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.

Yeah that is the single most important issue why the whole project is probably flawed. It was addressed in some other comment by some other thoughful commentator in a slightly different way. I know Ethereum (and other PoS chains) pretty well too, and I understand permissionless.

It shouldn't be authorized. Ideally, through the energy meter, only solar (and other renewable) energy generated should be able to mint the coins. There should be some kind of protocol or consensus mechanism that would accomplish that. I guess no such protocol exists :) Thanks!

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!

My fundamental hope was that with this idea solar energy generation would be boosted by some order of magnitude, and that people and communities would own the infrastructure and not be dependent on any government agency. Solarpunks say a lot that Solarpunk is about communities and people, and for such a vision, I thought that independence (self-reliance?) is a major requirement. However, after reading a lot of very thoughtful responses, like yours, I already came to the conclusion that it won't work in the way I explained. But I wanted to honor the time you took to respond.

The idea about the tokens would be that you could go to any community doing this thing, and use them there. They would not be confined to where the energy was generated. You generated in a LA neighborhood but spent somewhere in NYC. Even in Seoul or Kuala Lumpur, because they are kWh and not USD, so there's that utility. Consumers need to buy anyways, right? Of course the only reason to why they would buy tokens instead of paying in USD is if it would be cheaper, or if it offered some kind of other surplus utility or ease of use - for example if the tokens can also be used to pay your energy bill, or any other good. Which requires that those tokens somehow become widely accepted.

None of these criteria seem to be properties of the design I propose, and various people have already pointed out serious flaws or areas for improvement. So I guess the idea was noble but not so feasible :) Thanks!.

My fundamental hope was that with this idea solar energy generation would be boosted by some order of magnitude, and that people and communities would own the infrastructure and not be dependent on any government agency. Solarpunks say a lot that Solarpunk is about communities and people, and for such a vision, I thought that independence (self-reliance?) is a major requirement. However, after reading a lot of very thoughtful responses, like yours, I already came to the conclusion that it won't work in the way I explained. But I wanted to honor the time you took to respond. I know very well how the electrical grid works, as my primary education was electrical draftsman, so I understand all your points and I agree - although for some of them, there can be solutions - that's what engineering is about. But as there are fundamental flaws in this design, there's no point in delving deeper. Thanks!

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.

That's incorrect. Blockchains are not a feature of capitalism. Cryptocurrencies (mostly) are. The only reason why they haven't been able to replace the banking system is that they live in a purely digital realm. What can you do with some digital tokens which you have obtained bypassing the government and powers? Not much. If you want to buy a house, or a car or anything substantial, you have to legalize your earnings, essentially mooting the very thing the "revolutionaries" thought they were doing (bringing down the banking system). So, they moved to do DeFi and other "virtual" stuff (basically a Casino), pretending they never meant to do that.

I still believe blockchains have potential, but I agree with most commentators here, not for the wrong use cases. And my own idea seems to be the wrong use case. Alas, my goal was to increase and incentivize solar energy generation while giving control to people and communities, more than what utility companies allow us to do.

Yep, real blockchain know-how here. I answered to this partly here I think (if I am linking correctly) https://slrpnk.net/post/17009217/13027204. The real issue there is how would anyone be prevented to register a new private key as a validator. Hard-wiring that into the hardware creates new problems. So I guess this is the argument where it all could fall apart, just technically. Thanks.

I can't blame you for this sentiment because there is a lot of scamming. So is the current monetary system btw, even at a bigger and blunt scale.

Crypto is just math, what people do with it is something different. It's a tool, and it can be used for good as for bad.

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.

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.