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Comment by Tloewald | Hacker News Reader

There'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.

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Sadly, 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.

My 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.

Yeah, 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.

Devil'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

"mine BitCoins in a carbon-neutral fashion."

That is a very interesting notion. I'm not sure how you'd implement it, particularly with different amounts of carbon emitted from different means of generating power, &c.

I was thinking carbon-neutral for the individual miner, not for the whole network. The latter would be a very ambitious project.

Do you just mean individual miners individually going out and purchasing carbon credits? What would motivate that, when the thing they're producing is fungible (and thus it can't strengthen their brand, &c)?

I'd applaud it in any event, but it seems like something that can't really be enforced and is unlikely to be widespread without enforcement as I have no real means of converting my approval into anything tangible or even directing it where it belongs.

I'm thinking something far simpler: solar panels hooked to a battery, which is hooked to a minimalist mining rig that runs as often as it's able. Self-powered mining, other than the minimal amount used for passing network traffic, and whatever's used by the pool.

Ah, also interesting, though I'm skeptical about it recouping investment in reasonable time.

If it actually became common, it would mean mining would move East-West with the day, and North-South with the seasons.

"USD is already de-facto backed by oil [Petrodollar]"

Kind of, but not really, and not in a free market way. The $ is backed by the us military. You can't have competing currencies becoming Petro-X. If you try, you "get democracy" in your country.

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