We need altcoins as long as we interact economically over the net, with people we do not know (or simply with people outside our local communities). If we try to imagine what qualities a “solarpunk coin” should have, what are your thoughts? Do we know any existing coin, checking all boxes? This question is more about political economy of Solarpunk, then its technology.
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Cryptocurrency is, with few exceptions, looked at with scorn by most solarpunks. This is due to the technology itself being almost exclusively used by grifters and scammers, as well as some inherent problems to the technology itself, which are wonderfully explored in this Folding Ideas video on Crypto, DAOs, and NFTs.
But to answer your question, I think one of the few viable options would be something based on GNU Taler, which is a sort of anonymous digital cash that is distinctly not based on cryptography at all, and thus avoids the unbelievable waste of energy that most Cryptos are plagued with.
Thank you for mentioning GNU Taler.
I have freshly read an interesting article https://www.leafscore.com/blog/the-9-most-sustainable-cryptocurrencies-for-2021/ (the link is weirdly recycled, it is a 2024 piece), showing that there is a number of altcoins (and I use this term deliberately - no ETH or BTC included) trying to solve both the technical and political faults of the initial concept. I believe that, if one designs a currency properly in political sense, the technology can be adjusted as well.
I’m skeptical if such a thing can be done with crypto specifically.
As an example, the top coin in that list, Solarcoin, uses a Proof-of-Authority model, which while very energy efficient, is also difficult to decentralize, and vulnerable to the ‘authority’ acting maliciously. It’s cool that it’s based of solar power generation, but I can’t help but feel that just means the people who are wealthy enough to own solar panels would become rich compared to the have-nots?
Stellar, on the other hand, uses a Federated Byzantine Protocol, which… Honestly it’s too late for me to try to understand it 😅
I guess I have to ask: what is the goal of the theoretical altcoin? Are we spitballing a currency for a post-capitalism world? Something for us to use in the here and now to avoid PayPal fees or zelle? A method for activists to covertly transfer funds?
The reason why will inform the what.
I’m interested in currencies with depreciating value as an incentive to spend or loan money without incentivizing excess wealth hoarding. This was first proposed by Silvio Gesell over 100 years ago but modern digital currencies may make the idea far easier to implement.
Thoughts?
While a good idea in theory, such currencies are never going to be very popular as people loath easily visible and (externally) enforced inflation.
It is also not really all that different from a currency issuing entity regularly making additional money and causing inflation that way. Silvio Gesell developed his theories in contrast to largely gold pegged currencies of his time, and one can argue that fiat currencies of today are already largely implementing his ideas albeit on a larger scale, making the regional benefits less apparent.
The way to make this work is imho to clearly link the inflation to funding of widely agreed on common infrastucture spending through.
It does not work at scale because people who want to stash wealth will just buy things they can later resell, gold for instance. Or dollars.
Yeah I’m not really sure how to overcome this. Maybe povoq is correct that money printing is an easier solution, since it doesn’t require direct participation from the wealthy.
I’m still interested in experimenting with this idea though. Most other forms of wealth besides money have downsides, even gold. Hoarding physical goods is harder to do secretly and requires storage and security costs.
This is the kind of comment that I would expect from a Solarpunk, a critical, curious and hopeful hint to start a discussion towards a positive productive possible outcome, instead of the regular neo-rural cottagecore luddite cryptophobia rants
That wouldnt go very well for poorer people.
Imagine spending 90% of your income to survive while the 10% youre saving for a car/house goes to shit because of a stupid incentive to spend?
Hell no
This is just one idea. It is not meant to solve every problem. Though, frankly, I don’t think your critique is very relevant. The poor typically have little or no savings and spend their money immediately. So they should be largely unaffected by this. And increased spending and lending by the more privileged should benefit the poor to some extent, as will the reduction in the wealthy’s spending power.
But yes I think further ideas and programs would be needed to fully solve poverty. This type of currency would easily accommodate a UBI or similar benefit programs since the natural reduction in money supply would solve any issues of inflation typically associated with large direct payments to citizens.
Its not very cognizant of you to assume that poor people dont/cant save money. Youre implying that they are poor because they dont save or youre implying that they just cant save because of how poor they are which is mostly untrue.
First of all the reason you seem to get downvoted is the term altcoin, which is very much crypto currency, which has a lot of problems in a solarpunk context.
The fundamental problem currencies try to solve is a lack of trust between parties in a trade. Bascially if you get money, you know you can exchange it for something you want right now or later. So it enables transactions between people who do not know each other and do not trust each other, but trust a the third party issueing the currency. Hence a currency needs to be easy to transfer, so people actually use it, stable in value so people trust it, divisible so people can pay a fair price and recognized, so people can exchange it in as many places as possible for as many different types of goods or services as possible.
The way we usually solve it, is by having a government issue the currency. The reason it has value, is that people living in the country issueing the currency have to pay taxes in that currency. So a lot of people actually do need it. Obviously this require governments and gives those governments a lot of power. However there is another way and that is begging the currency to something, which has value. We do that all the time with coupons and vouchers. The problem with that is that the whatever it is being pegged too, can change in value relative to the entire economy. So if you have your currency fixed to say imaginum and there is only a fixed supply of imaginum in the world, but the economy grows twice in size, you end up with 100% inflation. That was a massive problem with the gold standard btw. It was somewhat fixed, by governments printing more money, then they could actually back with gold. Obviously that is not quite the idea.
So given the options a well run government system seems to me to be better. The good part about that, is that this allows to fund public services as well.
However most currency today is not created by governments today. Instead it is created by banks. When a bank gives you a loan, you get cash and the bank gets a gurantee from you worth the loan. You get cash from the bank and for that the bank gets a gurantee that you pay back the loan. The bank does not use its own money for it, but money other bank cutomers have in their bank accounts. Obviously though those cutomers can still pay with the money they have in their bank account using credit cards for example. So a loan basically doubles the money in the system.
So most money is debt and debt has a big problem in the solarpunk world, as it requires more money to be paid back. Hence you need economic growth and that is a really nasty problem. So making banking illegal would solve a lot of problems.
TLDR: Government issued currency, without banking.
You post starts good, but then gets a few things wrong in the end 😅
For example the leverage banks are allowed to have is more like 1:10, meaning they can increase the money supply tenfold or so. It also doesn’t have to be backed by other customer’s money at all.
Interests on bank loans are also only a small part of why capitalism requires constant growth. In fact the recent years of near or partially even below zero interest rates proove that this basically a neglectable part.
In general, increasing money supply isn’t nearly as big of a problem as some people say, as ultimately money is just a means of exchange with no inherent value of its own, so it it good to be able to adjust the supply easily to account for the real world demand. If you want to read more about that the so called Modern Monetary Theory is a good start.
Personally, I would advocate for the exact opposite: (community) banking without government involvement.
While it is true that taxation gives government issued fiat currencies its primary trust, this is ultimately a coercive methode backed by the threat of violence and imprisionment, which is not something that I can support. It is also only one of many ways to structure a currency and have it being trusted by its users, so I think we will be able to figure out something better 😊
Instead of a single currency, we should have many with each currency belonging to a democratic venture commune, an association of worker coops that manages a pool of commonly-owned capital. This currency would get its value by being used to purchase access to the commune’s commonly-owned means of production. It would also have built in transfer and exit fees for extracting value outside of the commune. The value of these fees could be spent by the commune on public goods
@asksolarpunkI’m aware not all coins are proof-of-work mined using coal generators. Proof of stake isn’t punk either.
In all honesty there’s nothing to make better, I believe the central issue with crypto is that it doesn’t solve any real problem.
It’d need to be stable - not a fluctuating investment the way most crypto folks seem to use cryptocurrency.
It’d need to be more private than blockchain crypto. From following the investigations of various crypto heist, it seems like your only defense against anyone being able to track your spending is the obscurity of your wallet. It’s like having every bank account’s activities public with just the names blanked out. I know tumblers and such exist but I’d rather the privacy was built in to the system. This is probably the biggest hurdle since you have to trust someone to keep track of the money, whether it’s a bank or a public ledger.
It’d need to be backed by something other than waste. I know that’s the proof-of-work systems and that there are lighter alternatives that are probably fine. But if there has to be surplus calculations those should go towards distributed calculations for identifying planets or tracking weather patterns or something.
But if there has to be surplus calculations those should go towards distributed calculations for identifying planets or tracking weather patterns or something.
Curecoin rewards completing unfolding proteins with Folding@home with your GPU as a form of distributed medical research, so none of the energy is technically wasted.
I don’t like the idea of a single coin
But one coin generated for hosting a platform, one coin for piracy, one coin for cooperatives etc seems the way to go
Oh right, also one coin for UBI
As per now, I struggle in imagining a layer one chain to support all of these. Probably it would make more sense to stay on eth and eventually move? I’m not sure.
So, do I understand you correctly that we are talking about several “tokens” based on the same chain? I know there are some open chain frameworks (ETH is waaay too capitalist for my liking) that could be utilised - after diligent scrutiny.
Meanwhile, in another subthread, we got to (probably central) question, whether basic risks: double-spending and forgery, could be addressed without blockchain, in a publicly transparent and verifiable way.
Blockchain is just another name for a public (distributed/shared) ledger. Due to scaling and privacy issues of that, this method is inherently unsuited for direct payment use, but it could be useful for an inter-bank exchange market of local currencies.
Why not just trust people?
Why not just trust people
I think you are implying a false dichotomy here, like money and trust are opposed. Anyway, trust in people doesn’t scale at all, it’s trust about platforms that can kinda scale. I do not trust a random person on the other side of the ocean i’ve never seen but if we use paypal and ebay i can kinda trust those 2 platforms
like money and trust are opposed
OK let’s say you owe me a dollar and I just remember that. How is an altcoin superior to you trusting me?
trust in people doesn’t scale at all
So you do think it’s a real dichotomy?
but if we use paypal and ebay i can kinda trust those 2 platforms
If they are paying paypal, you are leveraging paypal to create a threat of violence on them. That’s not very Solarpunk of you.
If they are paying paypal, you are leveraging paypal to create a threat of violence on them. That’s not very Solarpunk of you.
This message is very ironic after having watched just yesterday the sociology lesson about socialization.
First you express that threats of violence are bad and then you express yourself a threat of violence to me. Because violence is actually used at every level to enforce rules and norms. Your attempt of relying to the menace of getting (at idealism level) kicked from the solarpunks is violence itself.
It’s not very solarpunk to immediately rely on violence while discussing ideas :P
So you do think it’s a real dichotomy?
I can trust people without trusting their, and mine, ability to remember everything. When a friend lends me money (trusting that I won’t just take them and ghost them), I keep a txt for every time I give back part of the money. Not because we don’t trust each other and are scared to steal to each other but because we are humans and don’t want to keep everything in the active memory of the brain when we can just write it down.
It’s a tool that has some functions on the microsociologic level and others at the macro one. On a macro one, yes trust can be a part of it if the platform bears some of the refunds part etc.
Trust is a choice. There will always be people who choose not to trust - that is their right and they should not be alienated because of that.
I’m more than happy to alienate them. They don’t trust me, why should society work according to their whims?
Values are not a disability.
Do you really ONLY see disability on this picture? I see different people with different needs. It’s about needs. People have different needs. IF you are more than happy to alienate them, because their needs offend you, you are giving them the right to alienate you. And finally everyone gets alienated. Is THIS Solarpunk for you?
Because that’s not how human nature works. Trust starts to weaken with scale. In a small village you’d be accountable and your life would be made harder for taking advantage of someone, but if you don’t know the person and will never see her again, people feel very safe to risk and make an extra. The consequences of social life differ widely in small and big scale. Plenty of old tales of travelling merchants selling junk for gold, profitting on ignorance.
Because that’s not how human nature works
Solarpunk is optimistic. You’re probably looking for Green Growth or Cyberpunk.
Trust starts to weaken with scale
You don’t need to use an altcoin, you can use the real legal tender of many countries you “don’t trust” to buy stuff. Buy Argentine currency and use it to trade. You need to trust something at some point, and what you’re (maybe unknowingly) doing is trusting authoritarian institutions. Code cannot substitute for that.
Your argument seems to be “Authoritarianism is a reasonable thing to sacrifice in order to enable trustless purchases” in the same breath as “But also I don’t even trust the authorities”, assuming you’re arguing for an altcoin.
