Hear me out. On Reddit, the #solarpunk channel is decidedly anti-blockchain. To me, this is totally surprising and against the actual ethos of Solarpunk - to integrate technology for a bright, clean future.
Granted, blockchains don’t have much reputation in alternative circles. And for a good reason. A lot is just linked to scams, get-rich-quick dudes, and speculation, apart from energy consumption arguments.
But blockchain at its core is just a distributed database. One that has no central authority, can not be tampered with, cannot be altered, nor taken down if parametrized accordingly.
This allows - as a potential - to democratize access and value creation. Renewable energy is also fundamentally decentralized. Everyone can participate!
Now, with the costs of renewable energy creation (notably solar) shrunk significantly, and the demand for energy consumption rising heavily, if we only think about the booming electric vehicles alone -
What if people could earn money by generating solar energy and selling directly to vehicles, instead of the grid? I believe this could actually boost renewable energy generation over the roof.
Generators would be rewarded with a blockchain token for the energy generated, while consumers would pay for the energy in those tokens. Therefore speculation would be curbed as the tokens are for a real thing, energy, which on top is a stable unit - kWh.
Of course there are a lot of hurdles here - mostly institutional. Usually, energy is controlled by local authorities. They don’t want to allow anyone access to this market.
Then there is the distribution issue. Energy must be transported to the points of consumption, the charging stations. But due to the decentralized nature, this could actually result surprisingly cheap, as instead of transporting large distances, more charging stations in neighborhoods could reduce those distances. But still, this would require upfront charging stations and distribution investments.
I am an engineer. A dreamer. More often than not, as many many others, the realities of markets and economies clash with such ideals, thrashing generally good ideas.
But I wonder if such a scheme could made be possible. Anyone having some good suggestions? I mean mainly from the economics side. How to design the scheme, how to make it so that it is interesting to everyone? There are already several solar energy blockchains, but they kinda failed to get traction.
For the more radicals - I also dream of a money-less Solarpunk future, but to date, it seems further away than ever, looking at the right wing surge everywhere. Maybe we can build bridges at least from the technological side. Thank you if you got so far. Happy to respond to critique and questions.
money-less Solarpunk future
Don’t read that channel, but it sounds like another unworkable socialist utopia.
As for the title, current crypto miners love running their operations near hydro power plants - not because ecology, but because economics of such power plants make it really cheap.
Whole thing is a complex matter - there’s really nice coverage by Sabine Hossenfelder
Currency, the term you are looking for is currency.
The way you exchange value for goods and services without needlessly attaching an energy wasting puzzel game to it is to not do it!
Just have physical or digital currency in USD or some other real world currency that doesn’t require a blockchain and doesn’t have its amount artificially capped by processing power. It’s a dumb idea made by con men to take money from people.
I agree as long as you talk bitcoin. But blockchains are NOT just cryptocurrencies, and not all currencies work as you describe like bitcoin.
BTW, when we have digital USD, say goodbye to your financial freedom. The government can (and will) tax you whenever they want whatever they want for the reasons they want (we need to save the economy, we need to bail out banks, etc.). They can even shut you down completely by closing access to your accounts. Because they will only allow the use of the digital dollar, because they will have full control. A totalitarian regime’s dream.
I think this idea has at least two problems:
- Energy consumption is only a problem for outdated cryptos like bitcoin. Prettymuch every modern crypto runs on much more efficient proof-of-stake, etc.
- Even if we wanted a solar crypto, how would we verify that it’s generated by solar power?
I thought the same way as validating in Proof-of-Stake works: The devices have a private key (yes there are issues there about securing them for non-authorized access, but they can largely be addressed like also nodes do) which is registered on the blockchain. Then only these registered devices can issue coins. This is critical and there might be a lot of ways this could be hackable, which could or could not be mitigated. However I thought it’s not more of a challenge than running say an Ethereum or any other node.
This isn’t anything like how validating in proof-of-stake works (at least not in Ethereum’s version, which is the one I’m familiar with). Validating is permissionless. Anyone can set up a validating account, there’s no authority that can reject you.
Who “authorizes” keys to determine if a particular solarpunk miner is sufficiently solarpunk?
Also, “Proof of stake” would just mean that the owners of the ledger are unaccountable random rich guys instead of the shareholders of the utility company. That’s a distinction with absolutely zero difference.
No, that’s not how proof of stake works. Or it doesn’t have to, at any rate. Ethereum’s staking token is not a governance token, holding a lot of it doesn’t give you any “ownership” of the blockchain as a whole.
Quite the opposite in fact, if you’re staking millions of dollars worth of tokens then that means the blockchain has millions of dollars worth of your assets “held hostage” to ensure you follow the blockchain’s rules. If you don’t then the hostage gets slashed.
Successful in accomplishing what?
In allowing people generating solar energy to be fairly rewarded. Schemes today are at the mercy of the utility companies. Basically, to incentivize people to generate more solar energy than is already happening. Think of roofs.
I realize this is only meaningful if for some (I guess economic) reason they get more through that than through selling to the grid.
So we should waste perfeclty good electricity to mine some blackchain … for what reward? Some meme currency?
There’s no mining. Only a few blockchains require mining today. The energy generation IS the mining. Every kwh which has been generated would just issue a token. Sorry if that sounds mumbo jumbo, but these are actually blockchain technology characteristics.
Precisely my thought. I’ve yet to see an application of block chain that hasn’t already been solved by some other technology.
I can turn this around. I have yet to see some of the characteristics of blockchains being solved by some other technology. You may say it’s irrelevant because they are useless, and I am not going to argue against that. But it’s a technology and as such has potential. Maybe not today, maybe never. It’s like Solarpunk. We don’t know if it will ever be real.
So you think cryptos “solve” the same problem as paper money? A distributed open network is just the same as some rich bros printing paper?
Sometime the point is not to solve a new problem but to improve a fundamentally broken “solution”.
Rich bros print the crypto currency with no accountability.
Governments print real money.
FTFY
I am not talking cryptocurrency but blockchains. And governments don’t print real money, they just print money you think is real, because they force you to. And there are crypto currencies which are not printed by rich bros. However, the same way as community currencies like LETS or mutual credit, they have just limited impact. I just say this because the all-round attack “it’s all garbage” simply is not true.
There’s application in responding to requests for information quickly, in a mesh network, perhaps in presence of malactors. For example the medical records of injured US soldiers are stored in and delivered using a block chain solution.
There’s application in a hypothetical currency free from the corruption of governance. For example, an orange President couldn’t print gobs of money during a pandemic, devaluing your currency, then hand that money to corporations.
There’s application in responding to requests for information quickly, in a mesh network, perhaps in presence of malactors.
Online databases already exist and have been handling requests for information quickly for longer than there has been an internet, and always in the presence of bad actors. What problem is there, specifically, that the blockchain would solve?
For example the medical records of injured US soldiers are stored in and delivered using a block chain solution.
No they arent, the DoD did a study that said it might be useful for that purpose if they can solve the challenges with scaling, interoperability, and integration with legacy services.
There’s application in a hypothetical currency free from the corruption of governance. For example, an orange President couldn’t print gobs of money during a pandemic, devaluing your currency, then hand that money to corporations.
No there isn’t. Unregulated currencies are still subject to corrupt governance, the only difference being that the governance isn’t nominally accountable to the electorate. Literally nothing has stopped Elon from printing scam tokens for his pump and dump schemes and keeping the extracted value for himself.
This is what happens to IT professionals when the centralization of textbook design is no longer appropriate the situations. All they’ve got is a hammer. So, everything’s a nail, even if it means lying.
Bitcoin is the only inflation resistant currency I know of.
It’s not a very useful currency if deflation is making people hoard it…
The current situation, where those closest to the issueing party of new currency reap the biggest reward, also sounds not very usefull. Therefore I do applaud alternatives, be they not perfect.
