I'm hoping we can do our NFT trading on non-PoW chains within the next couple years. This should reduce the environmental impact to that of baseball cards.
These can trivially be copied (double spent), which means they're just as scarce as any digital data. Valueless without some significant proof of violence and hyper censorship ability enforcing copyright protection.
The primary revolution of bitcoin was the invention of self enforcing digital scarcity.
Is there something that you can only do via the token? Are there special events or access for token holders? I could see something like that being independently valuable, and interesting.
If you want to sell it to someone else, you sign a message saying you give it to them and so on, forming a "chain" of signed transactions.
But like a painting that can be copied, people decide to disproportionately value the first one...just because.
The ownership record in a public blockchain can't be corrupted.
I thought DRM already invented that.
It’s probably a bad idea for other reasons, but it’s one way to reduce the environmental impact of PoW
There is no such thing as "excess power" for crytomining. Even if there was then that energy could just be stored using batteries or gravity storage or something, or it could be sold to neighbouring energy users, or it could be used in the grid and other more polluting sources could be scaled down instead.
I was thinking the idea seemed to have some validity.. For ex: storage of solar/wind-powered is critical and the current inefficiencies and batteries rely on lithium and alternatives are still in research.(http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#moving-storage) ..
so in theory there's a system that can be built around the excess energy(of renewable systems) + crypto mining as a incentive for taking up renewable energy setups.(Of course this cannot convert the mined stuff back to energy so it's a one-way stuff at best and has it's own cons and pros).
Too much power is usually handled in the generation side by incentivize producers to scale back generation or even paying to have them take a plant offline.
For a bitcoin mining operation, I suspect it would not be profitable to have all that equipment sit idle except when there is an oversupply of electricity.
For example, drop some solar panels and miners in the middle of the desert and immediately start generating profit. Use the profit to deploy more solar panels and build out transmission lines. You can do this piecemeal at low initial investment to feel out an energy source without committing billions of dollars to build out.
I'm not aware of anyone who's done major operations like this, but with the profitability of mining so absurdly high right now plus scrutiny on using dirty energy sources, I wouldn't be surprised if it starts. Access to mining ASICs is likely the key bottleneck.
This is the story used to explain part of the reason so much mining is in China. They built out a ton of hydroelectric dams over the decades that have been underutilized due to lack of infrastructure. Miners came in for the unused electricity and brought in a ton of money to the area.