solarcoinv2

A global cryptocurrency backed by Renewable Energy

Acknowledgements

This concept is inspired by SolarCoin, and tries to build further on this concept.

Motivation

• Provide a strong monetary incentive for renewable energy generation
• Solve the usual problems associated with cryptocurrency

Current Status

Design Phase

Design

1. Unlike the stated aims of many cryptocurrencies, SolarCoinV2 embraces and infact depends on government support, and aims for recognition from the UN (United Nations). It requests the governments of all countries to perform a few very simple and specific duties, with great integrity.

2. Any renewable energy is convertible into SolarCoinV2. 1MWh of renewable energy = 1 SolarCoinV2 for all time to come.

3. In any day and age, currency must be backed by something useful for that day and age. Gold was the original successful currency. It was useful because it could be easily made into non-rusting vessels, decorations, dental implants etc. As time went on gold became too scarce for such use. Hence today, it no longer officially backs currency. SolarCoinV2 is the global currency of choice for today's day and age, because the need in today's day and age is Renewable Energy. To visualise that energy and not common knowledge is the main challenge in today's economy, you should be aware that 3D printers that can manufacture anything commonly needed (including themselves), are becoming accessible to the general public. Many printing programs that instruct the printers to print various useful objects, are freely available over the internet. You can imagine that raw material costs will be a small part of the cost for most manufactured items. Most of the cost would involve the energy to run the printers, the internet infrastructure, transportation drones for raw materials and finished goods etc....

4. Countries may issue Cash form of solarcoinV2 for convenience of poor and illiterate who don't have access to smartphones yet. However there should be a steady movement towards only the online (cryotcurrency) form of SolarCoinV2.

5. SolarCoinV2 will use servers of (say) 7 government groups in 7 different continents of the world - Asia, Africa, Europe, North Americe, South America, Australia and (perhaps) Antarctica. Each server is capable of storing the bank balances of all the people in the world. These are enough servers and enough geographical distances between them to establish consensus-based trust. If not, more servers can be added. Another good number of servers to have is one for each country in the world. However having more servers will make transactions significantly slower to record and verify.

6. Government will issue public keys and private keys to citizens. Each SolarCoinV2 bank account is associated with a private key and a public key. Governments know the bank balances of their citizens; they need to verify income tax anyway. Apart from this, every attempt will be made by government and individuals to keep the mapping of public keys to people on a need-to-know basis, just like our bank account numbers are semi-private at present. The databases will have a table with at least 2 columns: the public key and the bank balance amount. The value of the latter column is accessible only by the governments and the account owner.

7. Governments are responsible to purchase renewable energy from their citizens. The governments must with great integrity and precision, ensure that the energy was indeed generated in a renewable manner and is of the said quantity. In return for the energy, the governments credit the account on all 7 servers with SolarCoinV2. The message is digitally signed by the crediting government. Governments from other countries and from the UN can act as watchdogs in this process of renewable energy purchase from the public.

8. People transfer SolarCoinV2 from their accounts to others' by sending digitally signed messages (signed with their private key) to all 7 servers, to credit SolarCoinV2 from their accounts to other accounts. The public keys of the sender and receiver account must be mentioned in each message. All 7 servers adjust the account balances accordingly.

9. No need of mining, PoW, PoS and all such electric-power-hungry activities. People can check all 7 servers (they can connect to these servers over https and these servers will use the usual SSL certificates that we use to trust netbanking websites etc.) In order to check one's bank balance, a person must send a request that is digitally signed with their private key, to all 7 servers. Only then will the servers respond with information about their bank balance. This will help hackers from discovering that which public key has how much balance.

10. Just like one person can have multiple bank accounts, governments may offer this facility to their citizens so that for security reasons, any one account does not contain too much money. Each account can optionally maintain a transaction history, or the servers may expose a kind of OpenBanking API that allows third-party applications to store the transaction history beyond a certain number of transactions.

Roadmap

• Solicit feedback, especially from Government representatives
• Create a technical proof of concept

Author Anonymity

Project authors depend on the job market for their income and so request that their wish for confidentiality be respected. You can use GitHub issues to communicate with us.