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.
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.
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.