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Comment by Comevius | Hacker News Reader

Electricity works for blockchain technologies because you can't spoof the result of the algorithm, you have to do the work, which consumes a lot of energy. You can do the work more efficiently, but that has a limit, or you can switch to a different blockchain technology that uses less energy, but then you run into a different problem with supply and demand, and if you try to fix those you run into a different problem with scalability.

Carbon capture would not work as an incentive, because it can be spoofed. It's not something that you must absolutely do, you can just say that you did.

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Like I mentioned in the post - I'm still a noob here and don't pretend to know enough to support or refute what you're saying, but what you said certainly makes sense.

I can confidently say that it seems not-too-difficult to tweak certain assumptions about mining (e.g. have a central authority that can issue tokens in response to offline proof, like proof of capturing X amount of carbon). With that in place and assuming you now have $CARBONCOIN, you can leverage all of the existing financialization that exists within the crypto ecosystem and you have a functioning carbon capture marketplace having only implemented a fraction of it.

Like I said - I'm a noob and I'm trying to learn more to understand what the problems with stuff like would be. But I'm really interested in "what rules of crypto can you tweak to accomplish real things".

The decentralization is maybe the key purpoted advantage of blockchain. I don't think it's tremendously useful, but hey, it's what people cite as a major advantage.

If you're proposing switching to a centralized authority to determine carbon credits, well, we already have that: carbon tax credits for out existing financial system. Carboncoin already exists.

If you have to have a central authority, then you don't need crypto. The primary purpose of crypto's existence is decentralization. If you lose that, then you might as well just use an existing fiat currency.

The basis of blockchains is that you don't need to trust. You run the algorithm, you run it faster than everyone else and you got a coin to spend. It's all publicly, cryptographically verifiable. As long as everyone agrees on which blockchain is the real one nobody can take away your coin.

This trustlessness is an important selling point in a world where people don't trust each other, their institutions, their governments, especially after 2008 when it was clearly demonstrated that the financial institutions we depend on are being run like criminal organizations, to this day and with zero consequences for the criminals. So here comes technology to save the day.

Crypto economies can exist because blockchain technology eliminates the double spending problem. The problem of course is that although blockchains can restrict people from spending their coin twice, they can't restrict people from committing the rest of the crimes, including scamming, social engineering, insider trading, pumping and dumping and other market manipulations. Every crime in the book, since crypto economies are not meant to be regulated. Outright replacing the blockchain with a different one also happened to Ethereum. The perpetrators range from lone social engineers to companies like a16z doing white-collar crime on an industrial scale. Trustlessness basically devolves into a bigger fish eats the smaller one system, and Ponzi schemes in which people are left holding useless crypto assets. It's all about stealing USD from bigger fools. Bonus points if you manage to convince them to never sell their cryptocurrency back, which is why crypto is being pushed as an utopia, as a solution to everything. It's the future of selling art (NFT) and hosting websites (Web 3.0), even though it is obvious that blockchain technology is not especially suitable for any of that. It can only really eliminate the double spending problem.

Unfortunately trust, and more importantly oversight will always be required. You can't avoid it as long as there are humans involved. We have to fix our institutions instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with them, most of our problems can be accounted to industries and interest groups manipulating the system to their own benefit, more usually than not by hindering regulatory effort.

If I have a central authority, why would I not just keep all my transactions in a regular database? It would be much cheaper and many times more efficient.

> Carbon capture would not work as an incentive

The incentive behind bitcoin is always economics. Miners will use the cheapest energy possible as it will produce the most profit. The cheapest energy is the surplus green energy that solar produces during the day. It can't be used by industry and it can't be used by residential during the evening.

Bitcoin will self regulate onto the cheapest energy because of its economics and the cheapest energy is and will always be renewables.

The share of renewables is only around 30% and some of that is hydro and bioenergy, which are not that great. However there is also a growth incentive. If the energy is cheaper you can mine more. Not to mention that the more renewable capacity Bitcoin uses, the less of it is available to factories, cars and houses, the more expensive renewables are. The growth of renewables then must outpace the growth of Bitcoin to be cheaper.

A few people get rich from Bitcoin, the rest of society pays for it: pollution, more expensive energy, people losing their money to Ponzi schemes, insider trading, pump and dump and so on. Bitcoin takes resources away from education, health care, the environment and puts it into supercars, superyachts and supermodels. It's a future some people want for themselves, it is not a sustainable future. It's greed, it's selfishness, it's short-sightedness.

> the more renewable capacity Bitcoin uses, the less of it is available to factories, cars and houses

Electricity costs 22p a unit but for every unit my solar puts onto the grid I am paid only 5p. They pay me so little not because of their greed but because they can't use the energy, electricity is needed most in the evening when my solar isn't producing. At that rate the solar on my roof will never pay for itself.

Batteries and hydro storage are expensive and not that great for the environment in comparison to a miner thats small and can be anywhere there is a power source and internet connection.

If we can manage surplus energy on the grid instantaneously in a way that stores its value like we can with bitcoin we could solve the grid balancing problems renewables present. We can produce energy at 120% - 200% what is needed and burn the surplus instead of trying to store that energy.

If I put that surplus energy my solar produces into a miner I can make more money than powering the grid not because I am starving factories, cars and houses of my power but simply because my power would be wasted on the grid and would never actually power those things.

> It's greed, it's selfishness, it's short-sightedness.

Its a tool it can be used how the wielder sees fit

Bitcoin has an infinitely increasing energy demand. Surplus would not be enough to sustain it. There are better uses for clean energy, like making steel, hydrogen or ammonia.

Bitcoin offers little back to society. A few people make a boatload of cash with it. The infamous trickle-down economic theory unfortunately doesn't work.

You can't use electricity to produce enough heat to melt steel thats why they use coal thats why that electricity is so cheap. If you could then why is the steel industry spending billions on coal when there is cheap renewables in massive abundance? Why is the electricity produced by solar so worthless if it has such imense value to this rich industry, and on the flip side why is the value of bitcoin through the roof if society don't benefit from it.

Banking the worlds unbanked offers little to you that doesn't mean it offers little to society think of those who have less than you.

There are fossil-fuel steel initiatives like Hybrit. If coal would be more expensive we would see more of these.

Bitcoin's value is through the roof due to the religious fervor of holders, greedy investors shooting for the moon, and market manipulation. This is however not sustainable since the only value is cashing out at the right time, taking money from bag holders.

Bitcoin is more of an asset class than a currency, it does not offer much to the unbanked. You can't buy anything with it, you can just buy it and sell it, which is risky. People however are being scammed with Bitcoin, just look at what happened in Brazil after their regulators gave a thumbs up on cryptocurrencies: FOMO, Ponzi schemes, hundreds of thousands of victims.

Bitcoin in many parts of the world finances organized crime and terrorism, so banking the unbanked is not always a good idea either.

I can't speak in detail to whether it'd work or be a good idea, but there has been an attempt to design a fraud-resistant carbon capture coin. https://www.gwern.net/CO2-Coin

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