we could start it fairly soon but I definitely want some feedback on the methodology and such.

As for you, how much compost do you think you make in a year?

I would like to open the floor for ideas on getting composting added to GreenCoin. The most significant "final answer" is to get to a net weight of CO2 that is ultimately sequestered per unit weight of compost.

Currently we have two distinct types of producers in the GreenCoin ecosystem: PV solar (electric power) and biodiesel (liquid/transportation fuel, waste-vegetable oil source)

• For electrical the calculation is 0.527 kg CO2 [global average to produce 1 kWh of electricity) - 0.046 kg CO2 (PV solar equivalent to produce 1 kWh electricity) = 0.481 kg CO2 offset per kWh
• Biodiesel (from WVO): 9.167 kg Co2/gallon petro-diesel impact - 1.969 kg CO2 biodiesel impact = 7.167 kg CO2 offset per gallon

We know that, eventually, GreenCoin will need to encompass agriculture, farming and forestry to have the total CO2 offset impact required in order to address the total carbon picture. So at some point we need to just dive in and get started. I've been reading some interesting information about composting and soil management benefits, existing carbon standards such as the ACR, and a bunch of other resources over the past couple of days. The trick is to come up with a good single number that relates compost CO2e to the same CO2e seen with the likes of PV solar.

The ACR published a report with a detailed calculation for compost added to rangeland here (pages 24-31). This is an EXTREMELY detailed calculation. The general pathology with these types of reports is to take a look at massive projects because, in general, these reports are for the benefit of governments (in this case the State of California) to make informed decisions on how to distribute carbon throughout their carbon tax or Cap & Trade system they have legislated, and therefore projects have a deminimus size to be considered useful.

With GreenCoin we like to take a more "bottom up" approach; looking at carbon from a small scale, like an individual user or small Producer, and then multiplying that effect across a large population set (should GreenCoin be considered useful and grow considerably, of course). There are several reasons for this:

- it is much simpler to calculate carbon offset effects
- the individual user is engaged much more easily. They can see what kind of difference they are actually making by the decisions they make
- Ultimately the responsibility of carbon belongs with everyone, and the global effect of climate change is exactly equal to [Everyone's Effect * Everybody], so engaging the end user individually is an absolute imperative, in our opinion

For me it is difficult to see how spreading compost over 1000 hectares in California and studying it over 40 years is really so great for the environment that it's worth paying for. It's just too abstract. And I'm a pretty smart guy when it comes to carbon, or at least I feel I am engaged and "paying attention" so to speak, so when I see other folks that take a look at these things and think "what a giant waste of taxpayer money, screw this carbon bullshit," I mean, I have a lot of sympathy for that. What we are really talking about here, for most of us anyway, is cost. So the dialogue now is what's the cost and how do pay for it? for which at GreenCoin we provide a potential answer: a distributed, market-based system of private ownership.

So with carbon as it relates to organic matter and recycling/reclamation, I was thinking of taking this opposite, bottom-up approach, and then determining if the result was at least theoretically similar to the likes of an ACR calculation, and a good agreement there means we have something that we could go to war with. I present a calculation below but will need to determine a mechanism for comparison to the ACR and update further.

Americans threw away 254 million tons of stuff in 2007 and 28.3% of that was organic matter ("green waste"). Food waste is particularly bad at being recovered, only 2.6%, and yard waste is pretty good at 64.1%.

• 1 lb of food/green waste is about 70-80% water or a minimum of 0.2 lb organic matter
• of the organic matter about 50% is molecular carbon (equal to about 0.1 lb C per pound of food)
• 0.1 lb pure C is worth 0.367 lbs CO2e, or 0.167 kg CO2e*
• Americans toss about 4.6 lbs of trash a day of which 1.25 lbs is food waste (per capita)
• The average American daily impact from green waste (yard and food) is therefore 0.21 kg CO2e per day

* note, pure carbon (C) weighs 12 g/mol and CO2 weighs 44 g/mol. This is commonly known as CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) so folks are always comparing apples to apples on weight.
* These calculations are quite simple and "back-of-the-envelope." I present them to invite refinement and debate. Also, it helps to show simplicity to further highlight a key benefit of the GreenCoin model.

So that's about the same amount of carbon in green waste as generating 0.5 kWh per person, per day, of green power (such as solar). That's not a big impact but it's a real impact if you spread that across 300 M people. Also, it is a "tangible" impact. When you throw away a day's worth of food at home that would ultimately be landfilled, you threw away 0.5 kWh of green energy. That's 50 full cell phone charges. This is the type of impact I think people can relate too.

I feel significantly convinced that food and green waste presents substantial greenhouse gas reduction potential. I propose offering GreenCoin in the amount of 0.167 kg CO2 per lb of food or green waste. Since most people compost by unit volume, I think 1,000 lbs/yard is a good starting point, so that is 167 kg CO2 per yard of compost. A cubic yard is 202 gallons so 1 gallon of compost = 0.825 kg CO2e.

Reporting: For reporting purposes, a composter could simply report the compost unit weight (preferable) or volume once the the compost is finished. For folks at home who have food/yard pick-up, the GreenCoin credit should ultimately reside with the composter (the municipality, for example). Considering there is not a lot of municipal food waste pick-up in the US, we can push for backyard composting as being the big push. I would hope to make more of a dent in food waste where the recovery is quite pathetic.

When it comes to compost use, I was very happy to read about evidence for a kind of upward-spiraling, virtuous "carbon cycle," that I linked to above. This premature data of additional carbon sequestration, if true, won't be caught in the GreenCoin calc per se, but it does highlight an additional benefit of the power of people changing their carbon habits and mindset in small ways and how that may translate to future benefits toward our environment and climate future that are hard to predict with today's data. This gives an element of hope too; that we have the ability and power to make powerful changes in a meaningful timeframe, and with a lot of the doom-and-gloom type news coverage of climate inevitability, I like having that hope abound.

Looking forward to the chain coming back online. If you don't get it working with the addnode that iHashFury suggested feel free to message ncsupanda for help.

Can you explain further what you mean by "come from different directions"? I consider myself to take a careful approach to new ideas as well.

Truckfarmer - thanks for these comments, we love discussing all things GreenCoin, how we got to where we are now, and how we can grow and expand.

We definitely agree that being a solar-only endeavor cannot answer the carbon problem alone. Around the world, carbon emissions from electrical power production only account for ~25% of the human total. The other huge carve-outs are for transportation fuel, farming/agriculture and deforestation, among others. In addition, at this time we are also inviting wind and biogas electrical producers to sign up though we have not gotten one of these producers yet. Another poster had mentioned that we need more producers, and this is very true and obviously an area we are trying to expand as quickly as possible.

Solar is a good entry market however because it is fairly pioneering in a way: energy production has been traditionally massively centralized. Home solar arrays have been the first real paradigm shift away fromt his centralization seen on any meaningful, large scale, to date. Carbon credits, which do exist in some form as imposed by some state governments (CA) and to a limited extent, the Feds, work better at the centralized size because the number of total players is relatively small. There doesn't exist a de facto carbon credit standard with no deminimus production size, like GreenCoin does for the"little guys." Therefore, with GreenCoin we tried to turn the model upside down, start with small, distributed Producers and grow the ecosystem based more on the number of participants than the total amount of carbon, and have the human interest drive the later stages (where bigger players participate), at which point you're solving the global problem quite nicely: big carbon is involved and big user numbers.

Another reason for advocating for solar initially (or more specifically, renewable grid-tied electrical production) is the ease of providing for a highly accurate carbon calculation. Governments are very good at writing reports and it is a widely published figure the amount of CO2 the world produces, on average, to produce 1 kWh of electrical power (we use the figure 527 gCO2/kWh currently - and 100% PV Solar is about 46 g).

We also have a biofuel producer on board that makes small scale home biodiesel that calculates carbon at 7.167 kg CO2/gallon biofuel. This is fairly conservative number. Biofuel is more challenging of a single carbon value to get to versus electrical power so the pathology here is to set a few high-level calculation standards and then work with each incoming producer to walk through their system. Our current biofuel producer makes biodiesel from waste vegetable cooking oil and that's about the highest carbon value you can get because the carbon intensiveness of growing a plant specifically for fuel does not need to be considered.

Introducing composting is really interesting. However we need some canonical standards on what is getting saved in terms of carbon. This is important to make sure we are comparing apples to apples. Consider the use case scenario where we want someone who took a cross country flight to consider investing in greencoin for their offset. They have a ~250 kg CO2 imperative for the flight. As a Foundation, we need to be sure we are offering a fairly accurate system for carbon pound for pound for this buyer. Electrical power is simple (46 g CO2 net for solar versus 527 g for global electrical) and biofuel (9 kg CO2 per gallon petro diesel versus ~2 for biodiesel). The difference is the amount offset, which is what generates the GreenCoin award. I want to look into many other useful activities, such as composting, because maybe as we grow we become the standard, but it seems lots of people are trying to answer the question on composting right now (example).

I have significant professional experience with anaerobic digestion and know the energy and carbon number there quite well. I mention this because AD is a lot like composting: organic matter remeidation into something useful. Ultimately, anaerobic digestion produces energy: carbon chains are broken down to acetate which is split into 1 CO2 + 1 CH4 per acetate. The CH4 (methane / natural gas) is burned and runs a turbine to produce power. So net net you remediate your waste (e.g., sewage into clean water) and make power. GreenCoin for this would be awarded at the power production meter. Composting does not release CH4 and therefore we cannot use this pathology. The really big question, and I'll look into this and if you do as well, I really appreciate the help, is to figure out what carbon impact a yard of compost has. It would need to replace some canonical global average for fertilizer, which is actually quite carbon intensive (yes, believe it or not for some folks, significant fertilizer production comes from oil, and as the fertilizer decays it releases this stored carbon into the air). Composting is renewable, the same as biofuel, because the carbon cycle introduces no new CO2 (all CO2 being released was absorbed to grow the organic matter within a meaningful lifetime). We figure out those numbers and the GreenCoin Foundation can edict composting figures, and now you are a bona fide greencoin producer as a composter. Let's definitely discuss it together.

On a side note, the Foundation is really just me doing energy calcs and ncsupanda doing the coin development. I usually act in a conservative manner towards calculations so as a single entity I can be as defensible as possible on the carbon storag figures. If I have other players, experts and what not, weighing in, it makes the job of issuing new carbon data more community based and legitimate for these new entries like composting. I would like to grow the Foundation advisors and members this way so something to consider being a part of.

Solar doesn't require arable farm land (that's more of a biofuel argument) so I just wanted to point that out. The average solar radiation reaching the US surface is about 200 W/m2. The amount of total surface area you would need to account for our current electrical power needs is actually quite manageable. The biggest problem with solar is the intermittent power nature. It is generally considered an outright win if energy storage technology caught up with solar technology.

With all of that said I'm glad to see so much high value activity on the forum recently. I have a lot more to get through and I'll try to respond over the next couple of days to all of the other comments and ideas. I'm traveling a bit now as panda said so I apologize if I cannot get right back. Thanks for posting!

Are you figuring GreenCoin into the revenue analysis?... 

Lightsplasher I've been thinking about your post for awhile and I like the concept and watched your PoB videos. I cannot agree with you more that the community element in cryptos is a very difficult and critical piece to a successful ecosystem. I think ncsupanda and I have built a good coin and a functioning (albeit kinda rough-around-the-edges) website for Producers to log in and add their readings, but the exposure ("getting out there") and community aspects continue to remain a challenge.

When it comes to the CO2 aspect of GreenCoin, it is very mathematical. I think it is awesome to get people out biking for the health benefits alone, but there is a challenge in capturing this in our carbon emission offset calculations. Conservation (e.g., biking to work and not driving) is hard to prove because simply you may have not driven in the first place, and conservation comes with its own financial reward in that it reduces costs. Producing electrical power with solar versus coal comes with no financial reward (save gov't incentives): an electron on the grid is an electron on the grid regardless of how it was produced. GreenCoin is a production incentive; a way to produce something, like a kWh of electrical power, at some reduced-carbon output versus a canonical average and then receiving GreenCoins as a credit for the difference. As another example, if you had a ream of stationary bikes at a gym and they were churning out electrical power, certainly those riders would get credit for their production, as well as having all of the wonderful health benefits.

As I said I like the overall concept and you seem to have a mechanism in place that already that kind of works with taking donated coins and distributing them to a community of PoB submitters. I'd be happy to help out with coins for another one of your campaigns, say 500,000 GRE (as opposed to handing out magi one time) if that sounds interesting to you.

On a personal note I'm a long distance runner and tried biking when I was injured once. I bought a bike and literally used it once in 9 years. It's just not my thing. So I also like the idea of PoR as well as PoB ... just a thought ...  

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Still 8 more left!!! Sign up your renewable system with GreenCoin today!

GreenCoin incentives could really help here:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-19/cheap-electricity-for-poor-squeezing-out-solar-in-india.html

I am sending soon just sit tight. Thanks for your patience. I will post the TXIDs in this thread when they are sent.

GreenCoin (GRE) is now listed on Bittrex (in addition to Allcoin). Thanks!

We know the wallet works, for example, the mac wallet is working for me. What OSX version are you using? Mine is 10.9.4 (which I suppose is "Mavericks"). There are a number of things you can try. Perhaps apple has quarantined the program because it is unsigned (something called "Gatekeeper" I believe). When I had trouble recently with the mac client was with the quarantine, however, the wallet did not launch at all. It seems you do not have an issue with launching the Qt but the problem is it does not connect. You could try removing the quarantine for starters though:


It might be something simple like your security is set too high and this blocks certain programs, which can be toggled in settings, or you need to use sudo to open the program:

Also, you can try adding nodes manually that are listed in the OP. For example, with the GreenCoin-QT open go to Help -> Debug Console:


Also in the client's support files folder  there is a debug.log file. You could try firing up the client and posting what this reporting:
/Users/[YOU]/Library/Application Support/GreenCoin

We can probably get it figured out though one way or the other. Thanks for posting.

Reward #1 and #2 have been banked and I'll pay them this weekend.

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Try this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=636548.msg9168137#msg9168137

And if it doesn't work let me know. We are working on compiling a version of the windows wallet that does not require the conf file and will report back once it is ready.

no that is something else

the dumprivkey and re-import worked for me. Kinda funny it took two tries. The first time I left my computer for awhile and the privkey imported all the real transactions, and then some time later, included the non-spent transaction (as unconfirmed of course). So I tried it again and quickly spent the coins before it could load in the un-spent transaction and it worked somehow.

SO it worked. But I really don't know why.

We are considering initiating an affiliate program to help GreenCoin expand and grow. Currently how GreenCoin works:

A block award is split between the Foundation and the winning miner 50%/50%. All of the Foundation's 50% awarded coins are given to Producers daily based on their net carbon offset as calculated by the foundation (currently 0.481 kg CO2 per kWh solar electricity and 7.167 kg CO2 per gallon pure biofuel).

The affiliate program would work as follows:
- The 50% split for miner/Foundation remains the same (this is hard coded into the coin)
- The Foundation would award 90% of the coin directly to Producers as is done now, and 10% to Affiliates in a 3 Tiered system. A direct referral (Tier 1) receives 6% of their referred's production coins, a secondary referral (the referred of your referred) you would receive 3% of their Production coins, and 1% for Tier 3.
- All Producers will become Affiliates by default, however, an Affiliate-Only is a new type of user that can receive coins. This is the first type of user that is not a miner or Producer that can receive coins. However, we feel that incentivizing Affiliates to expand the network is a very good use of coins.

We welcome feedback. Given the community is still rather small I think we can come to an accord on whether this is a good idea and good use of future coins, and can move forward based on that feedback. We have 16 producers so a majority of 9 votes is needed to implement the system. The Foundation officially recommends implementing the new system. There will be a cost involved however, and I am currently looking into the costs (so what I am saying here is even if the system gets voted in, I might not be able to afford it but I'm trying my best. GRE has already cost me >$20k.)

using the new wallet doesn't do any good. They are marked as spent even though they are unconfirmed. Is there a way to scrub an unconfirmed transaction from the wallet. I found -zapwallettxes but no sure how it works in windows: command line: Go to folder -> rubycoin.exe -zapwallettxes ?

I sent 20k to Bittrex yesterday (11/6) and they haven't shown up. I sent them from the old wallet by accident. They have zero confirmations but is there a way to get them back or are they toast?? 

PM ncsupanda and I about the wallets: we are paying for them in BTC so we can tell you the rate. Also, PM me about energy/carbon market, we can discuss. Thanks for your feedback.