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Comment by qbasic_forever | Hacker News Reader

Somebody needs to invent a coin that works on proof-of-carbon-emission-reductions, or proof-of-global-poverty-reduction and do some real good for the world.

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> proof-of-carbon-emission-reductions

That one is fun! First, I credibly claim to have plans to release ridiculous quantities of CO2, and then you negotiate with me to convince me not to. Then we can split the coins.

It’s like proof of stake - you have to prove you have a track record of producing the emissions.

Burn tires for a year then reap the reductions the next.

Sure - that’s pretty much how it works. If you own and can defend a jurisdiction where you can do that, other people will likely pay or trade things with you to stop.

A cheaper way to deal with you is to embargo/tariff your exports, until you come back to the negotiating table, hat in hand.

Not sure that always works.

Hang on, Fidel Castro is on the other line.

That was a life-or-death political issue for the communist party of Cuba (USSR subsidies also mitigated some of the damage the embargo caused). This is just a question of money - which is far more tractable.

Seems like there are some pretty large blocs who won’t embargo you these days.

This is being done right now in the Amazon without blockchain. First you start logging a lot more trees. Then the world is outraged at how many trees you cut, and you begrundgingly go to the negotiation table to figure out the carbon subsidies you're going to get in exchange for not cutting those trees. But wouldn't you know, estimates of how many trees you're able to not cut per year are based on how many trees you just cut so you get way more than you would've in the first place.

Exchanging money for not doing things is fun.

Sounds like the classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket on a global scale.

That’s how the current carbon offset credit system works.

That’s actually pretty simple if you can live with centralization ... just certify CO2 offsets for example for each coin purchased. Then again ... what’s the point of putting that on a blockchain?

> Then again ... what’s the point of putting that on a blockchain?

Marketing. :p

> That’s actually pretty simple if you can live with centralization ... just certify CO2 offsets for example for each coin purchased.

We have this today, but "just certify" does a lot of work here. It's really hard to certify CO2 offsets in many cases (e.g., it's tough to verify that the trees someone plants weren't going to be planted anyway or that they will live to their expected potential and not get burned down prematurely).

Whenever you plant a tree, do the following.

1. Take a picture of the tree

2. Burn the tree down.

3. Create NFT of the picture of the tree burning down.

4. Use the NFT of the picture of the tree to certify the CO2 offset.

Inspiration from: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56335948

I don't understand, the offset of a burnt tree is 0. I get that it's a joke, I just don't understand what the joke is.

Lets change the order of things then.

1. Take a picture of the tree

2. Create NFT of the picture of the tree.

3. Use the NFT of the picture of the tree to certify the CO2 offset.

4. Burn down the tree.

--------

Is it more obvious with this ordering? The NFT proves nothing. It doesn't matter when you burn (or otherwise damage) the tree. You have an NFT stating a carbon offset that is completely fake.

I'm just making fun of the idea that NFTs prove... anything useful... in these circumstances. Its the same thing as people who want to use blockchain to certify supply chains or whatever. The "Blockchain technology" doesn't do anything aside from provide marketing points.

> just certify CO2 offsets for example for each coin purchased

We have something like this in France. Energy providers (for example EDF, Electricité De France) must buy a certain number of CEE (Certificats d'Economie d'Energie, I think the concept is white certificates) every year, or face heavy fines (big enough that buying certificates is a big part of their activities).

As an example: let's say I want to change my window to have more isolation, which will reduce my energy consumption. This can produce a CEE, that I can "sell" to EDF, which will help financing the change.

I found a coin claiming to do this - tradeable carbon credits, where you could extinguish a coin to offset carbon. It seemed like it had no traction.

You could make carbon-neutral coin that automatically offsets its own emissions by buying and extinguishing carbon offsets for every transaction. Obviously this would be cost-prohibitive for Bitcoin, but seems practical for less energy-intensive cryptos. I’m surprised nobody has done this (at least, I didn’t find it by googling). I think you could make billions of dollars off this because of the current furor over environment impact of cryptos. And it would actually be good for the world.

This is one of the themes of Kim Stanley Robinson's "Ministry for the Future"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future

This defeats the purpose of disincentivizing adversaries who want to steal coins from other participants. The stake/spacetime/electricity isn't wasted; it is used to establish global consensus. You can't redirect those resources into "doing some real good in the world" the best you can do is to allocate resources directly to your good cause rather than trying to magically get the good done for free.

> The stake/spacetime/electricity isn't wasted; it is used to establish global consensus.

In the case of PoS or PoW it is spent to establish global consensus.

It’s certainly waste if there is no other productive work is done by the network that wouldn’t have been done without it.

> The stake/spacetime/electricity isn't wasted; it is used to establish global consensus.

I still would like everyone to understand how proof-of-work really works, I don't think many people do.

The current Bitcoin hash rate means that all those miners are currently calculating on the order of 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 hashes per second.

Of those, in Bitcoin only around 6 per hour have any actual effect. Six. Those are the ones that met the arbitrary target. The other 10^20 did not do any actual work, meaning that none of them did bring any miner, not even the same miner, the same chip, closer to the "answer". In that sense, they are wasted.

Instead, it is literally a lottery. The difficulty is adjusted such that if you try 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 random numbers per second, 6 per hour will randomly hit the target. It's more "raffling" that "mining".

I’m not sure I see what you’re saying. The “arbitrary target” is so high because of all the mining. If there were less miners, the difficult would decrease, and then it would be easier for a malicious party to find one of those 6 lottery tickets.

I am simply explaining how proof-of-work works.

It is correct that the difficulty is adjusted based on the hash rate. If mining power was halved, it would become twice as easy to hit the target. If a new ASIC would make calculating hashes twice as efficient, the network would make hitting the target twice as difficult, effectively counteracting the efficiency. The goal is to always have 6 successful calculations per hour on average.

I really like the characterization as a lottery, it is just luck. Your odds of winning each “next” are weighted by your ops/sec, but nothing better.

How about this: companies give out coins in exchange for useful labor contributions in the form of answering calls, stocking shelves, writing code...

That'll never work :/

Set up a coin such that every time it goes up, some amount of reserve is sold, and 100% of profits donated to carbon reduction projects. Give away free electric cars. Plant trees. Whatever.

Then hype up the coin. Make people bid it up endlessly just like they do other coins. Post lots of #moon #hodl crap on Twitter. Get the flock of sheep moving.

Sell hype, use the proceeds for CO2 reduction.

According to Bitcoiners Bitcoin is green, so you you could use the proceeds to buy Bitcoin.

https://bitcoinisgreen.org/

    "THE BITCOIN NETWORK FUNCTIONS AS A UNIQUE ENERGY BUYER THAT COULD ENABLE SOCIETY TO DEPLOY SUBSTANTIALLY MORE SOLAR AND WIND GENERATION CAPACITY. THIS DEPLOYMENT, ALONG WITH ENERGY STORAGE, AIMS TO FACILITATE THE TRANSITION TO A CLEANER AND MORE RESILIENT ELECTRICITY GRID.”

I used to get paid to write stuff like this.

I mean, personally, I do own some cryptocurrency right now, if it moons enough in the near future I would be very likely to use the proceeds to switch to an electric vehicle.

If it moons even higher I could move to a more energy-efficient apartment with double-paned glass and all.

A coal company executive installing double pane windows doesn’t make coal green.

Cryptocurrencies create a fictional kingdom that is being defended by an army of miners. The laws of the kingdom only apply inside the kingdom.

Folding@home and SETI@home and The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search already existed and could have had big nerds turn them into robot money somehow but naahhhhh. Of course not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_...

How do you cheaply and effectively verify that the real world work (sequestering carbon, fighting poverty) actually happened?

When the ultimate goal of zero emissions will be achieved, we will finally get a world where nobody is breathing :-D

A tree with a distributed ledger. The one who plants the most trees wins.

So, a Merkle tree.

Not sure what the "Rule 34" for crypto is, but:

https://www.regen.network/

A smart bike that prints coins based on the energy put into the bike.

i factory full of those bikes with motors to spin the wheels and gps spoofing

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