How to Get Carbon Offsets for Your Blockchain Life - Jay Zalowitz

uh hi my name's jay uh i'm going to be giving a mildly sarcastic talk today uh so fair warning if you don't like humor it's not gonna it's not dry it's just not a dry talk anyway uh so okay well i mean i could just speak louder uh so it's a mildly sarcastic look at crypto its impacts on the world and other related topics who am i um well i've spent a lot of time thinking about this i am still not sure my resume sort of things are i have been working as a software engineer for a very long time uh i'm pretty good at making sure there are less servers uh and uh in 2016 a friend and i started something called hacker noon if you've ever heard of that mild plug for the company i uh launched 15 minutes ago uh ramblas uh we're doing a distributed newsroom uh so anyone anywhere in the world can write anyone anywhere in the world can edit it hopefully some of you people like it uh that's anyway my plug sorry that's the last time i will speak about a thing that i own within this deck so the rest of it i have no position et cetera et cetera et cetera so yeah all right so fun facts let's get started crypto is awesome also kind of sucks sometimes we can do a lot better as a community we're all basically at an event where we get free drinks and hardly anyone's tipping minor call out our digital energy and waste is freakishly high and that's probably bad and some of you don't wear deodorant and you should here's the fun figures one ethereum transaction takes more energy than a hundred thousand visa transactions another fun figure we ethereum not bitcoin just ethereum uses the energy consumption of the netherlands and you know that's bad don't worry you guys are still winning it's doubly worse with bitcoin but we're not going to talk too much more about that so today's subject let's talk about our own impact on the world and how we can reduce it uh as i said there's going to be a lot of jokes so my personal opinion proof of work is not the worst thing to be proposed in 2009 here are some other ones joaquin phoenix quit acting to pursue a rap career perry took a vow of celibacy she took it back the next day and these masterpieces came out there's also this whole massive overprinting of monetary supply in response to a crisis and we totally learned our lesson as a society and never repeated that again so my point here is if we're being crypto enthusiasts and we're being honest with ourselves if we destroy the planet it's probably bad for crypto now what's a carbon offset carbon offsets are basically referring to a ton of removal or sequestration and there are a couple other options of carbon from the air but let's do the crypto version of this carbon offsets are a series of submission submissions to a group of centralized ledgers they're a tradable asset that has a history of going up in value each offset is unique it's like an nft a relatively simple method of publicly saying you used it and a limited set of them are produced every year so limited run get hype it's going to the moon so the reason i'm i'm here uh i'm a fan of a cryptocurrency called mobilecoin uh my friends uh were doing it and i'm a huge privacy advocate uh they're uh their consensus mechanism and and other systems inside of there make it so that they run really efficiently and that meant okay we can offset this entire project and we did so i'm going to get to a bunch of more information on how we did that but i'm going to start with a very quick note on providence carbon offsets are different each and every one of those tons are get packaged in a large group but for example there's singaporean carbon offsets there's canadian carbon offsets there's carbon offsets that involve forests or involve solar plants or plastic recycling i don't know but that's a thing so it matters what you're buying if you choose to go this route i prefer going the reforestation thing because trees are nice and uh you know they they're cool so i made the assumption that every single unit of power we're using every kilowatt would have otherwise been used for some other system so given that you know let's just assume that it's coal coal has an output of 2.23 tons per kilowatt uh for kilowatt hours sorry so that meant mobile coin with its 36 000 kilowatt hours was doing about 40 tons of carbon output a year we took that and we decided okay double that number and then make it 10x better because crypto so we bought a thousand tons of carbon offsets uh a very quick note that all the websites that sell carbon offsets on the internet if you're going to do a bulk buy is a horrible deal commercially you can actually get really inexpensive carbon offsets and you can take care of your own chain or your company that is the contact information for the guy that helped us he is smart and honest and a nice guy so uh uh the actual process of buying a carbon offset is annoyingly low-tech they make you do this thing called uh fiat like you know it's like bitcoin but it's paper uh and then you have to send them a thing to their bank from your bank and then there are people involved it it's bad uh and then uh when you actually want to do something you have to give somebody a call on the phone and then confirm it via email and then they go and go to another page send something in and you wait a bit and then it's done so that kind of sucks here's some things i'd really like to see happen i'd love it if a lot of you decided to build carbon offsets into your projects that you happen to like or things that you're a fan of uh there are multiple ways to do it uh i'm gonna try to skip to save some time uh go and figure out a way that every time somebody interacts with your projects you're doing a better thing for the world it doesn't have to be a carbon offset it doesn't have to be you know anything too special but like you know you have a a an nft collection you can partially give some of that to charity it's very fulfilling and trust me it feels awesome one example uh is uh we the company i literally uh just launched i'm kind of excited and freaking out sorry uh we we got a grant from the human token people human token is like mechanical turk on the blockchain uh you know you can get a human to go do something we're gonna use it to get riders uh so when we got in into their uh grant program we we had a conversation about our carbon output and and and whether or not they wanted to do it not only did they choose to make their own uh cryptocurrency carbon negative they're actually asking all the companies that they work with and give grants to to also have a plan for carbon neutrality uh so uh like i'm a huge fan of them going above and beyond there uh a very real request for the love of pete please somebody create a doll that does carbon offsets that actually care about providence uh right now almost every single one of the carbon offset chains or projects does have carbon offsets but they're just kind of random you don't know what you're getting one of the projects literally just helps farmers make sure they're getting carbon offset so there's no actual change but now these farmers are making money and don't get me wrong i'm all for farmers making money but that isn't really a reduction of harm to the environment that's just farmers making money uh so it's somebody listening out there or in here uh wants to somebody please make a dow for that and i will be one of your first uh uh money in um climate out was awesome by the way that's not a check on them i think they're great but as i said providence is the problem so a couple really good crypto projects that are uh also notable here blue dot change is attaching stuff to literally shipping vessels that are presumably not stuck in long beach uh and uh and they're removing methane from the environment so their goal is to knock out about a half a degree of temperature change within the next five years uh open forest protocol is awesome they are monitoring the heck out of forest doing it all on the blockchain it is they're an insane one i would really recommend looking into them uh a quick shout out for the mobilecoin team who kind of got me into this and they're 10x carbon negative so uh just shout out to them and a final anecdote on why it does matter that we do these things uh i was i was asking for feedback on my deck last night from a relatively well-known vc and he was like well i don't think carbon credit marketplaces are really a thing that's going to matter i think the real solutions are going to come from the government and of course i replied back the snarkiest thing i've come up with on twitter lately which is yeah crypto has a long history of waiting for the government to do something and we'll totally go with whatever they say anyway so point being we should be the ones taking action uh it's not just the government's responsibility to try to make the world a better place one of the great promises of crypto is we can make the world a better place and we can do a lot better uh anyway feel free to send all of your angry tweets at me uh i'm at jay's always everywhere cause uh got a unique last name and uh to answer two questions that i get a lot i can't approve your hacker noon article i don't work there anymore uh and my company is hiring so i'd really uh love it if anyone uh was interested in that too thank you all have a great day [Applause]