I am pleased to introduce the Nori carbon removal marketplace’s new podcast, Carbon Removal Newsroom. Our first show, Reversing Climate Change, is still going strong, but we received feedback recently from a survey we sent out to our newsletter subscribers about how listeners wanted a shorter show that included regular updates about carbon removal. We had been thinking about how to incorporate news into Reversing Climate Change and ran some experiments, and decided that a new podcast was the best way to do this kind of news programming.

Reversing Climate Change features longer interviews that tend to be evergreen shows…

If you’re totally new to blockchains, first read this article by my colleague Paul Gambill, “Why a carbon market belongs on the blockchain”, and then my piece “Why Nori needs its own cryptocurrency token”.

Choice of platform is a biggie. There are many blockchains competing for applications to build on them. There are design tradeoffs around speed, security, voting, programming language, degrees of decentralization, size/skill/vibrancy of the development community, and other axes. At Nori, we chose Ethereum.

Intro to Ethereum

Ethereum is a blockchain that specializes as a smart contract platform. Smart contracts are agreements that are programmed as software: when x happens…

Rewarding good behavior instead of punishing bad behavior is not a new idea in finding solutions to climate change. The intention of carbon markets was finding a way for companies to meet their compliance obligations under cap and trade in the most economically efficient way, and for offset providers to see an opportunity to make money being better stewards of the atmosphere. More carrot; less stick.

In some ways this has worked—but it hasn’t scaled. When it comes to scaling, effective software plus the profit motive can get the goods. …

A Nash equilibrium is a not ideal place to be stuck. It is a situation where you and I are both better off if we coordinate to do something together, but if only one of us follows through, the thing doesn’t get done. It is rational for neither one of us acting unilaterally, worrying that the other won’t act. You can see Nash equilibria like this all over the place.

I recently wrote about them in the context of reducing consumption to address climate change. Assume we all need to take the bus and stop driving cars to prevent climate…

This is my third post on credentialing, the first of which is about the Certified Bitcoin Professional Exam (CBP), the second on the Series 3 and Series 30 for commodities and derivatives trading and compliance.

The Securities Industry Essentials Exam (SIE) is a new test. It just became available on October 1st, 2018. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) reorganized the initial securities exams in what I believe to be a smart improvement. Before the reorganization, the typical path to working in securities was to get your Series 7 (general principles/federal law) and Series 63 (state law) to become a…

Tech feels so proprietary sometimes. Secret algorithms, hidden source code, big companies doing God knows what with your data, startups in stealth mode, and so on. It’s easy to overlook Linux’s open source development community as nerdy; the open collaborative effort for blockchain is overshadowed by the sector’s speculative appeal.

This is one of the reasons why I really enjoy incubators and hubs like Starfish Mission in San Francisco. The focus is on the tech and building it together. Nori recently visited our friends at Starfish Mission to record some Reversing Climate Change podcasts, and had on Jon Connors who…

This is a common question. It is also a good question. We discussed at length our approach to creating a token for our project, Nori, in a recent episode of our Reversing Climate Change podcast. There is a large temptation for any new blockchain project to issue their own cryptocurrency as a fundraising strategy, sometimes for no other functional reason beyond that. Many people start with this question upon learning of a new project.

Our primary digital asset, the NORI token, is the one that falls under this breed of scrutiny. So then, why does Nori needs its own cryptocurrency?

1. Price discovery

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One could say the environmental movement has a type. If you close your eyes, I imagine you and I will both converge on the same archetypal character. I suspect the crossover between those who identify as progressive or liberal and environmentalist is quite high.

There doesn’t seem to be much that the left can do to expand the environmental movement. That approach is already saturated. The demographic for growth in environmentalism is towards the right and center. Not only do I believe such a thing is possible, I think it is desirable too. …