Proof-of-Work-by-Renewable-Energy

Description

Rafe Furst:

"Our aim is to create a blockchain protocol in which mining can only be done by verified renewable sources of energy. We are exploring high-tech verification, but at the very least we can incentivize decentralized witnesses to enforce the policy (see for example Steem Witnesses). By incentivizing the mining of EnergyCoin (rather than delivering energy to the grid), we have a potential problem: if producers of renewable energy are incentivized to mine, who will provide power to households and businesses?

With Bitcoin (and other PoW tokens) once energy is spent on mining, it is no longer usable. With EnergyCoin, each mined token comes with an obligation (on the part of the producer) to deliver clean energy to the holder of the token, on demand.

This is analogous to the way gold-standard currency was redeemable on demand for gold. These “smart futures contracts” will be enforced by the PoWRE protocol, and Miner-Producers who violate a contract will be blacklisted and banned from the PoWRE network.

If and when an EnergyCoin is redeemed, the coin is destroyed, so that the price of EnergyCoin is loosely pegged to the market value of all the outstanding future contracts. The amount of energy due under each new contract will be dynamically set to minimally clear actual energy demand; in other words, EnergyCoin mined in excess of the world’s actual energy needs will become a growing reserve of value owned by the network of EnergyCoin holders." (https://medium.com/@RafeFurst/energycoin-d08ddcab4a0c)

More information

• more on the EnergyCoin via [1]: "A worldwide reserve currency, backed by renewable energy, which in turn backs a universal basic income for all."