You can evade taxe today. And the government does not have direct access to your bank account right now. It will with a digital USD, and because everything will have to run through their digital USD, everything is tracked, and you can’t evade anything. Give it a thought, there is a huge difference.

Thaaank you for a different view on things, finally. To be honest, I am myself also a bit a critic of bitcoin - most of the bitcoin green talk is green-wash, after all…However, the thing is that blockchains and cryptocurrencies are still relatively recent science.

And the ONE single thing which moved me to write this post and share my idea, even if it was shattered (I don’t mind if it just not good enough), was one of the phrases in that video: “…SPEED UP THE TRANSITION TO RENEWABLE ENERGY, BECAUSE ENERGY IS MONEY”. That is exactly my thesis, and my whole thinking (now several years!) revolves around how to make it actually real. If renewable energy was literally money, then there would be no inflation, things should work much more stable, because you can’t print energy out of thin air!

So first of all thank you, and if you have more resources around how renewable energy is money, but especially, how to make it literally money (less so about bitcoin though), I’d immensely appreciate!

No they cannot. You still have cash today, which also allows for anonymous transactions and which you can stash away. If today they’d try grabbing your money from your account, you could just move it away. That wouldn’t be possible anymore without approval, count on that. A digital USD is totally not the same, they’d probably just ban cash. It will be all nightmares becoming real. Not saying here crypto currencies are a panacea and the solution, just warning of the woes of a digital USD.

You too are conflating blockchains with cryptocurrencies using proof-of-work. This is simply not what blockchains are.

I am not talking cryptocurrency but blockchains. And governments don’t print real money, they just print money you think is real, because they force you to. And there are crypto currencies which are not printed by rich bros. However, the same way as community currencies like LETS or mutual credit, they have just limited impact. I just say this because the all-round attack “it’s all garbage” simply is not true.

I can turn this around. I have yet to see some of the characteristics of blockchains being solved by some other technology. You may say it’s irrelevant because they are useless, and I am not going to argue against that. But it’s a technology and as such has potential. Maybe not today, maybe never. It’s like Solarpunk. We don’t know if it will ever be real.

I agree as long as you talk bitcoin. But blockchains are NOT just cryptocurrencies, and not all currencies work as you describe like bitcoin.

BTW, when we have digital USD, say goodbye to your financial freedom. The government can (and will) tax you whenever they want whatever they want for the reasons they want (we need to save the economy, we need to bail out banks, etc.). They can even shut you down completely by closing access to your accounts. Because they will only allow the use of the digital dollar, because they will have full control. A totalitarian regime’s dream.

The obvious falsehood is dismissing each blockchain by using bitcoin as a reference. I am NOT talking about bitcoin-style Proof-Of-Work transactions whatsoever. Also, the article you mention is from 2020, where Ethereum was also running Proof-Of-Work, like bitcoin. It doesn’t anymore. I don’t dispute that bitcoin uses incomparable amounts of energy. If you can’t see what I am talking about then thanks for engaging but let’s not converse any longer.

So the primary reason I wrote this post was not to talk about something I am convinced of as a solution, but exactly for people to drill holes and fire everything they have at it. If I don’t have the answers, it would not work in real life. So first of all tI am grateful to everyone who is chiming in.

There is a fundamental aversion in Solarpunk circles towards blockchains. I don’t want to change that, nor argue against that. The crypto space has earned this aversion all by themselves. There is obvious abuse and misallocation through these concepts.

I am an engineer. I have fought all my life to get a balance between my affinity to tech and the harm we are doing to the planet. But - we can’t just all get back to be farmers, can we? I love Solarpunk because it inspires to get to that balance, where we don’t need all to go back to bare basics, but use technology for a harmonious life with our host planet.

Technology is a big word. Can we demonize technology in general? Is the Internet bad? Are EVs bad? Are solar panels bad (think of what it takes to create them!). I am sure that is not an issue here, or so I hope.

Blockchains. Again, blockchains are just data structures. Fundamentally, numbers linked to other numbers. Yes, they require energy, but so does the entire Internet. You wouldn’t blame the Internet as a whole just because it’s used for capitalist maximalization, much more than blockchains are being used for that? Should we stop using it because big corps make most of their money nowadays through the Internet?

Blockchains are also just tools. Yes, most stuff is anti-thetic to Solarpunk. Notwithstanding, I (and many others) believe it has potential to bring about some change. They are fundamentally a more democratic tool because they lower the barrier to entry. Everyone can participate, and nobody can take that away from you. We can argue about democracy too, as democracy per se is a very abstract concept as well, and there are no absolutes nor silver bullets. Every community of any scale has to work it out for themselves, but it’s blatantly obvious that what we call today Democracy is a farce.

Associating crypto-technology to “crypto-capitalist tech fetishism” exclusively, however, is, excuse my counter-pun here, which I also present without personal affront, not understanding the technology as such. There are donating platforms built with crypto. There are also dedicated crypto-leftist groups, check out https://www.reddit.com/r/cryptoleftists/ or their discord channel. There are bioregional and regenerative finance projects who channel resources to people doing great (solarpunk) stuff on the ground. There are a lot of many more great ideas based on crypto. A lot of them fail to get attraction, a lot fail altogether as a project, a lot are too idealistic, a lot just fall under the radar, and a lot are useless. A lot could be done without blockchains, or not at all.

I was not trying to convince anyone that this solar crypto stuff IS Solarpunk, I only tried to get feedback to the question if it is a feasible project with some beneficial properties, these being for example to communally govern resources, and providing income to people (what if shanty-towns would have their solar roofs. A game changer for them) while further boosting solar energy generation. Frankly after reading some replies it doesn’t look like. I don’t mind if people say it is or not Solarpunk, or all the other (always welcomed) dismissing and rejecting critique. The aim was to try to identify if there is merit in even trying. And it looks there isn’t, purely based on practical and economical criteria, like some you did point out in your reply.

“Communal, shared infrastructure” is an abstract concept as well. There is a tension rarely talked about, and it is if this means we need to go back living in small village-like communities only. It often sounds like that. Is that really the end game? I am not sure. In that case yes, blockchains and a whole lot of other stuff are superfluous. However, I assume most people writing here live in cities, with a romanticized ideal of what it means to live in small close-knit communities, because they never actually had the chance to do that. I have. And I have lived in cities. The population share living in cities is constantly growing. Most city people want to continue living in cities. So what we do? Can “Communal, shared infrastructure without growth” as a concept be applied to all scales? Maybe it can, and blockchains could be a powerful tool to mediate the transition to that, due to their unique characteristics of accountability, transparency and decentralization.

Or maybe not. That’s totally fine.

Yeah bitcoin is obviously not going to look well there. However, that’s taking one example and apply to everything, which is inaccurate. Like taking a massive Hummer and take its consumption for every (gas) car in existence.

The blockchain I am talking about wouldn’t have such power consumption because it doesn’t use mining. I have made allusions of how that works in other comments.

Traditional database solutions often don’t consume less, because they are centralized and need to account for all the load. Hence they are fat, difficult to maintain and scale, need backup, and run in energy sucking datacenters where you don’t have control.

Not even speaking of the data. Subject to hacking, manipulation, gated control, data loss, and a myriad of other problems.

Granted, MOST “problems” being thrown blockchains at are non-issues and just a hype hammer looking for nails, but there are genuine use cases where blockchains DOES solve important issues.

There’s no mining. Only a few blockchains require mining today. The energy generation IS the mining. Every kwh which has been generated would just issue a token. Sorry if that sounds mumbo jumbo, but these are actually blockchain technology characteristics.

Yes but you are at the mercy of utility companies, who are often very restrictive. You don’t get as much as you would get on the market, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to resell.

In allowing people generating solar energy to be fairly rewarded. Schemes today are at the mercy of the utility companies. Basically, to incentivize people to generate more solar energy than is already happening. Think of roofs.

I realize this is only meaningful if for some (I guess economic) reason they get more through that than through selling to the grid.