Re: Energy as the ultimate currency (was: Re: Ripple)

Thanks Manu,
that's truly fascinating.

And thanks for engaging in this conversation of great personal interest,
which if it's hijacking this list's purpose I am happy
to move elsewhere.

(I would venture to say though that the moment we have abundant antimatter
energy creation
we may not need any currency, or better, any money, anymore.
But that's completely off-topic so let's put that aside.)

So what I'm interested in is if and how proof-of-work could be implemented
for the
 "amount of energy you have stored in the global
energy network" by *current* renewable energy creation technology.
You mention hydrogen gas, and I wonder if other solar, wind, biogas etc
would be possible as well.

Any community world-wide would be able to contribute to an
abundant money supply...

I understand it should be kind of a hardware device matching energy
generated
to a crypto-currency. I lack the mathematical background to be able to
devise how the proof-of-work should be devised though.

Or maybe I'm even misunderstanding something crucial.


2013/11/21 Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>

> WARNING: This thread is somewhat off-topic for this mailing list. It's
> speculative, we are not working on this at all. The only reason I'm
> diving into it here is to give people an idea of the sorts of thought
> experiments we've carried out in this area in the past.
>
> Only read it if you're intellectually curious about the area of the
> "ultimate currency". This email has almost no bearing on the work we're
> going to be doing here over the next 2-3 years since the technology or
> infrastructure to accomplish what's outlined in this email doesn't exist
> yet.
>
> On 11/20/2013 03:32 PM, Patrick Logan wrote:
> > "Ultimately, I think humanity will settle on "energy" as the unit of
> >  direct exchange since that's the only really stable currency over
> > the long term."
>
> Arthur Britto wrote:
> > We did not consider energy. That's an intriguing and elegant
> > thought.
>
> Patrick Logan Wrote:
> > Absolute naive lurker here... any recommendations for reading about
> > this? I could be completely misunderstanding what this means.
> >
> > My first thought is, how could that be? Currency is virtual and can
> > be exchanged virtually for relatively little energy.
>
> I think Joseph has provided a few links, but it'll take you quite some
> time to go through the literature. I'm going to try and summarize the
> thinking in this area in the rest of this email. None of it originated
> in my head, I'm merely summarizing the thoughts of other people that are
> much smarter than I am.
>
> This line of reasoning came out of the physics and mathematics
> communities. Everything boils down to physics and mathematics at the end
> of the day. :P
>
> Ultimately, there is only one currency that holds its value throughout
> time and that is energy. It's the only thing you can store that will
> keep its value over billions of years.
>
> 1 megajoule of energy is going to do the same thing at 1 billion years
> from the big bang as it does at 10 billion years from the big bang. The
> best way that humankind has dreamed up to store energy over long
> timescales is storage as antimatter.
>
> Energy per unit mass:
>
> Anti-matter: 9   × 10^16 J/kg
> Fusion     : 6.3 × 10^14 J/kg
> Fission    : 8   × 10^13 J/kg
> Gasoline   : 4.4 × 10^7  J/kg
>
> The technology to store antimatter at a large scale does not exist yet
> (and may never exist). Putting that aside, there are less dense ways
> than antimatter to store energy over long periods of time that doesn't
> invalidate this theory.
>
> Now for the leap of faith: Assume a readily available machine and energy
> grid that is capable of producing, storing, and retrieving anti-matter
> over very large time scales. If that's too much of a leap of faith for
> you, assume a mechanism for generating, distributing, and retrieving
> hydrogen gas (which does exist today on a small scale, and could be
> ramped up to become a global energy distribution mechanism if the
> economies are there to do so).
>
> The way that you earn this energy currency is by directing energy into
> the system (creating anti-matter or hydrogen gas), and the way that you
> spend the energy is by transforming it into work of some kind ("burning"
> the anti-matter or hydrogen gas to heat a home, power a car, etc.).
>
> So, that's the ultimate currency, but in order for the ultimate currency
> to be of use to humankind, you must create liquidity and to do that, you
> must virtualize it in some way. So, you store the reference to the
> amount of energy you have generated in the Internet in the same basic
> way that Bitcoin does, as a proof of work. Except in this case, the
> proof of work isn't the "amount of energy you have burned to create 25
> Bitcoins", it is the "amount of energy you have stored in the global
> energy network".
>
> Imagine a power plant where you lease some of the power generation
> equipment (anti-matter traps, solar-powered hydrogen gas generators,
> etc.). You'd buy energy generation capacity at the plant, which would
> then credit your energy account for energy it creates and feeds into the
> global system. There would be a cryptographic protocol used (much like
> what Bitcoin, Ripple, or PaySwarm currently use) to assign the energy to
> your Internet-based energy currency account. So, after a few years, you
> could see something like this:
>
> Energy Account Balance: 62,342.75 MJ
>
> That number is as stable as you get as far as a currency is concerned.
> Since it's extremely stable, it would end up becoming the reserve
> currency for the world. It will always be worth the same amount today as
> it would be worth 2 billion years from now. Ultimately, this is where
> humanity is headed.
>
> This is not to say that there won't be other currencies. Humans love to
> speculate and take short-cuts to wealth creation. Other currencies will
> also need to exist to model or drive the sort of behavior we'd like to
> see. For example, we are still going to need to drive societies to do
> things (like work/save/spend) by inflating or deflating a currency like
> we do with fiat currencies.
>
> Like I said in the beginning of this email, this is an interesting
> thought experiment. We are nearing the point at which the Internet can
> support a global cryptographic energy currency. This could provide a
> universal stable currency for humankind.
>
> The piece that is missing to enable energy-based currencies is an
> equitable, global, uniform energy creation, storage, and retrieval
> mechanism. Until that happens, we're going to see people approximate
> energy-based currencies.
>
> Bitcoin proof-of-work is such an approximation, albeit as an accidental
> side-effect of the mining algorithm. So is the research that Joseph
> Potvin and his colleagues are doing on the Earth Reserve currency
> (measuring solar energy densities per unit mass of land).
>
> -- manu
>
> --
> Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> blog: Meritora - Web payments commercial launch
> http://blog.meritora.com/launch/
>
>