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Comment by lukifer | Hacker News Reader

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

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"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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