto? Almost certainly.

It is being done without crypto!

The only value crypto brings is a way to advertise 'proof' of purchase of offsets to the public, IOW for marketing purposes.

I imagine this company exists solely to trap VCs and harvest their organs.

How can you not get VC money when you use two of most hyped up buzz-phrases going around?

But they are still missing machine learning and AR in the business plan...

They're saving that up for the next round of funding.

I mean, I am starting a company that's using AR and machine learning to enable remote medical diagnostics for climate change, all on the blockchain, for rural America and the third world. But on the other hand, I'm not. Unless you're investing. In which case I am.

Now I want to try this. I'll start my brainstorming session by watching this:

https://youtu.be/GyV_UG60dD4

I can make my website here:

http://tiffzhang.com/startup/

Now, what am I missing?

Elaborate?

how do you fix climate change with fucking blockchain?

http://doyouneedablockchain.com/

Meta, but the text on that page renders awfully. Seems they're scaling the elements by 1.64297 instead of just setting a font-size?!

Result is incredibly fuzzy https://lol768.com/i/AmpAbuseDormMendez

The use of proof-of-waste for cryptocurrency, which allows people to get rich by consuming extremely large amounts of electricity, is one of the worst inventions for the environment since CFCs and tetraethyl lead.

It's sad to see YT community members being so ill informed. Proof-of-Stake is coming in leading blockchains such as Ethereum, Polkadot, Cosmos, etc. This is changing. It's a new technology it takes time to improve. Anyway, do your homework before commenting on things you don't understand.

I don't see how that negates what the parent said. Something better is coming, so what was already done isn't bad?

Well first of all, blockchain technology has become so overhyped that its bound to draw scoffs even if the business case were legitimate. "Blockchain" anything almost sounds like a joke at first pass these days.

But in this specific instance, it is even more ridiculous as one of the biggest concerns surrounding blockchain technology is that it is insanely inefficient in terms of energy usage, and concerns have been raised about how widespread usage of blockchain technology could exacerbate climate change.

> Proof-of-Stake is coming

There have been so many proposed algorithms on this idea over the past years, yet here we are, still waiting. For now, it's either vaporware or it has a security flaw.

Or, like traditional proof-of-work mining has become, it will coalesce into the very thing it was meant to remove: control by a few powerful and centralized authorities.

Regardless, blockchain is not going to help solve climate change. A distributed carbon credit market is not going to solve climate change.

I want proof-of-stake to work. I really do. But I just don't believe it can anymore...

> There have been so many proposed algorithms on this idea over the past years, yet here we are, still waiting. For now, it's either vaporware or it has a security flaw.

There are several proof of stake networks running right now. Care to elaborate on the security flaws?

I’m no native English speaker, but does “addressing” strictly have to mean fixing/solving something?

Can it be employed to mean the opposite? As in, “addressing” things for the worse?

"Addressing a problem" is viewed the same way as fixing or attempting to fix a problem. I've not heard it used to imply making a problem worse.

The word “Addressing” has a connotation in this usage context that the subject is focusing their attention on what they see as broken or deficient. The trick is that it’s relative to the subject or speaker’s point of view.

To address a problem is about intent rather than action. Usually it's an acknowledgement that a problem exists and a potential solution to that problem. You don't have to actually act on the problem or solve it just present a possible solution.

For example I could address climate change with blockchain by suggesting that people don't use bitcoin. Even if I continue to use bitcoin this could be considered addressing the problem.

Every time I hear “fixing X with blockchain” it gets dumber and dumber.

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