Author Topic: crypto currency based on energy or computation  (Read 3389 times)

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Offline Markus

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The price/value of a specific energy not only depends on location1) but for many2) types of energy also on time3).
How are you going to consider this in your energy hierarchy?

1) Compare the price of natural gas in the US and Japan or even just the pump price of petrol in metropolitan areas to remote rural areas.
2) Especially those not easily storeable: Electricity, Light, Heat
3) Have a look at any market traded energy carrier. Short term price fluctuations are largest with electricity spot prices which can vary by one order of magnitude in a day and even become negative.

Offline puppies

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With this new type of measurement you can define the real wealth of everything. Because everything in our universe uses energy.
The "real" wealth is very different from the "economic" wealth ( capitalism monetary wealth).

Let me know if I'm being a stickler or missing the point, but I see a lot of posts like this.  I'm glad that you realize that wealth is not measured with current currencies, but it seems to me that you are trying to find a different currency model with which you can measure (true) wealth. 

The problems with this is that wealth just like value is a subjective thing.  What you consider wealth I might consider trash and vice versa.

Today at work I was looking at a recently vacated positions pay grade.  It's within field of expertise, and I'd have a decent shot at getting it.  This pay grade would give me a roughly $40k per year raise.  I'm not rich, this is a decent chunk of change for me.  It would however require me to travel a lot, probably even relocate to LA.  The result is that I am not interested.

Now maybe if I was having a hard time making ends meet, or was single it would be more attractive to me, but I'm happy and comfortable, and dare I say still in love.  That in my opinion makes me more wealthy than if I took this position. 

I'm going to badly paraphrase bastiat here.  Wealth cannot be measured in money or in the sign of money, but rather in the real satisfactions of our daily lives.

If I've missed the point please ignore me.  I'm a big fan of competing currencies.  Just don't pretend that they are a measure of wealth or value.
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Offline biophil

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hey biophil, one question : if you had a generally accepted way for accounting energy transfers, it would be possible for you to calculate an accurate energy balance?

...thats the basic idea behind emergy, putting different kind of energies into comparable units.

The problem with emergy is that is not 100% exact theres always uncertainty.

I ve read also that its possible to measure the amount of uncertainty of emergy calculations, but i dont know what can be this useful for.


If there is a margin of error in emergy calculation , what do you think about using all the nodes ( owners of emergy coins)  in the net to fix in a collaborative way this error and get a consensus of what is gonna be the fixed value?






Tipon, emergy is a fun theoretical concept, but I'm guessing that in this system you're envisioning you'd need to tabulate emergy values for all different types of energy conversions. Do you have any idea how difficult that would be to do accurately? I worked in the renewable energy industry several years ago and we never were able to calculate an accurate energy balance for our product alone, much less for biofuels in general. The problem wasnt that we didn't try; it was that there is no generally accepted way to account for energy transfers. If we accounted for it one way we'd get vastly different values that if we accounted for it another way. I think emergy is a useful concept because it threatens our intuitions about how energy works, but I'm not sure it has great practical quantitative value.

Furthermore, how could you ever create a cryptocurrency that "knows" how much emergy this or that thing has, when humans can't even calculate precisely how much emergy it has?

I'm not trying to shoot down OP's idea, but I'd love for him to elaborate a little on how it might work.

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I think computing energy balance is still hard and maybe even chaotic. Think about energy balance for a liter of biodiesel:

One energy input is the electricity to run the plant and keep the lights on. This electricity comes from some combination of coal, nuclear, and renewables. Let's look at the nuclear: uranium has to be mined, transported, refined, and when its gone through fission, the waste has to be disposed of. All of those steps require energy. Take refining: the centrifuges have to be built somewhere, and it costs energy to do that. You could keep playing this game forever.

The point I'm trying to make is that it's computationally infeasible to compute an accurate energy balance because the energy web is so tightly interwoven. The only way you can figure out a product's energy cost is to make some educated guesses along the way. There's nothing wrong with that, but you could never guarantee that a mistake somewhere wouldn't throw the whole calculation off. Throw eMergy into the mix and you dramatically increase the complexity of an already-challenging problem.

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Offline tipon

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hey biophil, one question : if you had a generally accepted way for accounting energy transfers, it would be possible for you to calculate an accurate energy balance?

...thats the basic idea behind emergy, putting different kind of energies into comparable units.

The problem with emergy is that is not 100% exact theres always uncertainty.

I ve read also that its possible to measure the amount of uncertainty of emergy calculations, but i dont know what can be this useful for.


If there is a margin of error in emergy calculation , what do you think about using all the nodes ( owners of emergy coins)  in the net to fix in a collaborative way this error and get a consensus of what is gonna be the fixed value?






Tipon, emergy is a fun theoretical concept, but I'm guessing that in this system you're envisioning you'd need to tabulate emergy values for all different types of energy conversions. Do you have any idea how difficult that would be to do accurately? I worked in the renewable energy industry several years ago and we never were able to calculate an accurate energy balance for our product alone, much less for biofuels in general. The problem wasnt that we didn't try; it was that there is no generally accepted way to account for energy transfers. If we accounted for it one way we'd get vastly different values that if we accounted for it another way. I think emergy is a useful concept because it threatens our intuitions about how energy works, but I'm not sure it has great practical quantitative value.

Furthermore, how could you ever create a cryptocurrency that "knows" how much emergy this or that thing has, when humans can't even calculate precisely how much emergy it has?

I'm not trying to shoot down OP's idea, but I'd love for him to elaborate a little on how it might work.

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Offline biophil

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Offline Empirical1

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I don't understand. I think we can define things in terms of their 'Emergy' but two things with the same 'Emergy' can be valued very differently so I don't think it can work as a currency. For example, wouldn't the Mona Lisa be worth the same 'Emergy' as some other really bad painting?

Offline tipon

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yes, good point.
Emergy of all processes and things in the earth can be calculated but not in a 100% accurate way.
I think this means that a mechanism should be developed in the block chain that allows the users of emergy coins to achieve consensus on what is the accurate value.
So the accurate value should be based on consensus  of the descentralized nodes (swarm intelligence).

Whats OP?

At this moment I  dont know how to elaborate the idea because im new with crypto currencies but i hope we all can elaborate the idea.






Tipon, emergy is a fun theoretical concept, but I'm guessing that in this system you're envisioning you'd need to tabulate emergy values for all different types of energy conversions. Do you have any idea how difficult that would be to do accurately? I worked in the renewable energy industry several years ago and we never were able to calculate an accurate energy balance for our product alone, much less for biofuels in general. The problem wasnt that we didn't try; it was that there is no generally accepted way to account for energy transfers. If we accounted for it one way we'd get vastly different values that if we accounted for it another way. I think emergy is a useful concept because it threatens our intuitions about how energy works, but I'm not sure it has great practical quantitative value.

Furthermore, how could you ever create a cryptocurrency that "knows" how much emergy this or that thing has, when humans can't even calculate precisely how much emergy it has?

I'm not trying to shoot down OP's idea, but I'd love for him to elaborate a little on how it might work.

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« Last Edit: April 28, 2014, 03:58:33 pm by tipon »

Offline biophil

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Tipon, emergy is a fun theoretical concept, but I'm guessing that in this system you're envisioning you'd need to tabulate emergy values for all different types of energy conversions. Do you have any idea how difficult that would be to do accurately? I worked in the renewable energy industry several years ago and we never were able to calculate an accurate energy balance for our product alone, much less for biofuels in general. The problem wasnt that we didn't try; it was that there is no generally accepted way to account for energy transfers. If we accounted for it one way we'd get vastly different values that if we accounted for it another way. I think emergy is a useful concept because it threatens our intuitions about how energy works, but I'm not sure it has great practical quantitative value.

Furthermore, how could you ever create a cryptocurrency that "knows" how much emergy this or that thing has, when humans can't even calculate precisely how much emergy it has?

I'm not trying to shoot down OP's idea, but I'd love for him to elaborate a little on how it might work.

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Offline toast

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HI ,  some time ago i been thinking about the possibility of using energy as currency.
Creating a new currency based on thermodynamic laws and the eMergy concept proposed by Odum.
Odum used to say that money in our system is not a good way of measuring the real wealth of something because our economic system doesnt take in consideration energy and the work done by nature.  So he created a new way of measuring the "real" wealth of things, based on energy laws and in the hierarchy of energy.

Hierarchy of energy means that you cannot compare 2 different types of energies using just calories.
2 calories of sun energy are not the same as 2 calories of fossil energy in their capacity to generate work. So in order to compare different types of energy ( and  everything !, not just energies ) you need this hierarchy of energy that allows to convert the calories  from one type of energy to another.
For example 1 cal of fossil fuel is equal to 2000 cal of sun energy.

With this new type of measurement you can define the real wealth of everything. Because everything in our universe uses energy.
The "real" wealth is very different from the "economic" wealth ( capitalism monetary wealth).

With a new currency that integrates this , it would be possible to integrate the currency to the dynamics of the planet and nature, it would be possible to create a new sustainable world at large scale.



What do you think about this idea?
Is it possible use these technologies like block chain that work not only in the digital domain but are also attached to real world processes  or things in the real world?

There is Safecoin which uses Proof of Resource.
There is Solarcoin which uses Proof of Solar.

Safecoin is backed by information. Solarcoin is backed by Solar electricity.


https://github.com/maidsafe/Whitepapers/blob/master/Project-Safe.md
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1802166

"backed", no... that is like saying "bitcoin is backed by burned computation time" or even "fiat from gold-plated printing presses is backed by gold"
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Offline luckybit

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HI ,  some time ago i been thinking about the possibility of using energy as currency.
Creating a new currency based on thermodynamic laws and the eMergy concept proposed by Odum.
Odum used to say that money in our system is not a good way of measuring the real wealth of something because our economic system doesnt take in consideration energy and the work done by nature.  So he created a new way of measuring the "real" wealth of things, based on energy laws and in the hierarchy of energy.

Hierarchy of energy means that you cannot compare 2 different types of energies using just calories.
2 calories of sun energy are not the same as 2 calories of fossil energy in their capacity to generate work. So in order to compare different types of energy ( and  everything !, not just energies ) you need this hierarchy of energy that allows to convert the calories  from one type of energy to another.
For example 1 cal of fossil fuel is equal to 2000 cal of sun energy.

With this new type of measurement you can define the real wealth of everything. Because everything in our universe uses energy.
The "real" wealth is very different from the "economic" wealth ( capitalism monetary wealth).

With a new currency that integrates this , it would be possible to integrate the currency to the dynamics of the planet and nature, it would be possible to create a new sustainable world at large scale.



What do you think about this idea?
Is it possible use these technologies like block chain that work not only in the digital domain but are also attached to real world processes  or things in the real world?

There is Safecoin which uses Proof of Resource.
There is Solarcoin which uses Proof of Solar.

Safecoin is backed by information. Solarcoin is backed by Solar electricity.


https://github.com/maidsafe/Whitepapers/blob/master/Project-Safe.md
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1802166
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you can just create a bitAsset for the different types of energy. i haven't looked fully into emergy but it seems like a worthwhile concept.

Offline tipon

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toast you are wrong, eMergy and the hierarchy also take in consideration information and computation, thats  why i used the word "computation" in the topic.
Instead of having a "proof of work" that is lost work, is it not possible that the money is itself the work?

So you exchange power of computation ( that is in escence another manifestation of energy) to others, or use it as currency.


what do you think?



You should read this book.


http://www.amazon.es/Environment-Power-Society-Twenty-First-Century/dp/0231128878




Offline toast

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You are ignoring the value of information which deals with configurations of energy. I would rather have a ton of plutonium and a nuclear engineer than two tons of plutonium.
Do not use this post as information for making any important decisions. The only agreements I ever make are informal and non-binding. Take the same precautions as when dealing with a compromised account, scammer, sockpuppet, etc.

Offline tipon

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HI ,  some time ago i been thinking about the possibility of using energy as currency.
Creating a new currency based on thermodynamic laws and the eMergy concept proposed by Odum.
Odum used to say that money in our system is not a good way of measuring the real wealth of something because our economic system doesnt take in consideration energy and the work done by nature.  So he created a new way of measuring the "real" wealth of things, based on energy laws and in the hierarchy of energy.

Hierarchy of energy means that you cannot compare 2 different types of energies using just calories.
2 calories of sun energy are not the same as 2 calories of fossil energy in their capacity to generate work. So in order to compare different types of energy ( and  everything !, not just energies ) you need this hierarchy of energy that allows to convert the calories  from one type of energy to another.
For example 1 cal of fossil fuel is equal to 2000 cal of sun energy.

With this new type of measurement you can define the real wealth of everything. Because everything in our universe uses energy.
The "real" wealth is very different from the "economic" wealth ( capitalism monetary wealth).

With a new currency that integrates this , it would be possible to integrate the currency to the dynamics of the planet and nature, it would be possible to create a new sustainable world at large scale.



What do you think about this idea?
Is it possible use these technologies like block chain that work not only in the digital domain but are also attached to real world processes  or things in the real world?