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Comment by WithinReason | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if you could have some kind of (cypto?)currency that has its price backed by 1 ton of carbon captured. You can get one by paying the market price for it, or by capturing 1 ton of carbon. So if you want to offset your carbon footprint you can just go to a CarbonCoin marketplace and buy the appropriate amount of CarbonCoins. Could the crypto craze be exploited to save the environment?

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This is a major plot point in Ministry for the Future, pretty much exactly how you describe. Great book, and it's a good idea that I think has some real-world support from economists and others. Here's a site about the idea: https://globalcarbonreward.org/

Almost this exact thing launched in the last couple of weeks - https://klimadao.finance/

In a podcast, I heard one of the founders describe it as a first step at creating a 'non-extractive' economic system.

What does it mean to be "backed by" carbon captured?

Talk of backing a currency traditionally refers to some mechanism that guarantees people will continue to value it in the future:

- a currency is "backed by gold" if it is exchangeable for hunks of metal by whoever holds some of it (the future value of those hunks being taken as granted)

- a currency is backed by a government if that government guarantees that the currency will remain sufficiently scarce and that it will be a/the means of paying taxes due to that government.

In this case, though, you just mean that a coin is minted each time a ton of co2 is sequestered, right? And you would need some other mechanism to generate demand for the coins?

> In this case, though, you just mean that a coin is minted each time a ton of co2 is sequestered, right? And you would need some other mechanism to generate demand for the coins?

Exactly.

See https://www.gwern.net/CO2-Coin

The economical scheme makes a lot of sense, but it seems like the practically hard part would be to prove to the world that carbon capture has actually occurred. I don't see how blockchains would help there.

The rest is just bookkeeping, which can happen on any kind of ledger, distributed or otherwise.

good idea but also sounds like it could be gamed. eventually people will be printing themselves carbon dollars for carbon they could have emitted, but didn't

Sort of related but there was a great episode on American greed about exploiting the RIM or RIN marketplace by simply making up contract numbers

Rulesets more complicated than tictactoe have edge cases, holes, exploits.

That's why market design is important.

Open markets require boring stuff like properly aligned incentives, contract law, property rights, transparency and auditing, fair & impartial courts, right to appeal, and so forth. Your basic sanity checks.

Maintaining and protecting a balance is never easy. We can only hope to minimize cheating.

All the alternatives are much worse. The popular criticism of market failures are often because the obvious safe guards were eliminated or ignored.

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