Producers and owners: GreenCoin grows by telling your friends. The website is
up and live. It isn't really visually wonderful yet but it does have a good backend that services the coin well. It does what it needs to for right now: allows users to
sign up their renewable system and get paid free coins. It has been paying out every day for over 100 days. GreenCoin operates under a very simple mechanistic premise:
1) sign up your renewable system
2) get verified
3) bank free coins
Check out the
network page, we've offset 9,451 kg CO2 by paying out 143.06M greencoins to renewable producers.
Allcoin's last is 12 satoshis, and bitcoin's last is $427, so that's 286 M GRE * 12 * 1e-8 * 427 = $14,600 at these current prices, which is the market cap of GreenCoin. But GreenCoin isn't just a coin, it's a commodity-backed asset and dividing the market cap by 9,451.7 kg CO2 = $1.55 per kg CO2. The total value number ($15k) is obviously small potatoes on a global scale but the per kg CO2 is not, and is actually pretty interesting. This type of value provides for $0.75 per kWh of PV solar generated (481 g CO2 offset per kWh) and a whooping $11 for a gallon of biofuel (~7 kg CO2 offset per gallon for biodiesel versus petrodiesel). Do you think biofuel producers would struggle against petroleum if they had an $11 dollar incentive ON TOP of their usual and customary sales revenue? Granted, the coin is very small and relatively unknown and the prices above could very well be more associated with general speculation around what may become of it, but that's interesting in itself; that a newly created asset can price BOTH the future value of it's impact as well as it's current base value (in this case in carbon offset). And this is the real value in my opinion, the coup de grace of a market based carbon offset system in one sentence: Governments price carbon at its
face value and GreenCoin prices it at its
social value. Why is the latter so important? Because we have no chance of reigning in the problem given the current price of carbon and the lack of a global authority to enforce it. Changes will not occur fast enough. We need to hit 2050 emission targets by 2022 and 2100 targets by 2030. Our current efforts (read: lack thereof) will not get us there. In fact,
they are not even close. If we want to change the direction we must develop and utilize a mechanism of pricing and trading the value of the problem with each other.
