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.
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.
How would this generated electricity be transferred to the purchaser? So I generate 1 kW of power and get one of these tokens. I put that token up for purchase. Somebody buys that token entitling them to 1 kW. Now how does that 1 kW go from me to them? If the answer is the power company, now you need to rope them into this scheme and I’m not seeing any reason at all why they would do that.
The blockchain solves one problem: trust. Do we really have that problem in normal energy markets?
People who buy and sell energy would need to trust each other and the middle man in between them. If they have trust issues, using a blockchain could make sense. As far as I can tell, the current system doesn’t suffer from a lack of trust, so what would the blockchain do in case?
I actually have to disagree with the notion that blockchain (meaning distributed public ledger blockchain for these purposes) solves the trust problem. I’ve yet to see an example where this is actually true.
What public ledger blockchains do is move trust to somewhere off-chain. Consider a common example that’s used by advocates; tracking a banana from source to sale. The blockchain is supposed to create a completely untamperable record that proves the banana in your hands was ethically sourced. But in order for that to actually work, there has to be some way to prove that the banana in your hands corresponds to the record on the chain. And that proof can only come from human verification at each step of the process. So the trust is still there, it’s just in the humans verifying the accuracy of the records rather than in the records themselves. Which is basically how the current system works.
And you’ll find this same problem with basically any and every application of public ledger blockchains as a solution to problems of trust. In the vast majority of cases, sooner or later these trustless, decentralized systems will ultimately defer to trust in a central authority. How do you know your Bored Ape NFT is the real one, and not a copy minted by someone else on the same chain against the same image? You check it with BAYC through OpenSea or whatever platform they’re using. Ethereum has been forked multiple times. How do we know the current “Ethereum” is the true and real version of the ledger? Because the Ethereum Foundation says so.
These systems only solve trust in the same way that sweeping all your trash under the rug “solves” cleaning your apartment.
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.
I’m failing to understand what problem the blockchain would solve that isn’t already solved more efficiently by a regular database…
Not all blockchains work via mining
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.
Sure, if blockchain was created first then it would be novel instead of novelty.
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.
How is it an improvement?
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.
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?
No there isn’t. Unregulated currencies are still subject to corrupt governance, the only difference being that the governance isn’t accountable yo the electorate.
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.
What do you mean, “alternatives”? This sounds like a distinction without a difference.
A little inflation is a good thing. The deflationary cycle is awful.