Proof-of-Carbon-Capture

As The Economist recently pointed out, if humanity is to avoid potentially

cataclysmic climate change in the coming decades limiting carbon emissions is simply insufficient. Even if tomorrow we all drove electric cars and generated electricity with wind and solar exclusively, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is already too high. Removing CO2 from the atmosphere now a necessity.

There are many, many obstacles to this imperative as their front cover article discusses.  Notwithstanding climate change deniers awaiting the four horsemen, a massive global collective action conundrum, and feeble/nascent R&D, this is a problem that will not wait for a next election cycle. We need to start pulling carbon out of the atmosphere yesterday.

Planting trees is a simple and elegant natural solution. Unfortunately, trees are slow to grow, compete for water and land that is needed for human sustenance, and at risk of pouring carbon back into the atmosphere when the trees burn or are harvested for human processing.

Chemical solutions, like calcium hydroxide, have been shown effective at capturing CO2, but no scalable application has demonstrated that it can deliver a minimum viable product. Innovative solutions such as Swiss Climeworks’ direct air capture (DAC) plants are beginning to show the economic viability of capturing and selling carbon. Unfortunately, start up costs are in the millions of dollars, thus likely requiring concerted political/governmental effort to scale globally. As we have seen, focusing the minds of politicians beyond their next election is futile and unelected leaders have almost no incentive to act as the brunt of climate change is falling on the non-elite.

Enter blockchain and the potential for global decentralized ‘mining’ of economic value by demonstrating effort. Right now, Bitcoin is an environmental disaster, burning through astounding amounts of energy to compute proof-of-work solutions on specialized hardware. The original idea of the decentralized network of Bitcoin mining nodes was that people could use their home computers to run cryptographic hash guesses in a race to confirm blocks of transactions on the network. The winning nodes are rewarded with bitcoins.

Skeptics of this borderless economic enterprise abound, but what can be said with confidence is that Satoshi Nakamoto opened some box or squeezed something out of a tube. Today there are probably over a 1,000 cryptographic tokens modeled on the Bitcoin blockchain concept.  These tokens are traded and speculated on by a new community of young tech-savvy pseudo-investors. I use the term ‘pseudo’ because the economic activity around these tokens is extremely gamified, almost entirely stripping out Warren’s value fundamentals. For regulators this is a shocking and dangerous, but it offers an important insight that could be harnessed for the good of the planet.

People (at least in countries where I have lived) like making money, especially easy money. Lifting things and showing up at the office are falling out of favor as a social value. We increasingly want winning lottery tickets, instant American Idol fame and fortune, or a least some quick bucks from swapping digital tokens or video game swords and shields. So proof-of-carbon-capture.

Perhaps we could develop a network where normal people with a few thousand dollars could set up small DAC filter systems and join a global network that rewards them economically for demonstrating that they are pulling carbon out of the air. There are lots of issues to work out, such as how to verifiably connect ‘on-chain’ representations of carbon-capture, with ‘off-chain’ actual real-world carbon capture, or how to ensure that the energy used isn’t being stolen from the local coal plant or that captured carbon is not improperly dumped or otherwise used to game the system. There are lots of problems and maybe the idea is completely unworkable, but much smarter people than me are already working on how to make crypto assets more environmentally friendly. 

Are you one of them?

Proof-of-work as a primary motivator of human value

What is the great limiter of a human being? Death and decline. Human impermanence is the foundation of the app economy (saving you valuable time) as well as Buddhism (relinquishment of attachment to things that will fail and fade away). Because human lives all terminate, and as living beings we relish our aliveness, time becomes the most valuable item.  That is why, when people cross social norms (or unscrupulous despots), time is what is taken from them through prison (or worse). In certain cultures, the fetish of youth lionizes that unholdable virtue of vigorous life that time takes from everyone.

Human beings are collector monkeys. We are primates that delight in and excel at collecting and storing things. This is how early womankind probably shifted from sustenance-level hunter-gathering (also a collecting and storing activity) to civilization-making agriculture. Collect and store. “The individual (and competing) collection of shiny things” describes the core of our current economic model. People collect things, ideas, status, power, and other people. The one thing we have so far failed at successfully collecting is time.

Time continues to slip through our fingers just as it has for millennia. The inescapable and melancholy passage of time, that takes everything from us, inspires and directs our most sincere art, or religious ideals and practices, as well as the structures of our families and social orders.

The race to bottle up time has been on for a long time and modern medicine, from the mundane (antibiotics) to the bizarre (cryogenic freezing), is a response to that deep human need to try to collect time. Just a bit more. Before we go.

Modern management gurus are learning that time is the new gold watch. Retirement and pensions are becoming laughable bygone Technicolors, rendering a heartless fraud the promise of future time to be with family in exchange for unrelenting work now. Time was invented in the factory mills to order humans as laborers. The company stopwatch timed the part-worker and determined if they would be kept on tomorrow. Wages are paid by the hour; lawyers bill by the fraction of an hour; and politicians govern in tranches of years. Time limits and motivates us all.

Enter Bitcoin. What does this have to do with Bitcoin (or more importantly, the future economy)? Hashcash; Solomon shell money; and the proof-of-work. Bitcoin is built on a decentralized model that rewards time-consuming work (calculating a valid block hash), essentially the investment of time (and energy and hardware - also made up of someone’s time). This process is at base the same as the millennia-old practice of adding shells to strings used as currency in the Solomon Islands. The demonstration of the effort (and time) expended on the strands is immediately self-evident to an observer seeing all the little shells tightly bound in neat rows.  This is how winning blocks are verified on the Bitcoin protocol - a first-to-the-post proof-of-work, neatly combing the ancient value in time investment with modern concepts of “first-is-best”.

Bitcoin, therefore, rewards the investment of time (not only in running the hashes, but in setting up the hardware and facilities to compute the hashes). A brief review of some other human endeavors shows how widespread and deeply ingrained this proof-of-work (i.e. proof-of-time-spent) value is in the human psyche.

In sport, the proof-of-work is the demonstration of hours, months, and years of practice, training, and toning, be it in individual exercise and time spent honing the body, or in group sports and time spent developing and executing strategy and skill. In e-sports (yes, playing video games is a sport now, ever since watching people gamble became a sport[1]), becoming a champion player is a clear expression of the intense amount of time invested in the effort.

Art, in all its forms, tends to convey the time the artist spent developing their skill and then crafting their art. The rapper who has developed her style and poetry from an early age; the 16^th century academia-trained classical painter; the lifetime masterpiece of the composer; the years of experience in the hands of a craftswoman; the novelist hammering out words for days, weeks, years.

The concept of the meritocracy values time (as it translates to experienced skill) above all else.

It is possible, and I believe, that the proof-of-work, recently popularized as a concept by Bitcoin, is a fundament of human valuation. It seems to be a universal value, seen across time and cultures. It could be the atomic building block of our value system and in turn our civilizations. Bitcoin will fail; the Westfalian state will fail. All fall to the ceaseless master of time. That is why we value time above all else and value those people, places[2], and things that readily show us that time (the most valuable resource to a human being) has been preciously spent.

This understanding/belief about human value is a cornerstone is sheparding in the next economy. The current economy is broken and dead, staggering on as reflected in the recent popular fascination with zombies (from Romero to GoT). The mill’s wage hour does not compute a sustainable life. The relentless and successful collection of money and power over time has reached an unstainable level. Automation and artificial intelligence change what is means to be a human with respect to the value of work and time spent working. Adjustment is coming, either in disconcerting increments or rending tumult. Work is dead, but the people considered “workers” are not.[3] A new economy that values humans as beyond workers or consumers must be born.

As we learn a new nomenclature and way of thinking about how people “make a living” and “fit into society” we must understand what people value.  People seem to value time and the proof-of-work and time spent.  How this transl

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[1] It’s interesting to reflect on societies’ difficult relationship with gambling. Could this relate to the apparent disconnect between a reward (equally possible for the one-time ticket buyer as for the daily lifetime lottery buyer) and time investment? Gambling appears to offend our underlying value that things are valuable because of the time spent on them, not the “unfair” results of random outcomes.

[2] It is notable that people spend tremendous sums planning trips to see ancient buildings, while the 1950’s US tract-house tourism industry has yet to gain any momentum.

[3] Proponents of human life and dignity must struggle against forces who would rather kill the worker along with the work, or reduce economic population pressures by unnaturally decreasing our numbers (birth control is a good idea, killing fields are bad).

Brand New Second Hand - The Current Cycle of (American) Xenophobia

For people who study immigration to the United States, there have been clear historic cycles of anti-immigrant sentiment.  In 1798 the brand-new federal government passed laws to keep out European radicals. This was followed by Chinese exclusion, anti-Catholicism, restrictions on eastern and southern Europeans, national origin quotas, English-only, Japanese internment, OperationWetback, etcetera, etcetera. Today’s cycle is just another iteration. Or is it?

The modern world is driven by media, more so than ever before in the history of humanity. It was very hard to hear the high priest yelling from atop the ziggurat.  Today the high priest is in your pocket.

The strength of the United States as a producer of services is it’s brand, or as academics call it “soft power”.  This is a plain truth for anyone who works in a service industry.  Image matters.  In many cases image, and the relationship that follows, is practically the only thing that matters.  Substance behind image is becoming less important—or so the recent U.S. elections would indicate.

The current cycle of anti-immigrant hysteria is marring the image of the United States.  Kennedy and Reagan’s “city on a hill” looks pretty shabby right now. The statute of liberty is an over-priced tourist trap, not an ideal, in 2017.

Like all of the past waves of anti-immigrant fear mongering, this one will pass, one way or another. The question is, what will be left of the brand?

Given the long history of dirty wars, black sites, and WMDtesting and use, the brand of the United States has proven remarkably resilient. Much of this, I would posit, has been due to the fact that the money seems to pour here. People seem willing to ignore a transgression or two or three for a couple pieces of gold or some cheap land.  Here’s the rub.

The West has been settled, the economic boom of the 1950’s and WWII global destruction is long gone, and the world economy is likely entering a period of low growth. The concentration of wealth and the crumbling of the “job” likely mean that money will not gush for most people. Land is not cheap. If the United States can’t wash away its sins with indulgences, its brand becomes increasingly relevant. 

Your services are valued if you are. If the United States appears to the world as a grumpy old white man walling in his wealth, that will be hard to sell. That is not sexy. That is not beyonce.[1] In the era of the image, public political temper tantrums, like the earlier waves of xenophobia, may have a much more damaging effects.

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[1] beyonce: (adj.) the state of being cool and sexy in everything one does; having the air of infinite poise and sex appeal

Migrants & Plutocrats

This post is an extreme oversimplification - a hyperbolic reduction of dynamic complex systems humans do not understand.  This post is a meme, a tweet, a hashtag.  This is a post of the time.

Modern migrants are the tool and byproduct of plutocrats the world-round. 

Plutocrats are the hyper-rich (mostly men) who divert and collect vast lakes of wealth for their purposes, without popular input or moral justification.  

Corrupt, self-interested elites dominate resources in communities and countries everywhere. Many economic theories assert that wealth concentration and elite amassing can “grow the pie” or avoid a zero-sum game.  If these theories are true anywhere, it is evident that they are not playing out for the majority of the world’s population. Thus, elite wealth amassing is often zero-sum, and every dollar, yuan, or sol diverted into the orbit of plutocrats is taken from the average person. In many locations where the pillage is particularly savage or where resources are very scarce to begin with, this diversion of resources results in terrible hardship. Average people are faced with two stark options: 1) wrest back resources from the local elites or 2) migrate.

The “Arab Spring” has shown what is involved with “wresting back” resources - death, asymmetric war, prison, and torture. Only the most desperate or foolhardy opt for revolution. Migration makes sense.

Those responsible for the concentration of local resources are doubly happy to see their victims depart because it is almost always the young, strong, and smart who go.  The revolution is diasporaed.  The unemployed, hungry young people are not in the street marching, they are gone, but they left family. And they send them money.  So not only is the political pressure off to make reforms or share some of the resources, but now, a new resource stream is flowing in that can be gorged on – remittances. Local wealth concentration continues unabated – a profitable dystopic cycle.

The migrants arrive in a new place.  Most of the time, this is not the land-of-milk-and-honey they set out to find, but a nearby place with its own elites busily amassing wealth and disenfranchising the average people.  Sometimes these migrants do make it to places of wealth, but it is irrelevant, the choreography is the same.

Elites amass wealth, the average person suffers the hardship and faces the same quandary – fight with the powerful for resources or migrate. However, in places where migrants have arrived the elites have a new ploy, a new tool.  When the angry take to the streets, offer them a scapegoat – the migrant – the perfect whipping boy.

Migrants have no political sway, they do not belong, and their social networks and clout are often weak or even non-existent. They have no voice to contest the undeserved responsibility laid at their door by those with the money and the megaphone. When the average person notices that there seems to be less wealth to go round, they are told to blame the immigrant.  Given our natural proclivity for tribalism, this scapegoat ploy has yet to fail. Set the average people upon themselves. Continue amassing wealth. Rinse. Repeat.