The Green Protocol: A New Vision for Crypto, Pt 2
September 8, 2021·60 comments·Money
Speculation has become the operating system for modern life, turning finance, sports, and politics into dopamine-fueled betting markets. But here's the brutal truth about the systems we've created to fight climate change: they're making the problem worse while pretending to fix it. The gap between what our markets say they're doing and what they're actually doing has become the central failure of our time.
• The speculation layer spreads everywhere because it's addictive and profitable for those in control. It's not a bug. It's the intended feature of a system designed by oligarchs and governments to keep populations engaged and distracted while power consolidates.
• Carbon credit markets exemplify how good intentions become perverse incentives. The EU declared biomass renewable energy, then American forests began disappearing at scale. Hundreds of acres of North Carolina and Georgia trees are cut down daily and shipped to Europe to be burned, all while counting as environmental progress.
• The structural flaw isn't the details. It's the mixing of positive and negative externalities into one market. When polluters can buy offsets from forest owners, actual carbon reduction companies lose pricing power and disappear. Real-world emissions stay flat while symbolic emissions fall.
• Everyone involved knows this is broken. Administrators, oligarchs, politicians. They understand the money flows to forest owners and polluters, not to the companies actually inventing new ways to reduce carbon. Administrative tweaks and standards-setting organizations have changed nothing because they accept the broken protocol as inevitable.
• The question isn't whether we can change a system this entrenched. It's whether we can establish a fundamentally different set of rules before the specification layer calcifies completely. The internet had a window in 1991 where protocols could be rewritten. That window closes fast.
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Comments
This is such an improvement over the current nebulous corporate displays of environmental-mindedness. I’m imagining Exxon-Mobil showing off its TOGs and me actually being impressed since I can compare that to other companies’ TOGs.
Flexing by showing off your TOGs > flexing by showing off your CryptoPunk (hopefully soon).
It is an impressive and thought provoking vision.
Has me thinking about a POG I’m involved with and if this is feasible for it
Thank you Ben
Very exciting stuff! Let me know if you need any beta users.
Outstanding work, Ben. In the blockchain space, you have produced what’s called the “white paper” for this project, or something close to it.
Do you have the technical competence to pull this off? The most important part of this is the “community” of developers you can attract to the project. (BTW - as you probably know, “community” is a defined term in the blockchain space where you will hear the following narrative: “…a vibrant developer community is essential to the success of an early-stage token project.”) It would be very helpful to be able to recruit an industry heavyweight who wants to put part of their efforts into this sort of a project.
Blockchain coders are in high demand right now–but I think your pitch will appeal to a certain number of them for obvious reasons. The thing is, you have to be in the flow, in the blockchain space, so you will have to find developers and coders who are already in the flow. Unless you are familiar with the various puzzle pieces, it’s easy to lose your way. Most protocols have distinct flaws as they trade off among speed, scale, and security. You can have 2 out of the 3, but not all three (yet). But you undoubtedly already know this stuff, having come up with this elegant approach.
The semi-centralized aspect of your protocol to remove certain blocks for certain reasons can be accomplished technically, but the rules and methods for detection and enforcement are going to be a bit more difficult if any discretion is involved. While there are plenty of examples of blockchains that aren’t Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, many (maybe even most?) developers like the DAO model pretty strongly. Among many of the more passionate (and relatively high-profile) in the space, the concept of coding, testing, building a community (i.e. a network), and then essentially walking away is as much a part of the blockchain ethos as are certain libertarian ideals.
But not all crypto-enthusiasts are wild-eyed libertarians. And they all do want to disrupt the existing power structures–first in finance, later in other protocols that disintermediate. They are being co-opted, though, which is one reason your Green Protocol strategy might be able to attract the coder equivalent of an ACLU attorney.
Anyway, fascinating approach, thanks.
One project I’m involved with, Helium, does not have a DAO but instead currently has a corporation which has a percentage of the returns guaranteed to it “by the blockchain”.
It’s still heavily centralized in that Helium Inc controls all of the code going into miners and validators, it picks it’s oracles who are providing USD/HNT data for it’s two token system of Helium/Data Credits which are it’s “stablecoin” like peg of bytes transferred for client devices to USD.
Generally it’s project’s users are not opposed to this level of centralization at the moment, but it did move it’s entire token generation model from a (imo) more sensible fixed inflation system to a “capped” system so that it could be more like “bitcoin”, so that the project could attract more capital. That was something which turned me off and where the lack of a real vote was really felt.
This is a really great read. Almost lost me at the beginning, but by the end I was fully into it. Love the idea and very interested in participating going forward.
One of the first thoughts I had after reaching the end was wanting to make a plan with my kids to plant a tree and show them how we can use the app to provide progress on it. Start small and grow it from there - one tree at a time. I think that would be a great way to help pass on some of my values and let them watch how it progresses.
I love this concept.
What about some mechanism for maintaining existing trees too? Might that be a separate POG? I am thinking of ways to disincentivize planting a bunch of trees, capturing the TOGs, then cutting them down and building a subdivision.
I’ll have to put aside some time to read your entire post, but I want to point you towards Project Drawdown which is a research-based effort to prioritize existing methods for getting to the theoretical future point of drawdown, or when the emissions curve reverses its trajectory and starts going down for good. There is a big debate in sustainability and cleantech circles whether we have to spend enormous amounts money on R&D to solve this (all about the flow!) or if really we just need to spend our resources deploying existing and proven tech like wind, solar, and EVs. I think we must do both but there are pretty good arguments to be made about the profit motives of those who only advocate R&D and future tech.
E.g. this opinion piece in Scientific American about how Bill Gates should STFU about how he thinks Africans should plan their food system, the outcome of which has important consequences for those people and our shared planet. Food for thought of what kind of system you are motivated to build, or perpetuate.
I thought about this too. In addition to the plant a billion new trees POG there should be a keep existing trees POG. I would think that the annual validation system for the TOG and COG’s would solve the subdivision problem as their TOG might exist for the year but once the subdivision goes up, at the next validation point the TOG would be removed or inert or canceled etc.
Great post, @twclix … thank you! To your question “do you have the technical competence to pull this off?”, the answer is definitely NO! I’m a coder and I’ve founded a successful software company, but I’m late to the crypto game and have different skill sets than I did 15-20 years ago. So as you suggest I’ll need to enlist/recruit both a core and peripheral community to help put this together.
I’m definitely a believer in the DAO way, but I don’t think it works for the Green Protocol. My strong sense is that to solve this puzzle of positive externalities using the Coase Theorem, there must be a preservation of property rights, which requires an adjudication and censorship function, which in turn requires a relatively high degree of centralization … at least on those functions. In other words, I can see the validation functions being perfectly decentralized, but I don’t think the embedded contracts here can be fully autonomous. My hope, though, is that even the most fervent DAO-enthusiast will recognize that implementing the (very) libertarian-minded Coase Theorem is just a different way of solving for a shared decentralized goal!
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