In most jurisdictions in the USA renewable energy generators are registered and audited by a third party, (like mrets.org where I work). Anomalies with generation data can be compared directly with data from the grid operators. Utilities will also require these commercial operations to have a "commercial energy meter" which are very expensive.

Apparently was enough to dupe Woz and get this to the front page of HN. Another blockchain success story.

The potential for fraud which may be tried in civil courts is not a slam-dunk argument for mutability.

There's plenty of ways of proving that these values were legitimate, but they're nothing to do with the blockchain element, that's the investigation side. What the blockchain element does is say, "X was definitely recorded by Y at T". It's a tool in the box. It's not the box.

You would need control of 51% of the nodes to submit a block with arbitrary data and override consensus. You can’t just add any hash to a block and add it to the network. In order to be the miner to add the next block, you have to win a competition to find a correct hash that solves a difficult math problem. Since there is no way to start with a resulting hash and work backwards to figure out what piece of data gave that hash, the Bitcoin protocol uses this feature to create its difficult math problem. The math problem stipulates that the first miner to produce a hash with a certain amount of leading 0s will be the winner of that block and be able to add it to the network.

> Blockchain doesn't provide irrefutable evidence of anything except that the record wasn't tampered with after the fact

> (and it's a very expensive and wasteful way to do so)

No it isn't. You're confusing blockchain (the algorithm) with Proof-of-Work (a method for providing decentralized consensus).

> Blockchain does nothing to verify the correctness of the data it holds, only its consistency with the history.

Correct. Nor does any other data structure. Blockchain is literally just a data structure, nothing more.

That's a significantly different attack, with different economics. It involved selling electricity instead of just buying less of it, and profiting from government subsidies. Clearly that can work if the subsidies are high enough.

We do that because our job in general is to ignore current practical limitations. The line between practical and impractical changes based on what we make; the job is all about creating solutions that either make a goal more practical, or improving the efficiency of a standing process.

This isn't just a problem with software engineers, but most engineering disciplines. It's impractical to transport logs hundreds of miles for processing, until we create a system that can do it efficiently. It's impractical to keep detailed records of billions of transactions, until we set up a database and reporting infrastructure that can handle that load.