10 ms·

CO₂ Coin: Decentralized Carbon Capture Blockchains (2021)

46 points by networked 5y ago

acdha 5y ago
> Audits rarely needed (hopefully). This seems highly optimistic: if there’s money involved, cheating is inevitable. Since this inherits Bitcoin’s protections for successful fraudsters, it seems highly unlikely that people wouldn’t just try to dodge audits until the challenge window closes and their transactions can’t be reversed.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gwern 5y ago
  Failing an audit by dodging it (how? blocking the roads with trucks? pointing a gun at the auditor's agent?) is a failure. Same solution in PoS slashing for stakers who don't maintain required latency: too bad, we don't care why, it was your job to do it right, your stake is slashed. (See the NashX exploding equilibrium for another example of this: the buyer doesn't give a s—t whatever excuses the seller might come up with, because it's cheap talk; the seller makes things right, or their stake gets burned. Period.)
  - acdha 5y ago
    Here are just a few things which come to mind – I’m sure there are others: Flood with volume so there isn’t audit capacity & the time limit expires without a challenge. Bribe the auditor. The auditor turns out to be you under an alias. Setup a mix of legit captured CO2 and something cheaper so when the auditor checks the easiest part to reach it appears valid. Find something which will trigger the cheapest tests but costs less. Pocket the difference. Truck the sequestered material from site to site, spending the proceeds long before anyone catches on. Rely on the fact that since the auditing appears to be completely optional, most people will choose not to pay for it. Bet on auditors being selected for being as cheap as possible and find the ones who will pass anything plausible. Flood the system with fake challenges until people demand something like a quorum vote which increases the odds that someone won’t scrutinize your business too closely, or you and your pals try to convince everyone to adopt a more secure fork. The key thing to remember is that a system which tries to be money is effectively its own bug bounty and it’s much harder to fix problems. Once you have money at stake every angle of the system will be under attack, and the security will come down to the real-world institutions backing it. Blockchains prevent silently rewriting history but that’s only one of the potential things people will try if there’s money at stake.
- ctchocula 5y ago
  I'm in the same boat as you. Once there's money involved, I can imagine a lot opportunity for fraud: -collecting fake "dust" that's the byproduct of another industrial process and minting tokens off it -bribing or threatening violence against auditors
  - gwern 5y ago
    1. There is no such process, as already noted in OP. 2. Bribing or colluding with auditors only works until buyers or skeptics bring in further auditors, kicking off the forking game, as already noted in OP.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      Whay incentive is there for buyers to bring in their own auditors? That costs money too, and if it's anything like the current situation many buyers are just looking to get the carbon off their books. What is their incentive to pay even more after burning the tokens to cover secondary auditing costs? Or for some other third party to insert themselves? And who oversees disputes when the trusted auditor disagrees with the challenge auditor?
gonab 5y ago
Build a proof of CO2 capture
- gwern 5y ago
  I'm glad you asked how one could build it. As it happens, OP is an entire essay about how one can prove CO2 capture. Perhaps you might enjoy reading it?
  - gonab 5y ago
    As with all of your texts, I'm sure I will read it more than once
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    The OP essay is about how people might agree the CO2 was captured. I don't see much detail about the actual chemistry of evaluating preexisting carbon in minerals and carbon levels after treatment.
endisneigh 5y ago
If the blockchain is immutable how do you reverse transactions if there's no monopoly on force in order to force the transaction? Say I have 1 ton of carbon captured, I am paid 1 coin and I "prove" that I captured 1 ton. Secretly, the mechanism of my capture is temporary and I realize not only the 1 ton, but an additional ton as it costed me energy to make this scheme work. What are you gonna do? Another, more likely example is that I say I have 1 ton captured, EnergyCorp has Bob audit me, I tell Bob, you approve of my fraudulent capture notice and I'll give you 10% of the profits. Bob agrees, I am paid my 1 coin. I give Bob 0.1 of the coin. We both win. Later Bob is found to have participated in the conspiracy. What are you gonna do? You, the smart reader are reading this and think - OK fine, we'll build a way to confirm capture without anyone else being involved. Well, I point to scenario 1. What're ya gonna do? The post basically assumes trusted auditors, which is fine, but why even do blockchain? Blockchain cannot beat reality. For what it's worth, both scenarios apply to traditional fiat, but at least in that scenario punitive damages apply and can be applied. I'm not sure how a tax or fine can or would be applied with any blockchain. It's also not even clear to me why blockchains are even necessary after skimming the OP.
- gwern 5y ago
  "Secretly, the mechanism of my capture is temporary" How is accelerating exothermic mineralization reactions 'temporary', exactly?
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    Hard to say without more specifics on how exactly carbon captured is proven. For a concrete example - let's say planting a 50ft tree to maturity constitutes capture. In other words, if I point to a lat and long and show that there wasn't a tree here before, and now there is, I receive the coin. Well, if you spent energy moving a mature tree from another place, you've not only killed the existing tree, but eventually the tree you've replanted will die too. That's the sort of scenario I'm referring to.
    - kevinwang 5y ago
wyager 5y ago
I’m disappointed to see Gwern fail to appreciate why social incentivization schemes cannot be decentralized. You have to trust someone (possibly a cartel) to authenticate claims about the state of the world, and that represents a SPOF. The only proof-of-x systems that are any good are systems that can be validated non-interactively and with no trusted third parties. You can add as many epicycles and “auditors” as you like and this won’t change the core problem.
- gwern 5y ago
  So, how do I validate my "Bitcoin" blockchain non-interactively, trusting no one? How do I prove I have the blockchain, and I haven't downloaded one that forked some time ago? For that matter, how do I prove that no aliens around Alpha Centauri received transmissions in 2011 of Bitcoin and have been mining a blockchain a million times longer ever since?
  - wyager 5y ago
    You have extremely strong evidence that you have the right chain because artificial network partitions are implausibly expensive to maintain and very cheap to subvert. The Alpha Centauri example is fair, and that does require a quasi-social process (everyone deciding to ignore the alien chain) to resolve. I say quasi-social because it doesn’t require any coordination or negotiation, but also isn’t fully automatic.
  - powera 5y ago
    If you haven't interacted with anyone on Earth in 10 years and don't plan to do so in the future, why do you care? You have a blockchain, that much you can be sure of. If you want the blockchain used on Earth in 2021, you won't need to trust any specific person. If you believe everyone on Earth is lying to you, you are still hopeless and helpless.
neolog 5y ago
The reason this works is the third-party auditor. The blockchain doesn't add any value on top of that.
elefanten 5y ago
This is all interesting. Some questions that came up as reading. 1. "as long as the auditor is trustworthy only to the extent that they will not sign lies about dust not being present" If they get the staked eth bounty, isn't there a pretty direct incentive for auditors to falsely report dust plots? 2. What happens with disputes? How do you challenge a false report about one of your dust plots? What if both sides are convinced they're correct & being honest -- maybe the dust farmer entered the wrong GPS coords, or the auditor visited the wrong coords, or wrote it down wrong in their notebook. What mechanism is there for adjudicating that kind of conflict?
chris_va 5y ago
(disclaimer: I work in a Climate&Energy research group) Ignoring the perverse incentive problem... ... enhanced weathering only works under certain conditions. Randomly spreading some olivine around at a specific GPS location does not effectively sequester CO2 on a useful timescale, for example. Olivine also needs water, and the reaction is very slow, so almost all olivine proposals end up dumping the material in the shallow ocean (or grinding it small enough, say <2um, so that it stays in the mix layer before it fully reacts with CO2). Grinding energy is not linear, so a bunch of 100um rock (easy to produce) requires a lot less energy than a bunch of 2um rock. Vespa gets around this (they claim) by sticking the rock in the wave/tidal zone to break it apart naturally, and keep it from sinking out of the mix layer. There are also issues with this from a biological standpoint (e.g. olivine contains some amount of nickel and cadmium), so doing this a gigaton scale would require a lot of research before incentivizing it. TLDR, there are things one could do on land that might work, but not what is proposed. === Long story short, I can't see a carbon coin being super successful if it is overly prescriptive on the method of CO2 capture, unless it gets very very lucky and happens to pick the right one. Since the proposal already requires an auditing methodology (which is basically all the proposal really is, if I am reading it right), it may as well drop the exact technology being audited. At that point, it mimics a normal carbon market, but with printed money, so not clear how it's going to get traction over a fiat currency.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  > TLDR, there are things one could do on land that might work, but not what is proposed. I'm curious what these might be.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
  > so not clear how it's going to get traction over a fiat currency. Everything else in your post was great, but there's certainly a precedent for even obviously unworkable ideas attracting much investment in the crypto space. Having something that could be beneficial is already way better than many crypto launches.
  - chris_va 5y ago
powera 5y ago
I've read the whole thing twice, and I still don't see any reason why a "blockchain" is an improvement over a centralized system run by an auditor.
AlexCoventry 5y ago
> To give 3 examples of incentives/games which can accomplish things software may never can would be: This portion needs to be rewritten for clarity.
space_rock 5y ago
But carbon capture is not provable like the energy use from SHA256 hashing. So this is just the 10,000th trashy blockchain scam
BrissyCoder 5y ago
So funny watching people contorting to strap blockchains on to applications that definitely don't benifit from them at all.
ineedasername 5y ago
Even assuming the proposed mineralization process was effective and consistent with appropriate pre mineralization and post mineralization tests performed... If you could setup an audit system of the type specified, how does cryptography & blockchain improve upon things? The author seems to acknowledge that question earlier in the article but at the end when it comes saying how this is different, I didn't see a complete answer.
- wallacoloo 5y ago
  Presumably the goal is to broaden the market. As a smaller player, I can capture carbon today but wouldn’t know how to sell it. I expect there’s some high barrier to entry. By decentralizing and codifying the market portion of this, I know the exact steps to entering the market, and the costs to enter are likely lower.
ineedasername 5y ago
This assumes there aren't other industrial uses for mineralized C02. There are [0] and at least some of them will simply release the C02 again. I'm sure all industrial applications of mineralized C02 would become a lot more popular as easily available quantities became available.
gloryless 5y ago
Trying to dance around the fact that Bitcoin devours energy by slapping CO2 on a new scam. Blockchain pointless here
Proven 5y ago
Nice effort, but why? 1) There's no need to capture CO2 2) There's no need to record that on a blockchain or use crypto - you could use Github or Gitlab or IPFS with PGP-signed notary statements. Or push commits to all three. 3) Most enterprises are already forced to capture (or pay for outsourced capture, buy CO2 credits and other nonsense), so in order to make CO2 Coin viable in terms of (voluntary) market demand, you'd have to stop the government climate racket first. Good luck getting your friendly government department to give up on the millions of dollars they collect. 4) Considering how expensive global warming racket has become, I can't believe enterprises or individuals can be incentivized to use such a coin. It's much better to just ignore the schema - once the government is out of it (necessary condition for a CO2 Coin), damage from not participating in the racket would be negligible. Nobody wants to pay for it - if they did, we wouldn't have CO2 taxes and excises and no meaningful voluntary contributions.
AlexCoventry 5y ago
> The set of GPS coordinates is invalid if they appear in any previous token. There probably needs to be something here about overlapping rectangles.
AlexCoventry 5y ago
It seems like there needs to be a minimum minting threshold which is much higher than the cost of auditing any point on the planet, so that there is adequate incentive for people to check the coordinates.
AlexCoventry 5y ago
Why not replace the auditor with a Kleros-like system?

46 points by networked 5y ago

> Audits rarely needed (hopefully). This seems highly optimistic: if there’s money involved, cheating is inevitable. Since this inherits Bitcoin’s protections for successful fraudsters, it seems highly unlikely that people wouldn’t just try to dodge audits until the challenge window closes and their transactions can’t be reversed.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gwern 5y ago
Failing an audit by dodging it (how? blocking the roads with trucks? pointing a gun at the auditor's agent?) is a failure. Same solution in PoS slashing for stakers who don't maintain required latency: too bad, we don't care why, it was your job to do it right, your stake is slashed. (See the NashX exploding equilibrium for another example of this: the buyer doesn't give a s—t whatever excuses the seller might come up with, because it's cheap talk; the seller makes things right, or their stake gets burned. Period.)
- acdha 5y ago
  Here are just a few things which come to mind – I’m sure there are others: Flood with volume so there isn’t audit capacity & the time limit expires without a challenge. Bribe the auditor. The auditor turns out to be you under an alias. Setup a mix of legit captured CO2 and something cheaper so when the auditor checks the easiest part to reach it appears valid. Find something which will trigger the cheapest tests but costs less. Pocket the difference. Truck the sequestered material from site to site, spending the proceeds long before anyone catches on. Rely on the fact that since the auditing appears to be completely optional, most people will choose not to pay for it. Bet on auditors being selected for being as cheap as possible and find the ones who will pass anything plausible. Flood the system with fake challenges until people demand something like a quorum vote which increases the odds that someone won’t scrutinize your business too closely, or you and your pals try to convince everyone to adopt a more secure fork. The key thing to remember is that a system which tries to be money is effectively its own bug bounty and it’s much harder to fix problems. Once you have money at stake every angle of the system will be under attack, and the security will come down to the real-world institutions backing it. Blockchains prevent silently rewriting history but that’s only one of the potential things people will try if there’s money at stake.
ctchocula 5y ago
I'm in the same boat as you. Once there's money involved, I can imagine a lot opportunity for fraud: -collecting fake "dust" that's the byproduct of another industrial process and minting tokens off it -bribing or threatening violence against auditors
- gwern 5y ago
  1. There is no such process, as already noted in OP. 2. Bribing or colluding with auditors only works until buyers or skeptics bring in further auditors, kicking off the forking game, as already noted in OP.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Whay incentive is there for buyers to bring in their own auditors? That costs money too, and if it's anything like the current situation many buyers are just looking to get the carbon off their books. What is their incentive to pay even more after burning the tokens to cover secondary auditing costs? Or for some other third party to insert themselves? And who oversees disputes when the trusted auditor disagrees with the challenge auditor?

gonab 5y ago

Build a proof of CO2 capture

gwern 5y ago
I'm glad you asked how one could build it. As it happens, OP is an entire essay about how one can prove CO2 capture. Perhaps you might enjoy reading it?
- gonab 5y ago
  As with all of your texts, I'm sure I will read it more than once
- ineedasername 5y ago
  The OP essay is about how people might agree the CO2 was captured. I don't see much detail about the actual chemistry of evaluating preexisting carbon in minerals and carbon levels after treatment.

endisneigh 5y ago

If the blockchain is immutable how do you reverse transactions if there's no monopoly on force in order to force the transaction? Say I have 1 ton of carbon captured, I am paid 1 coin and I "prove" that I captured 1 ton. Secretly, the mechanism of my capture is temporary and I realize not only the 1 ton, but an additional ton as it costed me energy to make this scheme work. What are you gonna do? Another, more likely example is that I say I have 1 ton captured, EnergyCorp has Bob audit me, I tell Bob, you approve of my fraudulent capture notice and I'll give you 10% of the profits. Bob agrees, I am paid my 1 coin. I give Bob 0.1 of the coin. We both win. Later Bob is found to have participated in the conspiracy. What are you gonna do? You, the smart reader are reading this and think - OK fine, we'll build a way to confirm capture without anyone else being involved. Well, I point to scenario 1. What're ya gonna do? The post basically assumes trusted auditors, which is fine, but why even do blockchain? Blockchain cannot beat reality. For what it's worth, both scenarios apply to traditional fiat, but at least in that scenario punitive damages apply and can be applied. I'm not sure how a tax or fine can or would be applied with any blockchain. It's also not even clear to me why blockchains are even necessary after skimming the OP.

gwern 5y ago
"Secretly, the mechanism of my capture is temporary" How is accelerating exothermic mineralization reactions 'temporary', exactly?
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Hard to say without more specifics on how exactly carbon captured is proven. For a concrete example - let's say planting a 50ft tree to maturity constitutes capture. In other words, if I point to a lat and long and show that there wasn't a tree here before, and now there is, I receive the coin. Well, if you spent energy moving a mature tree from another place, you've not only killed the existing tree, but eventually the tree you've replanted will die too. That's the sort of scenario I'm referring to.
  - kevinwang 5y ago

wyager 5y ago

I’m disappointed to see Gwern fail to appreciate why social incentivization schemes cannot be decentralized. You have to trust someone (possibly a cartel) to authenticate claims about the state of the world, and that represents a SPOF. The only proof-of-x systems that are any good are systems that can be validated non-interactively and with no trusted third parties. You can add as many epicycles and “auditors” as you like and this won’t change the core problem.

gwern 5y ago
So, how do I validate my "Bitcoin" blockchain non-interactively, trusting no one? How do I prove I have the blockchain, and I haven't downloaded one that forked some time ago? For that matter, how do I prove that no aliens around Alpha Centauri received transmissions in 2011 of Bitcoin and have been mining a blockchain a million times longer ever since?
- wyager 5y ago
  You have extremely strong evidence that you have the right chain because artificial network partitions are implausibly expensive to maintain and very cheap to subvert. The Alpha Centauri example is fair, and that does require a quasi-social process (everyone deciding to ignore the alien chain) to resolve. I say quasi-social because it doesn’t require any coordination or negotiation, but also isn’t fully automatic.
- powera 5y ago
  If you haven't interacted with anyone on Earth in 10 years and don't plan to do so in the future, why do you care? You have a blockchain, that much you can be sure of. If you want the blockchain used on Earth in 2021, you won't need to trust any specific person. If you believe everyone on Earth is lying to you, you are still hopeless and helpless.

neolog 5y ago

The reason this works is the third-party auditor. The blockchain doesn't add any value on top of that.

elefanten 5y ago

This is all interesting. Some questions that came up as reading. 1. "as long as the auditor is trustworthy only to the extent that they will not sign lies about dust not being present" If they get the staked eth bounty, isn't there a pretty direct incentive for auditors to falsely report dust plots? 2. What happens with disputes? How do you challenge a false report about one of your dust plots? What if both sides are convinced they're correct & being honest -- maybe the dust farmer entered the wrong GPS coords, or the auditor visited the wrong coords, or wrote it down wrong in their notebook. What mechanism is there for adjudicating that kind of conflict?

chris_va 5y ago

(disclaimer: I work in a Climate&Energy research group) Ignoring the perverse incentive problem... ... enhanced weathering only works under certain conditions. Randomly spreading some olivine around at a specific GPS location does not effectively sequester CO2 on a useful timescale, for example. Olivine also needs water, and the reaction is very slow, so almost all olivine proposals end up dumping the material in the shallow ocean (or grinding it small enough, say <2um, so that it stays in the mix layer before it fully reacts with CO2). Grinding energy is not linear, so a bunch of 100um rock (easy to produce) requires a lot less energy than a bunch of 2um rock. Vespa gets around this (they claim) by sticking the rock in the wave/tidal zone to break it apart naturally, and keep it from sinking out of the mix layer. There are also issues with this from a biological standpoint (e.g. olivine contains some amount of nickel and cadmium), so doing this a gigaton scale would require a lot of research before incentivizing it. TLDR, there are things one could do on land that might work, but not what is proposed. === Long story short, I can't see a carbon coin being super successful if it is overly prescriptive on the method of CO2 capture, unless it gets very very lucky and happens to pick the right one. Since the proposal already requires an auditing methodology (which is basically all the proposal really is, if I am reading it right), it may as well drop the exact technology being audited. At that point, it mimics a normal carbon market, but with printed money, so not clear how it's going to get traction over a fiat currency.

endisneigh 5y ago
> TLDR, there are things one could do on land that might work, but not what is proposed. I'm curious what these might be.
asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
> so not clear how it's going to get traction over a fiat currency. Everything else in your post was great, but there's certainly a precedent for even obviously unworkable ideas attracting much investment in the crypto space. Having something that could be beneficial is already way better than many crypto launches.
- chris_va 5y ago

powera 5y ago

I've read the whole thing twice, and I still don't see any reason why a "blockchain" is an improvement over a centralized system run by an auditor.

AlexCoventry 5y ago

> To give 3 examples of incentives/games which can accomplish things software may never can would be: This portion needs to be rewritten for clarity.

space_rock 5y ago

But carbon capture is not provable like the energy use from SHA256 hashing. So this is just the 10,000th trashy blockchain scam

BrissyCoder 5y ago

So funny watching people contorting to strap blockchains on to applications that definitely don't benifit from them at all.

ineedasername 5y ago

Even assuming the proposed mineralization process was effective and consistent with appropriate pre mineralization and post mineralization tests performed... If you could setup an audit system of the type specified, how does cryptography & blockchain improve upon things? The author seems to acknowledge that question earlier in the article but at the end when it comes saying how this is different, I didn't see a complete answer.

wallacoloo 5y ago
Presumably the goal is to broaden the market. As a smaller player, I can capture carbon today but wouldn’t know how to sell it. I expect there’s some high barrier to entry. By decentralizing and codifying the market portion of this, I know the exact steps to entering the market, and the costs to enter are likely lower.

ineedasername 5y ago

This assumes there aren't other industrial uses for mineralized C02. There are [0] and at least some of them will simply release the C02 again. I'm sure all industrial applications of mineralized C02 would become a lot more popular as easily available quantities became available.

gloryless 5y ago

Trying to dance around the fact that Bitcoin devours energy by slapping CO2 on a new scam. Blockchain pointless here

Proven 5y ago

Nice effort, but why? 1) There's no need to capture CO2 2) There's no need to record that on a blockchain or use crypto - you could use Github or Gitlab or IPFS with PGP-signed notary statements. Or push commits to all three. 3) Most enterprises are already forced to capture (or pay for outsourced capture, buy CO2 credits and other nonsense), so in order to make CO2 Coin viable in terms of (voluntary) market demand, you'd have to stop the government climate racket first. Good luck getting your friendly government department to give up on the millions of dollars they collect. 4) Considering how expensive global warming racket has become, I can't believe enterprises or individuals can be incentivized to use such a coin. It's much better to just ignore the schema - once the government is out of it (necessary condition for a CO2 Coin), damage from not participating in the racket would be negligible. Nobody wants to pay for it - if they did, we wouldn't have CO2 taxes and excises and no meaningful voluntary contributions.

AlexCoventry 5y ago

> The set of GPS coordinates is invalid if they appear in any previous token. There probably needs to be something here about overlapping rectangles.

AlexCoventry 5y ago

It seems like there needs to be a minimum minting threshold which is much higher than the cost of auditing any point on the planet, so that there is adequate incentive for people to check the coordinates.

AlexCoventry 5y ago

Why not replace the auditor with a Kleros-like system?