Bonding. If there’s a technique which allows for fraud 1 year down the road, then I need to have that much collateral locked in a trust for 1 year. If I behave, I get the collateral back, else I lose it. This discourages me from participating in detectable fraud over that year term.
How is accelerating exothermic mineralization reactions 'temporary', exactly?
For a concrete example - let's say planting a 50ft tree to maturity constitutes capture. In other words, if I point to a lat and long and show that there wasn't a tree here before, and now there is, I receive the coin.
Well, if you spent energy moving a mature tree from another place, you've not only killed the existing tree, but eventually the tree you've replanted will die too.
That's the sort of scenario I'm referring to.
In any case my concern is more around the second scenario I posed in my first post than the first one.
A common misconception. Blockchains are zero trust within the state/data space of the blockchain itself. We can refer to these space domains as "on-chain" and "off-chain".
Moving data or state information about the real world, say about the verification of successful carbon capture, to a blockchain is a core part of the oracle problem - which is the problem of migrating off-chain data, to the zero trust on-chain environment.
You use blockchains for the properties of immutability and transparency. In the case of gwern's proposal I can see a market environment where you can claim to capture carbon, provide data, make money (i.e. earn tokens) and then open yourself up to being "attacked" or "slashed". If someone else can make money/tokens by proving you are a liar you create an environment encouraging oracles (data providers) to be honest and accurate.
Final note: gwern pretty much states all of the above in his post, so I would suggest you not skim it.
It’s possible to write smart contracts in a way that an auditor, or group of auditors who reach consensus, can forcibly remove tokens and freeze accounts, of course this moves the needle towards centralisation more, (and I’m not interested in arguing the merits of that) - Im merely pointing out that immutability is not absolute in the way you are describing and exceptional circumstances and admin overrides can be coded in to EVM based systems at least.
If you are trusting a group of auditors why do you even need blockchain? The method in the OP is interesting, but I don't see the relevance of blockchain at all. Basically it comes down to some magical, incorruptible or comprisable auditor.
That's fine enough, but if you have that, you don't need blockchain to begin with.
But to your point that it's possible to hard fork, well, of course, computers being turing complete you can always go one level deeper into the platform and change the underlying system, but on a practical level forcing all of the miners to upgrade their software and coordinating this is a HUGE effort, and it seems like a very bad architectural decision to force an entire platform upgrade to deal with fraudulent users when safety can be built into the smart contracts themselves.
But I'm not arguing this centralisation is a good idea either, I'm merely pointing out that immutability isn't as final as the original post would make it seem, and there are ways of dealing with the problems they outlined (someone having fraudulently acquired tokens)
Is it that if everything goes perfectly with smart contracts being written perfectly with no bugs and all contingencies being taken into account and participants of the contract agree to the terms of said smart contracts in the event of fraud that's identified and confirmed it can be reversed? OK, point understood.
Say I have 1 ton of carbon captured, I am paid 1 coin and I "prove" that I captured 1 ton. Secretly, the mechanism of my capture is temporary and I realize not only the 1 ton, but an additional ton as it costed me energy to make this scheme work. What are you gonna do?
Another, more likely example is that I say I have 1 ton captured, EnergyCorp has Bob audit me, I tell Bob, you approve of my fraudulent capture notice and I'll give you 10% of the profits. Bob agrees, I am paid my 1 coin. I give Bob 0.1 of the coin. We both win. Later Bob is found to have participated in the conspiracy. What are you gonna do?
You, the smart reader are reading this and think - OK fine, we'll build a way to confirm capture without anyone else being involved. Well, I point to scenario 1. What're ya gonna do? The post basically assumes trusted auditors, which is fine, but why even do blockchain?
Blockchain cannot beat reality.
For what it's worth, both scenarios apply to traditional fiat, but at least in that scenario punitive damages apply and can be applied. I'm not sure how a tax or fine can or would be applied with any blockchain. It's also not even clear to me why blockchains are even necessary after skimming the OP.