From my previous posts you already know that I'm skeptical. I may be harsh but there is so many scams in this world there is no way easy to trust people. Even big projects, well organized seem to fails. I got scammed by ShareXcoin, something I would never imagined. The dev has all my trust, I promoted the business and all...
Anyway,
I'm skeptical but I really try to understand your project.
If I understand correctly, you try to be a kind of market carbon. Where people who lower their carbon emission get money (GreenCoin). But unlike the market carbon, pullutant people also get a reward (mining rigs dig GreenCoin even if they produce carbon because they use lot of electricity. Scrypt consuming more electricity than other popular algo.). Philosophically, I think it make no sense to pollute to reward environmentalists.
But this is not the biggest issue I have. If we talk strictly economics...
So we have miners who receive lot of coins that they will probably want to sell for bitcoins.
We have environmentalists that receive free coins, they will also probably want to sell for bitcoins.
That make a lot of people wanting to sell a lot of GreenCoins!
However, what are the incitatives to
buy GreenCoins? If no one has reason to buy them, the price will fall. And soon, no one will want to buy the coin even at 1 Satoshi.
Maybe there is something that I don't understand?
I'm sorry you've been scammed in the past. I lost 6.5 BTC in MtGox so I certainly feel your pain. We are going to great lengths to develop a reputation as being trust-worthy, responsive to the community, and transparent on the operation of the coin. I hope that we come to deserve your trust in the future.
These are good questions and I spent quite a long time (while searching for a dev guru like ncsupanda) thinking about how the whole ecosystem would work. At some level, you make predictions and then you just have to pull the trigger and put it out there and see how the market takes it. In business this is called user testing and the benefit in most businesses is you can react to your user feedback and change the product. This is much more difficult with crypto's because you have to fork. But having said that, here are some comments in response to your concerns:
Scrypt:We chose scrypt for a couple reasons. First, to ncsupanda's point, scrypt asic mining will reduce power consumption considerably for mining in the future. The second reason it has a good, stable history.
As to the power problem: The amount of mining ultimately would be fairly miniscule to the scale of the problem at hand. Global CO2 emissions are clocking over 31 GT annually. Let's take a look at bitcoin: obviously considered to be power-hog, but it's only 0.03% of the grid (I've read this elsewhere, if there is a better number, let me know). Electric power generation contributes 25% of the total global CO2 emissions, so 0.0003 * 0.25 * 31 GT = 2.3 MT of annual CO2 emissions coming from bitcoin's existence, or 0.0075% of all CO2 emissions. Now, we are all hopeful greencoin will become a great coin, and even if it did, I doubt it would be using substantially more power than bitcoin. If greencoin was capable of onlining green energy to even a 1% reduction in global electric power emissions, it means the coin reduces 33X more carbon than is produced by miners. At a 10% global reduction, it's over 300X and so on. Additionally, miners have an incentive to go green on their rigs because they get mined coins AND produced coins. Bitcoin doesn't offer this additional incentive. This is all before you even begin to account for the trade-offs that might actually work in cryptos' favor as an alternative payment system, for example, the energy needed to send payments in more traditional banking ways also uses power (servers, etc), and bitcoin might actually be net "greener."
GreenCoin Market:Ultimately the demand comes from people who otherwise cannot get coins from either mining or producing (or if the latter folks want more). Since GreenCoin is a calculated carbon offset, if you wanted to make your lifestyle carbon neutral or net negative even, GreenCoin essentially gives you a mechanism to do that. For example if you wanted to offset the average American annual per capita emissions of ~17 MT (~1.5 MT per month) you could purchase 1.5 MT of greencoin per month.
For me personally I like to think that something along these lines really needs to be possible. I fly around a lot for work and vacations, and know that a cross country (US) flight is easily 200 kg CO2 per passenger. My solar panels only make about 8 kg a day at their best, so I can never offset my lifestyle on my own. But if I can buy this from other folks that produce much more than me, that would be awesome. This is what greencoin is designed to effectuate.
I hope that helps a little and I'm glad your at least interested in the concept enough to ask. We welcome other comments, feedback and questions from others as this project matures.