Dev Fund Proposal: Carbon offsetting

Community Collaborations protocol
6
  1. How much carbon are we producing? Energy use seems like a reasonable proxy for developing a draft. How does that break down per-block at “reasonable” difficulty estimates?

There’s a few different ways I’ve worked this out to check they all align (hashes per second, watt consumption of gpus, then CO2 per MWh; orders of magnitude that the hashrate is different from bitcoin, and then orders of magnitude that ASICs are more efficient than gpus) and maybe the simplest is that eth has a hashrate of about 5 orders of magnitude more than zcash.

If ethereum has a carbon footprint of 7.66TWh/year, equivalent to about 709,000 average american households, then zcash is equivalent to about 7.09 american households per year, or about 766,000 kWh, at 0.6kgCO2/MWh, means 459 tonnes of CO2 are produced by zcash per year, which would cost ~$5000 to offset. 0.6kgCO2/MWh is germany’s average, but parts of China with high coal consumption can have an average of ~1kg/MWh, which would adjust the totals.

210240 zcash blocks in a year gives $0.02 per block that would need to be offset. So I think this can probably be offset by a donation from ECC or ZF or both and we dont need to do this whole dance :slight_smile:

  1. Do we know of any crypto-friendly carbon offsetters? Does anyone in the community know someone who has worked at or with such an organization before?

I like COTAP! https://cotap.org/

  1. How much money can be usefully deployed into carbon offsets? Does that align with per-block offsetting requirements?

This much should not have any unexpected affects! I don’t think per-block makes too much sense anymore.

  1. Are there preferred (or higher-leverage) forms of offsetting for the particular types of energy we consume?

Nope, leave it to the pros! Or look into investing in green energy / green businesses / funding carbon capture?

  1. How do we verify that the offsetting organization is actually doing the thing we expect?

I think transparency reports are the industry standard, short of hiring Lisa Jackson to make sure the several thousand dollars is getting to the right place :slight_smile:

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