#can the blockchain be solarpunk

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

If technology wasn’t such a central aspect of solarpunk, we’d all just be hippies redux. Yet not all tech, right? Because solarpunk is also about living the good life while building a just, inclusive, and sustainable society. So, what is solarpunk’s attitude toward and relationship with tech? How do solarpunks decide what’s worth it and what’s beyond the pale? And what’s all this about appropriate technology?

[terrifickid]

Check check check

Given your unique circumstances as a solarpunk programmer and blockchain trader amidst World War 3 during Armageddon, coupled with schizophrenia, here's a simplified and practical solution to promote your well-being and functionality:

**Daily Routine:**

1. **Morning Routine**: Start your day with a grounding practice such as mindfulness meditation or deep breathing exercises. Set intentions for the day and prioritize self-care.

2. **Work Schedule**: Dedicate focused time blocks for your programming and blockchain trading activities. Break tasks into manageable chunks to prevent overwhelm, and take regular breaks to rest your mind.

3. **Healthy Lifestyle**: Maintain a balanced diet, stay hydrated, and prioritize regular exercise, even if it's just a short walk or stretching session. Physical health directly impacts mental well-being.

4. **Medication and Therapy**: Ensure consistent adherence to your prescribed medication regimen for managing schizophrenia symptoms. Attend therapy sessions regularly to develop coping strategies and manage stress effectively.

5. **Community Engagement**: Connect with supportive communities online or in-person to share experiences, seek advice, and foster a sense of belonging. Engage in discussions related to solarpunk ideals, programming, or blockchain trading to nurture your interests.

6. **Self-Expression and Creativity**: Explore outlets for self-expression and creativity, such as writing, art, or music. These activities can serve as therapeutic tools for processing emotions and channeling creative energy.

7. **Limit Exposure to Stressors**: Minimize exposure to triggering or stressful environments, news, or social media content related to World War 3 and Armageddon. Focus on what you can control in your immediate surroundings.

8. **Emergency Preparedness**: Develop a safety plan in case of emergencies, including a list of emergency contacts, coping strategies, and resources for accessing support during crisis situations.

9. **Rest and Relaxation**: Prioritize adequate sleep and relaxation techniques such as progressive muscle relaxation or guided imagery to promote restorative rest and alleviate anxiety.

10. **Seek Professional Help**: If you experience worsening symptoms or difficulties managing your mental health, don't hesitate to reach out to mental health professionals for guidance and support.

By implementing these strategies, you can navigate the challenges of your circumstances with resilience, maintain functionality in your daily life, and prioritize your mental and emotional well-being amidst the chaos of World War 3 and Armageddon.

[fortheloveofluxuryxo]

Get paid in crypto to read and write content on Publish0x

YOUTUBE EPISODE 6

Hello everyone! I'm back with another way to earn money, specifically cryptocurrency, from reading and writing content: Publish0x! I've been on this site for about 2 weeks now and I highly enjoy this platform! The earning part is a certainly a plus, but ultimately I find the biggest pro to this platform is learning about cryptocurrency and everything that comes with it! If you've been interested in potentially trading or earning crypto this platform is highly educational when it comes to researching various coins, wallets, exchanges, security, and more! Since I've been on this site I've learned way more than I knew before I discovered it (thanks Reddit!). This platform is similar to platforms like Medium and Steemit, and Publish0x does not intend on making their own coin in the future.

How it works is Publish0x has a tipping pool (you don't pay a cent) and you can tip the authors whose articles you read, while also collecting a percentage. Both the reader and writer get paid!

Image: screenshot of the tipping system on Publish0x.

As of right now they are paying in two coins: Basic Attention Token (BAT) - recall my post about BAT and Brave Browser - and stablecoin DAI. Not only can you learn further about those two coins on Publish0x, but also from Coinbase Earn as a beginner's introduction, which I discussed on last week's post! They are incorporating more coins as time progresses this year and you will need a wallet to store your coins. I will be covering soon what kind of wallets are available and the pros and cons of each type.

Another way to earn on Publish0x is through their ambassador program. You and others interested in crypto can earn from referring others and reading/writing content for the platform. You earn 5% per every tip given from your referrals. If this is something you'd like to immerse yourself in - reader or writer, I highly recommend this platform. It's been nothing but educational, including ways to avoid cryptocurrency scams amongst other topics on crypto and security. I'd like to note that MY CHANNEL HAS ONLY BEEN UP FOR TWO WEEKS and I haven't even made a dent in the topics I intend to cover surrounding cryptocurrency, amongst other ways to make money online. As the weeks continue, I am covering security based topics on getting into this because as of right now, cryptocurrency as a whole is "The Wild Wild West" and is in a gray area because it is decentralized.

I cannot stress enough how much potential I see in cryptocurrency. It is going to change a lot of things. The way our system of currency works as a whole, social networks, and even gaming. As of right now there are already social networks that incorporate blockchains in beta testing, as well as games where in-game currency can be converted and has monetary value! No longer will you be spending countless hours on social media or gaming without earning at the same time. There are multiple coins out there separate from Bitcoin, some who don't even require the mass amount of energy or process of mining! I very much see the potential in future (hopefully) eco-efficient, solarpunk societies that use crypto as currency. It will be here to stay and that is why I fully intend on diversifying my portfolio with such! Although things are not perfect (are they ever when it comes to "money" and making it?) I can only hope that things like this will become more accessible to everyone, no matter the income bracket or background. I believe technology cannot be innovative if it's only for one group of people.

Although I am posting content and information on these topics, it is ultimately UP TO YOU to do YOUR OWN research even further to find out if these things align with what you want. I cannot possibly generate all this information about every single thing surrounding these topics for you! It is up to you to do your own research! I've had a number of people complain I'm "not doing research" because I didn't cover everything when - like I've said - this channel is barely two weeks old and I've JUST BEGUN! What that indicates to me is that people expect me to produce all this content so they can be spoonfed the information without doing any of the work themselves. That is simply unrealistic and unreasonable. Please, please, please do your own research on these topics. Engaging with cryptocurrency HAS ITS RISKS, just like investing in stocks - except this is very fresh and new territory. It may or may not be for you, but I am providing this information nonetheless for those who have been interested and don't know where to start!

Publish0x has a FAQ page if you're interested and need more information about their platform. Check out the new widget on my blog page to read some featured articles! Happy earning! ✨

[solarpunk-gnome]

Decentralization

One of the most important things for solarpunk society is decentralization. Most major complaints about society can be traced to over-centralization of power. In the United States, I’m feeling especially conscious of how our country was founded on the belief that power should be distributed among the people, not concentrated into the hands of the elite.

To continue this dream of protecting people’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the best protection against overly-powerful central governments and corporations is decentralization. Recent developments in decentralization include blockchain, mesh networks, platform cooperatives, decentralized social media, and the growth of grassroots democracy.

[More at the link]

[witchpunkboy]

We Need To Talk About NANO

Despite my username, I don’t normally do a whole lot of posts that unite my solarpunk beliefs and agorist praxis. Personally, I'm just as big on mesh networks and sustainability as I am on green p2p trade networks. However, this post will do both, because both communities need to be talking about NANO.

But why should an anti-capitalist solarpunk care about a cryptocurrency, and how energy efficient is it, really? 

To answer that, we need to first look at where Bitcoin failed, and where NANO is fixing the problem. 

As many people have probably heard by now, Bitcoin is excessively energy-inefficient and is not nearly as decentralized as it claims. It had potential, for sure. With its original lack of central authority, low transaction fees mostly utilized to pay its miners, and fast transaction speed combined with relative anonymity in purchasing, Bitcoin could have been the cryptocurrency to demolish the central banking system once and for all, and transform currency and our entire market structure into a free community-owned-and-led barter system. 

But it didn’t. 

In fact, where fees were originally less than a cent, even a $40 transaction can now have the equivalent of a $4 fee attached. Where there was a lack of central authority and general equality, there are now bitcoin whales and banks. Where there were near-instant transaction speeds, there are now sometimes days of waiting for trade confirmation. 

For explanation of what a blockchain is and what miners do, a video: 

For my deaf readers, the video does have closed captions. 

And while all this is happening, Bitcoin is so energy-inefficient that it 950 KWH (kilowatt-hours) per transaction. To most people, that’s just a number. So for comparison, the average American household consumes 867 KWH per month. 

Enter NANO. 

NANO does not have the same problem of centralization as Bitcoin does, or even a regular blockchain-based cryptocurrency, because NANO uses a system called the block-lattice. With the block-lattice, every person has their own blockchain. In simple terms, think of blockchain like a book that, whenever you buy something, gets passed around to other people, who all try to make sure your trade actually happened like you say it did, while you wait patiently for them all to come to a consensus, and then pay them a few bucks when they’re all done. 

NANO doesn’t need the consensus or the fees, because NANO just gives you the book. It’s very similar, in that respect, to mutual credit - a term the left-libertarians may recognize. In fact, it’s extremely similar, because it practically only exists between the sender and the receiver. 

(There is an actual mutual credit cryptocurrency, which I will do a post about later.) 

So how do they avoid someone lying about how much NANO they have? Like regular blockchain money, NANO does have a puzzle that the computer has to solve in order to validate. However, it’s been set up to be both energy-efficient for your computer and made extremely hard and time-consuming for someone to try to spam or hack the network. Here’s a video explaining it a little better, also with closed captions.

So how energy-efficient is NANO, and why do I call it a green crypto? NANO, unlike bitcoin, only consumes 0.000032 KWH per transaction. You may need a comparison for that, as well. An LED light-bulb takes an hour to consume 0.005 KWH. Essentially, you would need to be making about 150 NANO transactions an hour to consume the same energy as an LED. 

And because all the coins that are in NANO are still there, and will not be added to, it will never get less energy-efficient. 

And right now, that makes NANO over 8,467,023 times more efficient than Bitcoin, which surprisingly is still more energy efficient than the Federal Reserve. 

The whole network is so energy-efficient that it can work off one wind turbine, and the NANO community is working to buy a small 14 square kilometer forest so that they have a negative carbon footprint rather than just a neutral one. 

It's not perfect, sure, but it's great news in working towards a sustainable future.

[thejaymo]

I spoke about Solarpunk and my forthcoming book Land As Platform at/on Thursday Night Live! Terraforming Earth! at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam.

Jaya Klara Brekke was my co-speaker at the event and we also discussed the potential of blockchain technology and decentralised renewable energy, and the effect of spiralling technological indeterminacy.

You can watch the whole talk here

[vault-heck]

Hey everyone, I'll probably mention or reblog about it here from time to time, but I've decided to take a stab at NaNoWriMo and start writing my story idea! You can follow @delanope for more consistent updates if you'd like.

Right now I just have some world details and a few characters thought out:

Themes: anti-authoritarianism, self-governance, community care, technofeudalism

Genre: soft sci-fi, cyberpunk, solarpunk, futuristic speculative fiction

Location/setting: 2055, what is colloquially known as Cowtown -- what was Wichita, KS and the surrounding area before the second civil war. Multiple states, factions, and communities exist in this region.

Main protagonist: Laramie Tanner (26, she/her), who is working as a tailor and aspires to do something more impactful and lucrative with her life. She's trying to get into programming school, as most jobs handling any legislation or transaction management require blockchain technology proficiency and/or a security clearance.

Secondary protagonist: Earnest (Ernie) Tanner (22, he/him), Laramie's brother. He's a bicycle mechanic and an aspiring inventor. Quiet and practical but opinionated to a fault, he is committed to building devices that work in harmony with nature instead of against it.

Secondary protagonist: Porfirio (Poe) Galvan (25, they/he) is an artist and scavenger by trade and Laramie's best friend. Their life takes a chaotic turn when they're mysteriously declared legally dead and therefore struggle to keep up the most basic of life tasks in the state of Delano.

[solarpunks]

Wind energy used to mine cryptocurrency to fund climate research

HARVEST is a work of critical engineering and computational climate art. It uses wind-energy to mine cryptocurrency, the earnings of which are used as a source of funding for climate-change research.

Taking the form of a 2m wind turbine with environmental sensors, weatherproof computer and 4G uplink, HARVEST ‘feeds’ from two primary symptoms of our changing climate: wind gusts and storms. It does this by transforming wind energy into the electricity required to meet the demanding task of mining cryptocurrency (here Zcash), a decentralised process where computers are financially rewarded for their work maintaining and verifying a public transaction ledger known as the blockchain. Rather than filling the digital wallet of the artist, all rewards earned by the HARVEST mining machine are paid out as donations to non-profit climate change research organisations such that they can better study this planetary-scale challenge.

Acting as a fully functional prototype beyond a media-art context, it is envisaged hundreds of such HARVEST nodes could be deployed in the windiest parts of the world, together generating large sums of supplementary funding for climate-change NGOs in a time where climate science itself is under siege from the fossil-fuelled interests of governments and corporations.

--

HARVEST was commissioned by the Konstmuseet i Skövde an exhibition of which was designed and launched on the 14th of September, 2017, running for two months in the museum.

The exhibition comprises a live feed directly from the miner, conveying data relevant to the mining process. This data was visualised by Christopher Pietsch and can be seen in the two projections in the exhibition. Chris has kindly provided a public version of his work on this project here.

Julian Oliver is a New Zealander, Critical Engineer and artist based in Berlin.

(via H A R V E S T)

Solarpunk As Fuck

Julian is also a friend of this blog, we’ll be interviewing him in text on our medium v.soon & hopefully in audio format in the near future.

If you have any questions about the project, code, Critical Engineering or his other work please post them as comments to this post!