The Carboncoin Story
What is the current version of Carboncoin and
Why is it the way that it is?
A comprehensive review of the progress of the Carboncoin Project to date
by AxisMundi
Introduction
Carboncoin is a cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin — In fact we have made it as similar to Bitcoin as possible, because, from a legal perspective at least, Bitcoin totally nailed it.
Even today with the attempts by various regulatory bodies to clamp down on Etherium’s ERC20 ICO tokens for example, along with a whole host of other crypto projects, they are unable to do anything about Bitcoin.
So what does it mean to be like Bitcoin?
Proof of Work — the basis of the network — or more specifically, the cryptographic creation of tokens derived from real time activity on a network, shared out automatically by an integral algorithm to all participants of that network proportionately to their contribution to its operation (breathe) is a process so unique and complex that it rewrote the rulebook of international finance. The distributed ledger that is the Bitcoin blockchain was designed to be unstoppable by any entity — government, corporation or even groups of both.
Riding on the shirt tales of the evermore ubiquitous world wide web, the interconnectedness of everyone allowed the ledger to spread to thousands of computers, each one holding a true record of all the transactions that had ever taken place on the network, in accordance with the automated consensus of all of the operators of it.
What had come to exist was a trustless, borderless, unstoppable payment network which would allow anyone to join, was easy to use anonymously and, crucially, contained a finite number of tokens — this finite circulation meant that the value of the virtual tokens or “coins” would increase with the number of users. New users = +ve demand, finite circulation = -ve supply.
So how do you get that initial demand — the initial influx of new users? Well, you need to find a market, a group of people who would hae a use for an ostensibly untraceable, international way to transfer money. Simply put it is anyone doing anything illicitly for financial reward. The infamous dark web marketplace, The Silk Road, was it.
Once you’ve got the user base growing then the fun part comes into play: when demand for something finite increases, causing the price to increase, the “thing” then becomes attractive to a different, and substantially larger pool of wealth — speculators.
These people are constantly on the lookout for ways to make their money into more money, and when they see a finite asset multiply 10 times, they ask “why did that happen?”; when they see it multiply 10 times again they ask “how do I own this” and then it only needs to go up another 10% for them to jump right in. The process of them jumping in sees the price rise and makes others do the same. The smaller network participants are now looking at the value of their coins multiplied by hundreds, if not thousands. A skateboard has become a sports car, a cheap laptop is now a house, and the perception of value keeps on building.
It should be apparent that the existence of this new value transfer system, and its use, would be something that those in control of the conventional financial system (or “the world”) would endeavour to shut down, and fast. The network could not be stopped, no amount of computation power could be summoned to disrupt the network for more than a few minutes, and even this was prohibitively expensive. The only person who could be held in any way accountable for the issuance of all the tokens was the person who pushed go on the creation of the genesis block — the first block that is mined when a blockchain is launched — but the person who designed the system knew that, and so it was that Satoshi Nakamoto came to be. Being unable to find this person and therefore unable to hold anyone to account, there began a witch hunt for those who might have been key members of the development community to try to stop the unstoppable system.
Anyone who was even vaguely associated with the project, caught doing anything they should not have been, had the book very loudly and publicly thrown at them, yet the open source network continued. The bad press also continued. The unregulated asset kept on giving. Story after story of criminal activity, exchanges robbed, computers hacked, drugs sold, hitmen hired, and of course not forgetting money laundered.
The time came for The Man to admit defeat. The network could not be stopped, no matter how rigorously they hunted those involved in its creation. It was necessary for the lawmakers to legislate for the existence of Bitcoin, rather than against it.
Bitcoin had changed the world.
The Genesis of Carboncoin
“…whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
- Darwin’s conclusion to On the origin of species
In this new world, where cryptographic tokens are allowed to exist, and are generally accepted to have value, are there things that can be done better? Are there observable problems which can be solved? Moreover, can we make anything good happen?
The above quote was selected because it emphasises the time involved in the process of evolution. Carboncoin was born in a rapidly developing environment, selective adaptation was, is and will be critical to our success. This document is part of that process.
Shortly after it was started, the issuer of the Carboncoin tokens sold his premine and abandoned the network. We understand that he did this to finance the marketing of another coin he had started, but he had no idea that he had configured the Carboncoin protocol almost exactly to the specification that I was looking for, having had experience of about 20 of the first altcoin experiments and got a feel for exactly where the sweet spot was in terms of initial supply, block time and total circulation.
I had been watching Bitcoin without paying too much attention for about a year from 2012, being rather sceptical about virtual assets, and aware of the real possibility of bubbles occurring due to the extraordinary amount of money that had been printed and pumped into the global financial system in accordance with the Keynsian hypothesis. The price of Bitcoin broke the technical level I had calculated to be the most favourable entry. Watching the huge move higher that followed I began to ask myself why it would work, instead of why it would not. Shortly after, the penny dropped. I saw why it was working, and more interestingly how it was doing so.
At the same time, seeing the bad press the network was getting due to its associations with criminality, which I have no doubt were amplified by the media as much as possible, I couldn’t help but notice that some of the mud was sticking. This relentless bad press had, I felt, taken ubiquity off the table for Bitcoin — ubiquity would require mass participation of the middle classes, the majority I felt were likely to have been successfully put off. This presented an opportunity for a different version of the technology which, free from these negative associations, would be able to have a real shot at the mainstream.
I decided I needed to get immersed in the technology to learn enough about it to be able to design my own coin. My business partner and I assembled 3kW of computation power in the basement of the four story house I was living in. This was in October of 2013. It was an exciting time. Litecoin had just jumped, making it extremely profitable to mine, but only until everyone else did what we had done, so when we committed, time was scarce. We built 3 rigs, each containing 3 top spec graphics cards (the most powerful part of a domestic computer). The time between ordering the parts and mining our first Litecoin was four days. The computers were quite noisy, but the heat was bearable because it was winter. It heated the whole house and then some, but we didn’t give it a second thought, so caught up we were in the exciting new venture. After six weeks, it was no longer profitable for us to mine Litecoin after electricity costs, so we began looking into other coins we could mine.
Over the next few weeks we mined a multitude of different coins. In no particular order Stablecoin, Kruger, Digibyte, Dogecoin, Vertcoin, Ultracoin to name just a few. At the end of December we caught a break. By chance, I saw a post on a random mining pool we were using to mine Dogecoin, informing of a launch of a new coin called Mooncoin. The concept was simple enough. One coin for every length unit between Earth and the Moon. Total circulation was a whopping, and hitherto unprecedented, 284 billion coins and the initial release rate was very high, dropping off sharply. We got in at the very beginning of this quietly (but fairly) launched coin and accumulated a sizeable chunk. The price caught a bid and went up very high, before predictably coming all the way back down again and submarining under the weight of the absurd coin supply. The coin supply killed it, but everything else was spot on. I started to look for a launch with the same variables but a lower total supply.
It was February 2014. Feeling that I was homing in on the ideal configuration of the technology, I had started to play with some concepts for a coin and play with some designs. It was clear to me that for Bitcoin’s success to have a possibility of being repeated we had to do as they had done, but use the advantage of hindsight to avoid the traps they could do nothing to avoid, and take decisions knowing the full extent of the potential success. I began to consider what the bitcoin founders might have done differently if they’d known how big it would go. It was also apparent that my coin had to be the coin, the alternative to Bitcoin.
In the second week of February, the planets aligned. A pre announcement of Carboncoin, with a carbon fibre patterned background and a white diamond outline, but more importantly with exactly the numbers I had been looking for. Similar release rate to Mooncoin, with a rapid drop off, and crucially a total circulation of 16 Billion coins. This was it. I did not need to build my own, I would make this one happen. At this point I should remind the reader that my intentions were clear: build a real alternative to Bitcoin, but one which resisted uptake in the darkweb in favour of maximising our chances of a fruitful shot at the mainstream.
I had not developed the idea further than this at this stage, I had not had to — because to my mind I was backing a network with a genius developer who had picked exactly the correct numbers, so he would obviously welcome commitment from others who recognised it. Up until this point I had not started an account on bitcointalk, because I had always got enough information from the questions asked by other people. I noticed that the developer had gone silent for a long enough time to cause several members of the community to voice concern, so I started a profile and reached out by private message. Having had no response, when he eventually updated the thread, I addressed him directly. This was my first post on the Bitcoin Forum.
Not long after this, a very large sell order was processed taking out all of the buy orders on the market, and nothing was heard of the issuing developer of the tokens again. It would transpire that this developer would be our Satoshi Nakamoto, only going one step further — none of us had the faintest idea who he was.
Now we were faced with a problem — how could we make it so that we could update the network without the keys to the source code? Moreover, how could we prevent our network from being completely destroyed before we were able to update it?
There was also a different and much graver issue that had arisen. The reader will remember that this process had started with building very powerful computers to point at the various crypto networks to process tasks set by those networks and be rewarded coins. We were now in April, and the considerable amount of time we had spent in limbo waiting for responses from the new developer, combined with the changing seasons causing the heat produced by the machines to now become unbearable, had caused us to realise a fact that was deeply troubling — if we were running computers which were causing this much heat, then there were tens if not hundreds of thousands of other people doing the same thing. It was clear that we had been participating in an environmental disaster, and one that something really needed to be done about. It was simply not acceptable to allow this energy consumption that was effectively simply incentivised heat generation to go on without trying to do something about it, particulary given growing concerns about climate change and global warming. Carboncoin had to be different in this respect too, it had to be at the very least energy efficient, and indeed we felt so bad about having participated in this shameful energy wastage, that we wanted it to go further and make the coin committed to redressing the imbalance in nature we had contributed to.
This was the background slide we used for our talks and presentations, 2015
The Paradigm Shift
We were called Carboncoin. It was perfectly obvious what we had to do: make the coin about lowering the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We had to do a great deal of research on how to do this, and also whether there were any existing systems in place which we could align with in the course of making things right with nature. — I’m of course referring to the existing Carbon Credits systems.
We also had to find a way, with no capital controls — i.e. no ability to make coins or commit coins outside of the normal operating of the network, to make it so that any success/growth of the Carboncoin network would directly impact the amount of environmental good we could do.
My next steps were almost automatic. I knew how to make it so that we could change the source code, but I wasn’t prepared to do it until the network’s success would have a measurable positive impact on the environment.
Mining the coins had resulted in a modest holding for myself. I had a number of followers who expected me to inform them of the next thing, and so these guys had got some too but for me to take it on, make it work, make it secure and commit to making it a success the existing members of the network had to be prepared to support the coin’s new-found direction.
I messaged all the active participants in the network asking them to donate a significant proportion of their coins to a wallet address I called the environmental donations wallet. Donations trickled in until one day a person operating behind the name “hanoosh” posted that he had a huge number of coins available to sell. I messaged him directly asking him to donate half of his coins. To my surprise and joy he agreed! This resulted in enough coins, as I saw it, for me to commit to the project, some 4% of the total 16 Billion circulation. It was go time.
Getting over the first hurdles
With the disappearance of the original developer, the network faced a big challenge. The developer was the only person who was able to make amendments to, or update, the protocol.
In order for it to survive the network had to be able to make essential updates.
In the course of my experience of the early forks of Bitcoin, I had come across the idea of a 51% attack. Right at the heart of the Bitcoin protocol is the principal that the wallet clients will always look to the consensus of the network for the true version of the transaction history. In the case of Proof of Work coins this means the strongest part of the network in terms of computation power. What is the strongest part of the network in terms of computation power? Simply, it is at least 51% of the computation power. This is the same as saying if an outsider wanted to disrupt the bitcoin network, it would have to do so with more computation power than currently exists on it in order to control 51% of it and disrupt the payment history. This is one of the justifications for the extraordinary amount of computation power which has been allowed to continue to be used by bitcoin and other proof of work networks.
Further notes on Proof of Work
We had learnt early on about the (pseudo) random issuance of blocks on the bitcoin protocol. If you run a very small computer, processing problems set by a proof of work network, you are not guaranteed any coins at all. Instead you have a statistical likelihood of getting some (or finding a block, as it is often called) and this likelihood is directly linked to how much computation power you contribute, compared to the computation power of the network as a whole.
How this is delivered is beyond the scope of this paper, but Proof of Work coins are designed to keep the coin release rate approximately constant versus time, independently of computation power. I.e. if there are 10 people using 10kW of electricity, or 100 000 people using 10 gW of electricity, the number of blocks released per day will be approximately the same. This is simultaneously the reason why bitcoin’s energy consumption is so high, and the opportunity which enables the current version of Carboncoin to operate on mere hundreds of Watts.
To get around this statistical uncertainty, smaller computers group together using services known as mining pools. These pools enable a much higher likelihood of block discovery (coin payment) by combining the computation power of all contributors and then sharing the coins out proportionately.
When a new coin is released, external developers are given the opportunity to deploy mining pools for a reward from the issuing developer, and a small percentage of all coins mined by the pool.
The first job to be done was to find a developer who was capable of forking the original Carboncoin repository, to create a new version which we were able to make updates to if they were required. Many days were spent looking at the histories of the various coins on the bitcoin forum before we eventually found someone who was capable of doing the job.
Reaching out to him, a computer science academic, it was a pleasure to find him receptive and happy to help us overcome our immediate term problem, having done a similar thing on a different coin himself.
Some weeks later we were ready with the new repository. At the time, there were still 3 pools operating on the Carboncoin network. The switch date was scheduled and all of the pools were contacted advising them of the time to make the switch to the new repository.
Much as the issuing developer had achieved with a near perfect fair launch, everything went almost exactly according to plan. Version 0.7.1 was live. We were now able to make changes to the Carboncoin network! The project could move forward.
We couldn’t go full steam on the marketing though, because it was very clear that if we were able to take control of the network in that way then it would be very easy for someone else to do the same and this could certainly derail the project, if not kill it completely.
We were worried about this because we were on the bitcoin forum, openly discussing a major issue with bitcoin. Suffice it to say we did not make many friends in the network, and we have trolls operating to this day, we feel partly because of it. This is not dissimilar to turning up to a party full of people you don’t know and proclaiming at the top of your voice that the music is rubbish — not a recipe for a fun time at a party. You’d be much better off leaving silently and going to a party where the music was to your liking, something which we did immediately, expanding into our environmental demographic.
We needed a new logo, because the existing one, a white diamond on a carbon fiber background, had zero to do with our new direction. We ran a competition to determine this, and then allowed the network to vote on the winner. This is how the current Carboncoin logo was born.
We’d begun the development of an update which would bring Carboncoin in line with the latest version of Bitcoin, including the new logo, and include a network checkpoint meaning that were we to be significantly disrupted we would be able to restore all the balances to a point in time that was not the very beginning. Everyone who owned coins when we deployed this version would be able to know for sure that their holdings were safe. We completed and released version 0.9.1 in June of 2014. It gave us the ability to create more of these safe “restore points” in the future without requiring everyone to update — a major step forward, but not the ultimate solution by any means.
By the time our first branded update was completed calls were being made for us to fork to Proof of Stake, one environmental solution to the energy consumption of Bitcoin.
Proof of Stake solved the problem by adding a secondary mining layer called “staking”, this payed an “interest rate” proportionate to the coins a user allocated for “staking”. This layer meant that control of the network was also proportionate to coin holdings, i.e. to 51% attack the network, a user would have to accumulate more than half of the total coins — prohibitively expensive and entirely self-defeating. While being an attractive offering due to its disincentivisation of competitive mining, we decided not to go with proof of stake, despite many calling for us to do so.
There were two main reasons for our decision. Firstly, one rapidly worsening problem with established blockchains was the blockchain size issue. If you are making a distributed software system which requires everyone running a full client then the increasing size of that blockchain to potentially hundreds of gigabytes was a very serious problem indeed. The secondary hashing function which gave the “staking” blocks made those blockchains much more memory intensive i.e. their blockchains were getting bigger, faster.
The long term significance of an unsolved blocksize issue is that it creates an oligarchy of control of the network in the hands of those able to host the whole blockchain. On the way to this the costs to the environment are extremely severe. Notable is that it is not just the energy consumption of cryptocurrencies that is bad for the environment, the data storage is a real problem too.
Another observation about existing Proof of Stake technology, it was necessary for nearly all of them to use a security feature to prevent them falling apart. Instead of responding to pressure to make our blockchain less sustainable in the long run, we chose to adopt this same security feature while keeping everything else the same. The rapid reduction in the release rate of Carboncoins would disincentivise competitive mining before long anyway so, provided we could make it secure, we were on course to have a currency that was more efficient than Proof of Stake anyway.
The second factor was that at the time no one had been able to successfully configure a mobile client for a proof of stake coin, and for us to do this independently would be prohibitively expensive. In order to work we had to grow our user base as much as possible, to do that we saw mobile clients as absolutely essential.
Our android wallet was completed towards the end of 2014, and is still working.
The custom security feature was ready and deployed in 2015 which meant that we were as secure as proof of stake coins, and running more energy efficiently, but without adding to the rate our blockchain was growing. We had completed our technological objectives.
The Environmental Initiative
Our initial environmental solution was our environmental donations wallet which had 4% of the total circulation of coins there would ever be held by The Carboncoin Trust, a charitable trust we formed. The idea was that as the coin grew in popularity and market capitalisation, these coins could be slowly released to the market, funding The Carboncoin Trust and enabling it to plant trees, either directly funding tree planting on land, or sponsoring other tree planting charities.
This proposed solution came with a lot of issues.
Requiring adoption before any real activity could be demonstrated did not help us at all. When people join a benevolent concern they want to see demonstration of action almost immediately, indeed many people see the action first and then decide to join as a result.
Our first move on deciding to swerve the conventional carbon credits industry in favour of planting trees, something we saw as inarguably good for the environment, was to find a site on which we could plant trees in the event we were adopted and funds were created.
Once we had found a site this led to a great deal of trolling activity on the bitcoin forum. People came onto our thread to suggest the photos I had taken myself were in some way fraudulent.
Our move to ask the owner of the land, who had not claimed any carbon offsets for his less than a year old plantation of 2500 trees in the course of his established forestry operation, to commit the carbon offset to our project in return for us funding many more trees on the land was also in hindsight a mistake.
No one understood where the money had come from for the first trees to be planted, and they did not understand that the unclaimed offsets had been given to our project and this led to a great deal of trolling and FUD, frustratingly because of something that had been done with the best intentions.
Subsequently, in the course of the development of the idea, we have found this initial site to be less than ideal because we want our tree planting activities to be very much a participatory experience, and we want to be able to freely permit access to the land for carboncoin users also — this is something that the landowner would never have allowed.
Due to all of the above the decision was taken to remove the initial Carboncoin Forest site from the literature. The trees still exist and we still intend to fund the planting of more trees there — but The Carboncoin Forest, our flagship conservation site, is intended to be something rather more, as you will read.
Getting the coin out there
As previously mentioned, in taking on our green credentials, it was our intention to expand into a large and growing demographic: the environmentally conscientious.
Since the beginning of the project we have gained almost 1000 Carboncoin users who, until owning Carboncoin, had never had any experience of any other cryptocurrency.
Fair distribution has been a priority from the start and, with the exception of the environmental charity, no individual holds more than 2% of the total circulation.
This was all done with no marketing budget and without extensive resources to deploy on making it really easy to get hold of and spend coins.
Not only is this a very powerful proof of concept, and demonstration of real world appeal, but it also gives us an established network in which we can quickly deploy any new service we develop.
Several talks have been conducted, and interviews given over the course of the project but because there was always a job outstanding, or an improvement to be made, in the presence of no funding — we continually found ourselves holding off from making our major press releases.
We had made a decision to purposefully avoid formal fundraising because we wanted to spread the coin out as much as possible to maximise the wealth redistribution effect which we saw as one of the most significant benefits of the success of Bitcoin.
We felt it important that the project not be about making any one individual or entity disproportionately wealthy — which we saw as a real possibility in tasking on one or two large investors.
This decision only served to make many of the things we set out to do impossible, however. And in hindsight it would have been much better to make some people wealthy and get everything we wanted to do done, rather than having to fight to get anything done. This is a decision that will not be repeated.
Many people joined the network to help, only to find that they had to take on other work because there was nothing to pay them.
Our conclusion is that for any future projects, raising adequate funding is absolutely essential. Our extraordinarily lean start-up operation has however left us with insights which will serve our turn long after we are gone, in everything that we do.
We have also observed that we were able to do a huge amount with zero funding, which shows absolutely that there is clear demand for the idea — and that even a little funding, could see tremendous results in a very short time indeed.
In review: Our Decisions — do they still apply, are they still relevant, are they still correct
1: One Coin: We should endeavour to be the alternative to Bitcoin.
In order to have the positive impact that we want to on the environment we should intend to be the foremost alternative to Bitcoin.
This is still valid, although we would be able to make a real impact by getting into the top 10, so it is no longer critical for our success.
2: Be like Bitcoin: We should endeavour to be as similar to Bitcoin as possible
Bitcoin worked and continues to work, so we should endeavour to stay as close to the structure and formation of Bitcoin as possible, including: legal infrastructure, coin issuance.
It is no longer essential for us to be as similar to bitcoin as possible. It is possible to replicate the advantages and legal benefits in a very different software system which provides a host of additional features which better serve our use case. Indeed Bitcoin’s use case is very different to our use case, given that we do not intend to encourage usage on the dark web so much more is possible, and should be explored, so that we can match network growth and usage without this.
3: Not Dark, Light: our user base, and use, should be as much as possible, if not entirely, outside of the Dark Web
This is still absolutely the case and to be carried forward into any future iteration of the project.
4: Wealth Redistribution is a good thing, should be encouraged.
Our course of operating this network has shown that this statement should be refined. People who support us, our objectives, and the network should be rewarded financially and otherwise for doing so. Wealth redistribution for the sake of it, i.e. rewards that are not earnt, probably does more harm than good.
5: Be good for the environment 1: Do not undertake any software development which will result in increasing use of resources from what we have already
This is absolutely the case and should be adhered to unequivocally. Right now our current system has a distributed and expanding ledger, which runs on a very small amount of energy for transaction processing, but with no programmatically assigned solution to the blockchain size issue.
Any future solution must be an improvement on what we have already with respect to our total cost to the environment of operation.
6: Be good for the environment 2: Implement mechanisms in the network which enable funds to flow to projects and people doing good things for the environment
This is the most important thing that we do. Any future solution must start from a position of 4% of total capital appreciation going directly to environmental concerns as a base case.
Future solutions should use technology to improve on our effectiveness in achieving this.
7: The Early Network Participants, coming exclusively from the Bitcoin Forum, were the best people to choose the logo
Almost certainly not the case. We should get consultation from top logo designers on the best design for our logo and all of our digital assets. This decision requires expertise which is not held by the majority of people. We cannot compromise on this.
8: Maintain the existing blockchain
If we can reduce waste and increase effectiveness, while maintaining our advantages, by starting a new blockchain, then we should do so.
Our active userbase are an advantage and therefore should absolutely be carried over onto any new blockchain.
9: Do not raise funds, to encourage wealth redistribution
Achieving all our development goals, delivering polished and working services, marketing our polished services effectively to maximise network growth is much more important than any possible advantages to distributing coins at low value.
Users will be adequately rewarded by network growth in any funded solution.
10: We should avoid Carbon Credits altogether, focussing our environmental agenda solely on planting trees
Having made this decision early on, due to a variety of extremely negative consequences brought about by the Carbon Credits as proposed by the Kyoto Protocol and subsequent global conferences, we have encountered a steady stream of good people doing good things in the Carbon Credit space.
Where possible, Carboncoin should be made to help the good people in this established network do good things, in addition to our tree planting focus.
11: Biodiverse Forestry is the best thing we can do for the environment
Hell yeah it is. This was ratified a year after we declared it, in a study by Oxford University.
Our core environmental project will always be biodiverse forestry.
12: We should plant trees anywhere we can, i.e. on land we do not own
This is not true. The organisation should own land on which biodiverse forest will be planted and maintained as permanent. Certified reforestation projects should also be supported but our flagship forestry project should be on land that anyone who owns carboncoin is able to visit, and help with planting trees.
Steps should be taken to acquire regulatory permissions to share the ownership of land owned by the organisation on the Carboncoin blockchain.
13: Keep it simple, do what we say we will
This on its own is not sufficient. Decision making about funding allocation and network operation should be distributed amongst users as much as possible, without compromising the environmental objectives.
Conclusion
Since its launch in 2014, operating the Carboncoin has taught us a huge amount about cryptography and the emerging blockchain technology.
We made some decisions which were right at the time but aren’t relevant now, and we made some decisions, while having the best intentions, which inhibited our progress and held us back from achieving our objectives.
Since our launch an enormous amount of technological development has occurred in the space. Having spent much time reviewing our decisions and watching the emergence of new technology, we took the decision to explore the deployment of a new Carboncoin blockchain some months ago with view to incorporating smart contracts into our technology to better serve our environmental objectives.
We devised a new network based on the Etherium blockchain which would incorporate our custom security feature to ensure minimal electricity expenditure, but having all but completed this specification we encountered another new system emerging — that of Steem, and more significantly EOS. We are intending to deploy our new service using the EOS codestack.
Our new system will facilitate the issuance and transfer of Carbon Credits which fit into our environmental ethos. It is intended that this system disrupt the existing Carbon Credits system, eventually rendering it obsolete and replacing it.
The existing Carboncoin blockchain will continue to be maintained in its proven secure operation but old coins will be swapped for coins on the new network when it is deployed. There will be an initial exchange rate of 1.4 old coins to 1 new coin which will enable us to embark on an Initial Contribution Offering to fund our work. It is possible to get Carboncoin right now but as will be detailed in a future document, there will be many advantages to participating in the ICO above and beyond ownership of coins.
This document is the first in a series of documents to be released ahead of our ICO. The next release is our precis of our environmental agenda, and how we can use technology to impart our beliefs on the existing Carbon Credits industry, causing a more efficient flow of funds to those actively addressing human impact on the planet, in other words doing good things for the environment.
We look forward to your feedback and will welcome anyone wishing to help out onto the carboncoin slack channel. Please email slack@carboncoin.cc to get an invitation.
