Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Technology to create a local market for trading energy with neighbors is being experimented with: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... id-215268

Does the blockchain come in to play if they actually decide to go off-grid? Not really clear how they plan to use a blockchain instead of just querying the smart meter HQ.

Certainly it's a good idea for power companies to start their own blockchain(s), where the PoW is actually Proof of <Solar, Hydro, Wind>. The difficulty comes in when you consider how a peer could possibly verify this Proof. Would like to follow research in the area. If we are willing to have power companies have their meters installed in our homes, why shouldn't they bootstrap a currency minted by the net producers? Sounds like you don't even have to be a power company, just an organization that can measure power transmissions off some grid and reconcile who are producers. If you want that decentralized.. I'm not sure how exactly unless of course you can trust the HW manufacturer of the meter device to also add some required functionality ("trusted computing").

brute is similarly skeptical. the problem blockchains (not "Blockchain") solve is not about smarter redistribution, it's a distributed trusted ledger. while both mesh grids (telco or electrical) and blockchains are decentralized, brute doesn't see how using them together would add any value over simply using a centralized ledger at the power company/community level? way less overhead. but also fewer buzzwords, presumably..

Well I think a lot of folks talking blockchain are really just interested in fungible digital financial instruments or the like.

Before Bitcoin you couldn't trust the issuer of the instrument or the instrument was hard/costly to work with (not so fungible/useful) or there were double-spend/counterfeit issues. Issuers we could trust weren't interested or were stomped out by regulators. Bitcoin solved the double-spend in a way that somewhat avoids trusting the issuer* and settles transactions in a somewhat p2p way*. You could also solve the problems with "trusted computing" which is the same technology that allows for DRM but that has been "coming soon" for more than a decade (and relies on trusting HW/SW designers/manufacturers to some extant).

[*] anyone can go explore what the issuer(s) (miners) for bitcoins can control (e.g. gatekeeper of transactions) and to what extant mining is really de-centralized (not what it used to be..)

Combining mesh grids with smart devices (e.g. meters or cars being charged or computers using internet) makes a lot of since. But how do all these devices pay/access each other? Either an existing thing like Bitcoin/Ethereum, launch a new blockchain/token (or a new thing entirely in this spirit), or a more traditional approach that has the traditional risks/pain/lack of buy-in.