“CO2 Coin: Decentralized Carbon Capture Blockchains”, 2021-06-12 (; backlinks):
Sketch of a decentralized mineralization-based carbon capture: suppliers stake on reported deposits of mineral dust in publicly-auditable locations.
Blockchains or tokens for carbon dioxide removal have sometimes been proposed, but provide little advantage.
I review the principles of cryptoeconomics for designing mechanisms, and the proposal of “mineralization”—rock dust naturally reacting with atmospheric CO2 to lock it into minerals—for carbon capture to fight global warming.
Cryptoeconomics often relies on auditability & challenges to create desired behavior, and mineralization provides an objective, checkable, form of carbon credits. Thus, one can set up a simple economic game where miners claim tokens for doing mineralization to sell as carbon offsets, and challengers audit their supposed mineralization deposits hunting for fraud; the equilibrium is honest reporting of mineralization quantities, yielding a true decentralized, reliable, fraud-resistant “CO2 Coin”.