You can evade taxe today. And the government does not have direct access to your bank account right now. It will with a digital USD, and because everything will have to run through their digital USD, everything is tracked, and you can’t evade anything. Give it a thought, there is a huge difference.

Yeah that is the single most important issue why the whole project is probably flawed. It was addressed in some other comment by some other thoughful commentator in a slightly different way. I know Ethereum (and other PoS chains) pretty well too, and I understand permissionless.

It shouldn’t be authorized. Ideally, through the energy meter, only solar (and other renewable) energy generated should be able to mint the coins. There should be some kind of protocol or consensus mechanism that would accomplish that. I guess no such protocol exists :) Thanks!

Thaaank you for a different view on things, finally. To be honest, I am myself also a bit a critic of bitcoin - most of the bitcoin green talk is green-wash, after all…However, the thing is that blockchains and cryptocurrencies are still relatively recent science.

And the ONE single thing which moved me to write this post and share my idea, even if it was shattered (I don’t mind if it just not good enough), was one of the phrases in that video: “…SPEED UP THE TRANSITION TO RENEWABLE ENERGY, BECAUSE ENERGY IS MONEY”. That is exactly my thesis, and my whole thinking (now several years!) revolves around how to make it actually real. If renewable energy was literally money, then there would be no inflation, things should work much more stable, because you can’t print energy out of thin air!

So first of all thank you, and if you have more resources around how renewable energy is money, but especially, how to make it literally money (less so about bitcoin though), I’d immensely appreciate!

My fundamental hope was that with this idea solar energy generation would be boosted by some order of magnitude, and that people and communities would own the infrastructure and not be dependent on any government agency. Solarpunks say a lot that Solarpunk is about communities and people, and for such a vision, I thought that independence (self-reliance?) is a major requirement. However, after reading a lot of very thoughtful responses, like yours, I already came to the conclusion that it won’t work in the way I explained. But I wanted to honor the time you took to respond.

The idea about the tokens would be that you could go to any community doing this thing, and use them there. They would not be confined to where the energy was generated. You generated in a LA neighborhood but spent somewhere in NYC. Even in Seoul or Kuala Lumpur, because they are kWh and not USD, so there’s that utility. Consumers need to buy anyways, right? Of course the only reason to why they would buy tokens instead of paying in USD is if it would be cheaper, or if it offered some kind of other surplus utility or ease of use - for example if the tokens can also be used to pay your energy bill, or any other good. Which requires that those tokens somehow become widely accepted.

None of these criteria seem to be properties of the design I propose, and various people have already pointed out serious flaws or areas for improvement. So I guess the idea was noble but not so feasible :) Thanks!.

My fundamental hope was that with this idea solar energy generation would be boosted by some order of magnitude, and that people and communities would own the infrastructure and not be dependent on any government agency. Solarpunks say a lot that Solarpunk is about communities and people, and for such a vision, I thought that independence (self-reliance?) is a major requirement. However, after reading a lot of very thoughtful responses, like yours, I already came to the conclusion that it won’t work in the way I explained. But I wanted to honor the time you took to respond. I know very well how the electrical grid works, as my primary education was electrical draftsman, so I understand all your points and I agree - although for some of them, there can be solutions - that’s what engineering is about. But as there are fundamental flaws in this design, there’s no point in delving deeper. Thanks!

No they cannot. You still have cash today, which also allows for anonymous transactions and which you can stash away. If today they’d try grabbing your money from your account, you could just move it away. That wouldn’t be possible anymore without approval, count on that. A digital USD is totally not the same, they’d probably just ban cash. It will be all nightmares becoming real. Not saying here crypto currencies are a panacea and the solution, just warning of the woes of a digital USD.

You too are conflating blockchains with cryptocurrencies using proof-of-work. This is simply not what blockchains are.

That’s incorrect. Blockchains are not a feature of capitalism. Cryptocurrencies (mostly) are. The only reason why they haven’t been able to replace the banking system is that they live in a purely digital realm. What can you do with some digital tokens which you have obtained bypassing the government and powers? Not much. If you want to buy a house, or a car or anything substantial, you have to legalize your earnings, essentially mooting the very thing the “revolutionaries” thought they were doing (bringing down the banking system). So, they moved to do DeFi and other “virtual” stuff (basically a Casino), pretending they never meant to do that.

I still believe blockchains have potential, but I agree with most commentators here, not for the wrong use cases. And my own idea seems to be the wrong use case. Alas, my goal was to increase and incentivize solar energy generation while giving control to people and communities, more than what utility companies allow us to do.

Yeah this is the best critique in all the answers. I was aware of most of these issues, and I hoped that by sharing the idea, ways to improve it and make it viable would emerge. I was thinking that the same way solar energy can be metered and sold today (after all, you can’t lie about having generated energy you haven’t, can you?), the infrastructure issues could be addressed (being the meter the actual node, and possibly as some kind of light node, which wouldn’t have to store the whole chain). The most important goal however was to boost decentralized solar energy generation, and make it profitable to individuals and self-organizing communities, instead of relying on our slow, gating institutions. Think of shanty-towns in the tropics which could suddenly be contributing to a cleaner world while also resulting to be better off (some credit scheme or something would be required for their investment costs, of course). If this idea doesn’t reach those goals, it’s useless.

I still believe blockchains have potential but this is maybe not the best use case. Thanks!

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.

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.

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.

If your argument is “Public ledger blockchains can be just as efficient as traditional databases”

That was never my argument. If you read carefully, there were other arguments I made in context. I just wanted to put it into perspective. Everything uses energy, and comparing things in tech is often very complex because it depends on a zillion factors.

In a blockchain, to make a transaction you need the node and that’s it. In traditional client server model, a database on its own rarely does the job, especially if you talk transactions and banking. Hence why web servers and all the other layers very well account and are relevant to store a transaction, otherwise it just doesn’t happen. I know because I have done this for a living.

what have you done to actually show that only a public ledger blockchain can solve the problem you’re describing?

What have you done to show it does not? You are only arguing about energy. To date I have yet to see an application where I can send money in sub-seconds to a person in Venezuela which has trouble accessing international markets and censorship by the government. Or creating a tamper-proof land registry which can’t be altered by the government or a rich guy in some developing country. Or a database which can’t be censored, or shut down by a government or some powerful dude. An application which allowed anyone to create money (even if it’s too often misused). Mind you, I am not saying blockchain is good for everything nor that it is the best thing ever invented nor that it does not have problems. Any tech does.

I am sure you will find ways to argue against this, because when someone’s mind is made up there’s little space, but I am not here to convince you, I just stand my ground and make my case. Have a nice evening.

Your answer isn’t good enough either. Aren’t you forgetting application servers, web servers, load balancers, Cloudflare, firewalls and all that stuff which allow a database to just use 0.1J? Because if we are talking VISA and banking scale of transactions that’s what it takes.

Besides, it’s just missing the point. Traditional databases are good and best at what they do - address traditional problems. Blockchains address different problems, so comparing them for completely different use cases won’t work. You can compare MySQL vs Oracle vs PostgreSQL that way.

I don’t know! Maybe it does, maybe not. I am not claiming it does. I like to think about what COULD. Maybe THIS is not the way, I never claimed it does, I am thankful for all replies, which help honing my thinking. But someone may have a brilliant idea.

The obvious falsehood is dismissing each blockchain by using bitcoin as a reference. I am NOT talking about bitcoin-style Proof-Of-Work transactions whatsoever. Also, the article you mention is from 2020, where Ethereum was also running Proof-Of-Work, like bitcoin. It doesn’t anymore. I don’t dispute that bitcoin uses incomparable amounts of energy. If you can’t see what I am talking about then thanks for engaging but let’s not converse any longer.

A “database with appropriate access control” is a completely different use case, not appropriate at all for communal and open, transparent use. You need to have admins, you probably need some management organization altogether, admins can change stuff and it’s difficult to prove they didn’t, and a lot more issues.

However, "What problem are you trying to solve with the blockchain " is the fundamental question which needs to have an answer. I (and others) gave a lot of answers spread over all replies. At the core: no authority in control, complete transparency, unchangeable, decentralized (just like a renewable energy grid should be), everyone can participate.

A good idea does not need to convince, so if these arguments don’t answer the question, either it needs better explaining or it is not that good.

Communal, local infrastructure. Not a grid spanning vast areas, although it could. Look, this might totally not be the way to do it, but essentially to achieve independence we need to break up those monopolies. Otherwise we will always be enslaved to the powers that I thought we wanted to replace. Energy and food independence as well as communal land management I think are fundamental requirements for that - whatever the means, I subscribe. Otherwise I don’t see how a Solarpunk future can be even envisioned.

Blockchains (if used correctly) are good at breaking up such monopolies. But it’s just tech. People need to want and do it. So whatever people say :)

Yep, real blockchain know-how here. I answered to this partly here I think (if I am linking correctly) https://slrpnk.net/post/17009217/13027204. The real issue there is how would anyone be prevented to register a new private key as a validator. Hard-wiring that into the hardware creates new problems. So I guess this is the argument where it all could fall apart, just technically. Thanks.

Can’t disagree, but then why do we think Solarpunk? To have some nice pictures and inspiring stories?