5 ms·

What we need is a cryptocurrency that is somehow mined by pulling carbon out of the atmosphere.

by cowvin 5y ago

geogra4 5y ago
I'm laughing but honest to god I think this could work...somehow.
- teachrdan 5y ago
  DiamondCoin: The world's first cryptocurrency based on Proof of Carbon.
- lovemenot 5y ago
  Yes, this seems to have potential. The beauty of proof of work is the hashing algo is both 1) very hard to solve and 2) very easy to verify by anyone anywhere. Furthermore, 3) miners have a financial incentive to solve the algo and 4) They may do so in anyway they see fit. At a minimum a crypto-like solution should have these four properties. Now we already have a lot of unpaid CO2 miners (plants) doing it inefficiently, ad hoc and short-term. The first stage should be to allow these to opt in to get rewarded. Like you could mine bitcoin with spare CPU back in the day.
  - lutorm 5y ago
    Why not just turn CO2 into a currency directly then? Your "proof of work" is the CO2 you sequestrated and can sell to someone else.
    - lovemenot 5y ago
      I think it's for the same reasons we tend to abstract currencies away from their underpinning scarce resources. Convenience, scale, efficiency. Most mining devices don't actually ever successfully win a single bitcoin. But they get paid pro rata for their contribution to the combined hashing power, which did. For miners in a pool hashing power is the saleable commodity. Perhaps this was the point you were making. Even if it didn't fulfill its potential (yet), we must remember what made bitcoin so special: eliminating the double-spend and central authority problems. How do you intend to sell your sequestered CO2 and prove that it's still yours to sell? This is all hypothetical anyway. To my knowledge there's no scheme that satisfies those criteria wrt proof of sequestration.
    - curryst 5y ago
      There are all kinds of perverse incentives there. Oil is a great way to sequester CO2, but pumping it out of the ground doesn't help our problems. Yet it would still be valid currency. You could ban oil as a store, but people will use it as a power source for net positive emissions processes to sequester CO2 in another form. It also makes money laundering laughably easy (plant trees). Then again, maybe we care less if we can turn that money towards good. And there are also the general issues with using a physical currency. It's hard to transact across distances. You could do a bank-like system, but at that point it starts to look like carbon credits and calls into question the necessity of a parallel currency.
dbrueck 5y ago
Honestly, that's /precisely/ the type of thinking that we need more of. There's a lot of great work on the "this is a huge problem, how do we fix it?" side of things; we need to keep encouraging more on the "there's an abundance of this stuff that people consider bad and worthless, how can I use it?" side of things.
chickenpotpie 5y ago
Sadly I think this would cause a cobra effect and people would start creating carbon emissions to mine it more cost effectively
- diordiderot 5y ago
  Imagine a world where people are creating 36000000000000 kilograms of snakes every year
endisneigh 5y ago
how would you prevent people from creating carbon just to remove it?
- diordiderot 5y ago
  Carbon tax + petrol cost > Carbon sequestration subsidy
- lovemenot 5y ago
  Producers must somehow more than pay for sequesters to sequest. The technical details confound me right now. Imagine if every CO2 molecule were somehow unique: carrying with it a physical hash that could cheaply identify the processes that produced it. In this scenario, such an economy would become feasible. To reduce complexity and cost, it needn't be every molecule. Say just one in a quadrillion, at an exactly fixed rate. Of course CO2 is actually generic, as far as I know. Yet with only one wave of the magic wand, an economic solution has appeared. Assuming regulatory and societal support, which should be forthcoming in this current climate (pun intended).
billiam 5y ago
carbon coin concept explored by the amazing Kim Stanley Robinson: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50998056-the-ministry-for-the-future https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50998056-the-ministry-fo...
zhoujianfu 5y ago
What if say california's cap and trade carbon credits were distributed to all residents of california (as a crypto token?) as opposed to e.g. tesla? Then polluters have to buy them still, but from residents (instead of e.g. tesla)...

What we need is a cryptocurrency that is somehow mined by pulling carbon out of the atmosphere.

by cowvin 5y ago

What we need is a cryptocurrency that is somehow mined by pulling carbon out of the atmosphere.

geogra4 5y ago

I'm laughing but honest to god I think this could work...somehow.

teachrdan 5y ago
DiamondCoin: The world's first cryptocurrency based on Proof of Carbon.
lovemenot 5y ago
Yes, this seems to have potential. The beauty of proof of work is the hashing algo is both 1) very hard to solve and 2) very easy to verify by anyone anywhere. Furthermore, 3) miners have a financial incentive to solve the algo and 4) They may do so in anyway they see fit. At a minimum a crypto-like solution should have these four properties. Now we already have a lot of unpaid CO2 miners (plants) doing it inefficiently, ad hoc and short-term. The first stage should be to allow these to opt in to get rewarded. Like you could mine bitcoin with spare CPU back in the day.
- lutorm 5y ago
  Why not just turn CO2 into a currency directly then? Your "proof of work" is the CO2 you sequestrated and can sell to someone else.
  - lovemenot 5y ago
    I think it's for the same reasons we tend to abstract currencies away from their underpinning scarce resources. Convenience, scale, efficiency. Most mining devices don't actually ever successfully win a single bitcoin. But they get paid pro rata for their contribution to the combined hashing power, which did. For miners in a pool hashing power is the saleable commodity. Perhaps this was the point you were making. Even if it didn't fulfill its potential (yet), we must remember what made bitcoin so special: eliminating the double-spend and central authority problems. How do you intend to sell your sequestered CO2 and prove that it's still yours to sell? This is all hypothetical anyway. To my knowledge there's no scheme that satisfies those criteria wrt proof of sequestration.
  - curryst 5y ago
    There are all kinds of perverse incentives there. Oil is a great way to sequester CO2, but pumping it out of the ground doesn't help our problems. Yet it would still be valid currency. You could ban oil as a store, but people will use it as a power source for net positive emissions processes to sequester CO2 in another form. It also makes money laundering laughably easy (plant trees). Then again, maybe we care less if we can turn that money towards good. And there are also the general issues with using a physical currency. It's hard to transact across distances. You could do a bank-like system, but at that point it starts to look like carbon credits and calls into question the necessity of a parallel currency.

dbrueck 5y ago

Honestly, that's /precisely/ the type of thinking that we need more of. There's a lot of great work on the "this is a huge problem, how do we fix it?" side of things; we need to keep encouraging more on the "there's an abundance of this stuff that people consider bad and worthless, how can I use it?" side of things.

chickenpotpie 5y ago

Sadly I think this would cause a cobra effect and people would start creating carbon emissions to mine it more cost effectively

diordiderot 5y ago
Imagine a world where people are creating 36000000000000 kilograms of snakes every year

endisneigh 5y ago

how would you prevent people from creating carbon just to remove it?

diordiderot 5y ago
Carbon tax + petrol cost > Carbon sequestration subsidy
lovemenot 5y ago
Producers must somehow more than pay for sequesters to sequest. The technical details confound me right now. Imagine if every CO2 molecule were somehow unique: carrying with it a physical hash that could cheaply identify the processes that produced it. In this scenario, such an economy would become feasible. To reduce complexity and cost, it needn't be every molecule. Say just one in a quadrillion, at an exactly fixed rate. Of course CO2 is actually generic, as far as I know. Yet with only one wave of the magic wand, an economic solution has appeared. Assuming regulatory and societal support, which should be forthcoming in this current climate (pun intended).

billiam 5y ago

carbon coin concept explored by the amazing Kim Stanley Robinson: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50998056-the-ministry-for-the-future https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50998056-the-ministry-fo...

zhoujianfu 5y ago

What if say california's cap and trade carbon credits were distributed to all residents of california (as a crypto token?) as opposed to e.g. tesla? Then polluters have to buy them still, but from residents (instead of e.g. tesla)...