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SolarCoin cryptocurrency pays you to go green
- terabytest 13y agoDoesn't this break bitcoin's concept of no central issuer? If you have to send stuff to the organiser, that's somewhat of a central authority, isn't it?
- dijit 13y agoyes. sidenote: please stop making coins. it sort of defies the point of it being a currency of any kind if there are millions of different yet indistinguishable ones.
- ekianjo 13y agoDon't worry, natural selection will happen to them. Most coins of close to zero value will reach the bottom faster than they expect.
- jkarni 13y agoThis isn't obvious! See my comment to IgorPartola above.
- IgorPartola 13y agoWhy? A new blockchain is no real threat to any existing and established altcoin such as BTC or LTC. On the other hand, it's possible that someone will come up with either a technical improvement over the established altcoins, or die trying. Now, what would be really helpful is a wallet app that lets you have all different types of coins in one place. That way you wouldn't have to run 17 different clients for 17 different coins. It would also help you lose all your altcoins in one place.
- nwh 13y ago17? At the last count there's over a thousand of them.
- dllthomas 13y agoAnd most aren't used at all.
- jkarni 13y agoIt is a threat! If a there are a thousand indistinguishable block chains, it's (arguably[1]) as if the number of coins on a single blockchain were much bigger, which drives down the price. Since there's an infinite supply of new blockchains at more or less any price point (again, arguably), the price should be driven down to zero. [1] Arguably, -there is, for instance, the question of whether arbitrary differentiators such as "being the first blockchain" suffice to make the blockchain market not perfectly competitive, - but this point needs to be (and as far as I can tell hasn't really been, here on HN) argued about. See http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/12/on-the-future-of-dogecoin-bitcoin-and-other-cryptocurrencies-of-the-non-realm.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/12/on-... for some references, though.
- dllthomas 13y agoNot much more than different currencies or different goods devalue others as stores of value in general.
- jkarni 13y agoI think you're wrong, but am willing to be told otherwise. Here's why: one currency is not (generally) legal tender outside its country of origin, so there's an exchange rate determined roughly by the trade balance between countries etc. If all currencies were legal tender everywhere (a much more analogous) situation, the exchange rate would not be determined by the same factors, since the currency would in no way be pegged to the nation. Then the question becomes: what does in fact determine the exchange rates? I.e., would one currency be "infinitely valuable" compared to all others? Which one? The first? Or would all of the stabilize at the point where 1 of A is always worth 1 of B, because that's easiest to work with?
- herge 13y agoI don't accept your fiat of making BitCoin the one true coin.
- dijit 13y agothere's room for more than 1, litecoin, bitcoin. don't just make copies of what's available, it drives down price and stops adoption of it as a trading standard.
- Xdes 13y agoI could see SolarCoin working if there was some kind of specialized hardware that monitored the amount of electricity flow, but I can't think of a way to verify that it is hooked up to a solar panel versus plugged into a wall.
- dllthomas 13y agoI could see people hacking that specialized hardware...
- ctg 13y agoBut SolarCoint is not a bitcoin -- it is just a cryptocurrency.
- trickyhero 13y agoThat would be great but can I only mine if the solar panels are working? That would not work out here in Michigan, atleast during this winter.
- Tloewald 13y agoThere's this other thing you can get in exchange for generating solar power that's fairly popular and can be used to purchase goods and services. I can't remember it's called, but I think it's fairly popular in places like the USA, Burma, and Tibet. Oh and you can keep it in a physical wallet, it doesn't require an internet connection, transactions using it are almost untraceable, and it comes in a wide variety of sizes and colors.
- Jtsummers 13y agoSadly, where I live, I'd have to move at least 40 miles away to fall under a power company that would pay me for my excess production. IIUC, they have some percentage they have to meet for various stuffs (tax credits?, funding?), once they met that, they stopped taking new customers for the program.
- Tloewald 13y agoMy sarcasm aside -- this whole idea is idiotic. Power has a market value. If the solarcoins aren't worth as least as much as the cash you can get, no-one will take them. If they're worth more, then whoever is giving the solarcoins out will be annihilated by arbitrage. And that completely leaves aside verification issues. It's a damn silly idea.
- crazy1van 13y agoYeah, this just seems like a marketing gimmick to ride the popularity of flavor-of-the-month-coins. Power is already valuable. You can sell it for USD, euros, bitcoins, etc.
- lukifer 13y agoDevil's advocate: In a technological civilization, it makes more sense to back a currency with energy than with any other commodity. (USD is already de-facto backed by oil [1].) In a sense, BitCoin itself is also energy-backed, as the mining yield these days is roughly equal to the cost of electricity. That said, while a distributed currency that is miraculously 1:1 exchangeable with energy would be pretty neat, SolarCoin doesn't seem to be that. If anything, it would make more sense to just pay people in BitCoins for contributing energy back to the grid, or to mine BitCoins in a carbon-neutral fashion. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrodollar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrodollar
- dllthomas 13y agoI don't think it's fair to call it a cryptocurrency if it relies on something that can't be visible to the network without reliance on single trusted party.
- VMG 13y agoIt technically still is a crypto-currency, just not a decentralized one.
- dllthomas 13y agoWould you call Chaum's eCash (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash) a crypto-currency?
- wlievens 13y agoOh, like PayPal?
- VMG 13y agoNo, PayPal controls the complete funds of every individual. Even with a centralized crypto-currency, only those transactions are valid that have your cryptographic signature. The centralized trusted third party only decides on the order of transactions.
- jerf 13y agoAnd who is going to take a SolarCoin in return for goods or services? And what would then do with such a coin if they took one? Issuing currency is not the challenging part.
- andyjohnson0 13y agoThe same objection was once made to bitcoin.
- graeham 13y agoI've always thought "proof of work" in cryptocurrencies was a bit of a misnomer since the the "work" is useless. Could resources be used for productive work instead, for example distributed computation? I'm thinking something similar to SETI@home, but with currency rewards for work done. Perhaps this would also require a central issuer.
- ansible 13y agoThere is gridcoin [1], but it is just using standard mining software for litecoin, then checking to see if you're running the BIONC program, and giving you extra credit. I believe that the minute it gets popular, people will fake running the BIONC software. We need something where the proof of work is intimately tied to the actual BIONC calculations. [1] http://www.gridcoin.us/ http://www.gridcoin.us/
- lloeki 13y agoUnless I missed something[0], the work is actually useful in cryptocurrencies: it's actually bruteforcing a crypto function to find a solution for the block. Once the solution is found, the block, which contains actual transactions, is known to be valid, and the block is said to be mined. The very system that generates money is the system that validates the transactions. The miner gets the nominal fee of 25 BTC per block, plus any fees included in the transactions. [0]: http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-bitcoin.html http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-bi...
- aninhumer 13y agoIt's useful in the sense that it serves a purpose, but the results themselves are essentially meaningless. What people are asking is whether it's possible to adapt some kind of meaningful computation to serve the same function.
- GavinB 13y agoMaking a monetary system function is important work. From the Federal Reserve chairman to the sysadmins running wire transfer servers to the crew running the printing presses to the security guards who transport cash, there's a huge amount of work involved in running current fiat money systems. You can dislike cryptocurrencies for all sorts of other reasons, but that fact that some resources are consumed to keep it running really is going to be a feature of any sort of monetary system.
- GigabyteCoin 13y agoThe title sounds awesome, and then I read that it's being created by a centralized company that's organizing the entire thing. I'll bet they're organizing a hefty personal profit into their ploy as well.
- ZenoArrow 13y ago"I'll bet they're organizing a hefty personal profit into their ploy as well." Yes, I'd say they are. From the FAQ (Bitcoin section)... Largest holder of reserve currency: SolarCoin Foundation Sounds like they've premined it.
- wyager 13y agoSo the people who made this coin have the ability to mint an arbitrary amount? Seems legit.
- ck2 13y agoDarn it, I had this idea last year and was going to call it GreenCoin. Oh well, laziness wins again.
- andrewfong 13y agoOn encouraging decentralized home-based solar power in general, wasn't there an issue with the grid not being optimized for this sort of thing? Has that changed?
- zimbatm 13y agoNo necessarily. It depends if storage is done by using batteries installed at the person's home or by sending the current back into the power grid.
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoWhile a laudable initiative, this looks more like a way to get new cryptocurrency in the market by riding on solar community good will.
- mmcclure 13y ago"While most cryptocurrencies are just themed copies of Bitcoin – Dogecoin, based on a famous internet meme, is a notable example" I could be mistaken, but I was under the impression that almost all of these themed currencies such as Dogecoin were based on Litecoin...
- driverdan 13y ago> Bitcoin has been accused of wasting energy in the past because of the computing power it takes to mine coins, but Gogerty says that SolarCoin is 50 times more energy-efficient because its algorithm allows the total number of coins to be mined faster... That's not how crypocurrency mining works. Mining more coins in a shorter period of time does not make it more efficient. It just means the coins are worth less money.