Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

Re:Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day... by Natfan on Monday February 15, 2021 @06:44PM (#26149208)

Sure, you could get large Bitcoin miners to get certified with some authority, so that they can put a stamp on their website that tracks all of the transactions that were made with renewable energy.

However, people can, and will, lie and cheat for profit. In this case it's in the form of PR and playing nice with the Government, possibly for tax reasons.

We've seen this same story play out in the car industry[0], and that has far fewer (albeit far larger) players that need to be properly regulated.

So, from a technical perspective, how would you achieve this goal? Could one mathematically and cryptographically prove that the work was done using renewable energy? I don't know, that's something for someone much smarter than me to figure out.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day... by grifball on Monday February 15, 2021 @06:56PM (#26149325)

It sounds impossible, but I've read the abstract of this article which claims to provide a cryptographic proof of a physical object (nuclear warhead): https://www.pnas.org/content/113/31/8618

I'm not sure if this is possible to extrapolate to prove an energy generation process... But, it's exciting that a physical material can be cryptographically proven over a network (if I'm reading this abstract correctly).

[ Parent | on HN ]