Decentralized currencies, programmable money, PRüF, and the environment:
It is a widely repeated figure that Bitcoin uses more electricity than a small country.
What is not nearly as widely known is that more than 70 percent of the electricity used in bitcoin mining is renewable energy. Much of the rest is “stranded” power otherwise not used by the grid during off-peak production and other “idling” surpluses.
Ethereum mining currently comes in at about 20% of the power use of bitcoin — but is moving to proof-of-stake validators, which will reduce its energy footprint to a tiny shadow of its current usage.
While the renewable and stranded energy focus of cryptocurrency mining is commendable, by no means are the climate and pollution outputs of this technology free of problematic consequences.
Blockchain can be much cleaner than the traditional financial institutions it replaces.
Fortunately, many green alternatives exist for blockchain-based projects. The entire Polygon Proof-Of-Stake network, for example, uses about the same amount of energy as a mid-sized bank office or a small grocery store while serving nine million+ transactions per day. This is a much lower carbon and energy footprint than traditional financial institutions performing a similar number of transactions for a global customer base. Furthermore, Polygon also provides services such as savings, loans, instant payment processing, insurance, asset exchanges, and more.
In the future, programmable money will replace many functions of traditional finance and many cost centers for government. Servicing these segments will bring cost savings, carbon reductions, and efficiency improvements.
Services that programmable money can manage or facilitate more efficiently include:
POS and P2P payments
Securities Issuance and exchange
Asset management
Asset registration, licensure, and tax collection
Recorded documents and certificates
Legal titles / Deeds
Insurance
Social welfare distributions
The PRüF protocol is committed to a net reduction in carbon and pollution emissions over legacy solutions.
In addition to operating on green networks such as Polygon, the PRüF protocol itself reduces waste and facilitates reuse. Incentives built into PRüF pay users when their discarded items are reused. PRüF’s Future-PRüF™ digital assets are designed to be permanent and reusable — accommodating changes to media types, display formats, blockchains, storage providers, and access methods indefinitely into the future.
The PRüF office and campus operates using 100% solar power, with renewable water and waste management. We provide zero-carbon farmed produce at the cafeteria and take other measures to use low emissions vehicles and renewable office supplies wherever possible.
To formalize our commitment to minimizing or reversing climate impacts, we have become a signatory to the historic Crypto Climate Accord, which aligns us with other major signatories and reinforces our commitment to being net-zero or negative carbon by 2030.
PRüF is part of an emerging system of programmable money that will have far-reaching effects for humanity.
The degradation of the environment due to short-term financial priorities can be addressed using programmable money. Short-term thinking is not inherently due to human nature but rather the prevailing fiat money system that incentivizes the theft of future resources in favor of immediate rewards.
It is also possible to reverse this process. For example, let us consider a currency explicitly designed for international or inter-corporate trade. Using smart contracts to shift eventual rewards closer to the time of commitment, this kind of intelligent money could immediately incentivize long-term thinking and focus attention on sustainable solutions.
Along with climate change and unprecedented biological collapse, humanity faces fundamental challenges to its methods of organizing and incentivizing human effort. As artificial intelligence, systemic automation, and the information economy converge towards a singularity of change, PRüF is well positioned to be a key part of the solution.
