michael_nielsen

Is it possible to have a climate-friendly variant of bitcoin where miners can only operate using negatively priced electricity (surplus from renewables)? They'd then mostly have the effect of making it more economic to increase the contribution of renewables to base load.

I don't immediately see how to ensure that only negatively priced electricity (or, at minimum, renewable) could be used. There might be some clever authentication process possible, though...

*"increase the contribution of renewables to the _grid_", not base load.

An amusing enforcement mechanism would be to require that power-generating entities participating could only be paid for power in the underlying coin - let's call it greencoin.

Mining a block would require specifying who you bought your power from, and the price (negative!) paid - i.e., a pointer to the relevant transaction - in addition to the standard things done in mining.

Lots problems with this. Still, an amusing idea, and if it could be made to work would address two big problems simultaneously.