Perhaps a good candidate for mining coins like LivePeer (one of 8-10 actual solid blockchain projects IMO).
I mean, maybe you think their choice to deploy as an ERC20 was a bad choice; fine. But they're not adding any additional computation to the environment.
I don't understand how it's possible to think that LivePeer is bad for the environment without thinking the same thing about, for example, Elastic Transcoder. Your comment reads like a non-sequitur to me.
I'm not familiar with the nitty-gritty, but video transcoding seems to me to be something that can be verified much, much more cheaply than performed.
FWIW, I think they're already launched, so do feel free to break it.
Livepeer uses cryptographic signatures to prove authenticity of the video transcoding results, and that signature can be used as proof to punish cheaters (if you signed the result, you are responsible for the correctness - and since it's easy to validate whether the transcoding is done correctly, anyone can use that signature to punish you by taking away your stake). If no one cheats, no one gets punished. Since the cheater doesn't know how many people are monitoring the results, their best strategy is to be honest.
>Iceland, which is another hot spot for Bitcoin miners, makes use of 100 percent renewable geothermal and hydropower energy sources. The clean energy researcher explains that in this case, the energy demand for miners is almost irrelevant to the health of the environment.
Interesting.
Can anyone suggest a good curated list of solid blockchain projects?
In my experience, the "Build the Free Web" events are usually selected on the basis of actual engineering and not hype; the presenters there are typically from projects that are pretty good.
I work at NuCypher, and I think our project is very much based in sanity and solid programming. I feel confident that people will actually use our token to build interesting distributed things.
When we attend blockchain-oriented conferences, there are a few projects whose teams we usually gravitate towards and who seem (at least to me) to have similar principles (less hype, more logic).
These include LivePeer, Fluence, and Origin (I'm not currently invested in any of those, but actually I think I want to change that).
In addition to actual crypto assets, I also think that the Python tooling is really coming of age and full of a lot of very sober and solid programming - most of the projects that Piper Merriam and Jason Carver touch are worth looking at.