In my current headspace of wanting to adjust my life down to the bare minimum and live lighter, tech wise, food wise, shelter like (keep it moving) I’ve been thinking how we could maybe look about changing the platforms I use and interact with for the better.
I think a good selling point for the steam blockchain would be around storytelling some better energy credentials and what better story than being able to say we are carbon neutral — I mean, we are not but we could be if we found reliable hosts around the web that had fast ssd’s, low latency and good pricing that were completely powered by renewable energy sources, it would certainly bring the green army in of environmental people to use the platform, often their voice is muted by big corps and lobbying.
Carbon neutrality, or climate neutrality or having a net zero carbon footprint, refers to achieving net zero carbon dioxide emissions by balancing carbon emissions with carbon removal or simply eliminating carbon emissions altogether. Wikipedia
Finland for instance is looking to be carbon neutral by 2035 and I’m sure another raft of countries are trying to follow suite. i’ve seen lots of geo-political thought go into the placement of certain hosting equipment where countries have a steady renewable source, places like lulea in Sweden for instance, the home of the node pole - just check out the calculator to see the energy cost savings for running servers there.
It’s probably the reason that facebook invested over 1 billion dollars in building out it’s another european data centre in addition to Ireland and Denmark.
The expansion will nearly double the size of the Facebook data center campus in Luleå, according to the Swedish economic development organization Node Pole, bringing it to more than 1 million square feet.
So what’s this got to do with steem?
Well right now, nothing.
At the moment most witness servers are hosted across multiple server companies across the world, I’m not sure of their carbon neutral records of course but I’m sure we could be doing a lot more and it would make really good storytelling to be the worlds biggest carbon neutral chain — we could build a data marketplace out of it in the process offering 1-click migration tools and help those server companies with bare metal servers offerings.
You could actually go another step of building in a process of putting offers of hosting into a smart contract locking in the hosting price and have a tradable marketplace for data centres to bid on your requirements, locking in the price for 3, 6, 12 or 24 months ahead (thus locking in witness needs and balancing out the costs for protecting witness nodes swaying costs.
Of course with MIRA this is a problem that is hopefully falling away due to off the shelf servers with fairly modest ram requirements because we have the rocksdb adapter part which means that if you want to host a witness you don’t have to spend big amounts of money to do so — I’m hoping that this opens up a marketplace dapp owners to build their own frontends and to contribute a witness to the overall health of the network.
visualising our neutral hosting numbers
in a similar way to the way that blocktivity tracks TPS we could do a similar thing but more 3d and visual for the amount of co2 we are saving compared to other blockchains if we have the data for those — as I said above this is more about storytelling another feather in the bow of the steem blockchain and it could also peak interest in visualisation form especially to those countries and businesses that might be eligible for carbon credits (puke) and kick backs due to using carbon neutral services — potentially a marketplace there?
I’ve been seeing a lot of mobile app ‘masternode’ services and it seems to me that to secure the network from those ‘shock’ moments when lots of staff get laid off because of operating costs of one of the major figures in the steem blockchain maybe we need to be working towards an ease of use now for the average Joe to ‘spin up’ their own master node with ‘benefits’ — maybe this is where business alliances should be targeting their efforts, I’d absolutely love to spin up a witness node from a dashboard with health checking and all the data I need as a server owner.
I’d certainly like to see some of these things above happen and once I’ve worked out how to get a MIRA enable witness server going I’ll be looking for a carbon neutral fast low latency host to put it on. In the pursuit of cutting down and cutting back on consumption anything I can switch to for offsetting subtracting to the global issues is better in my books.
Written on the day of #WorldEnvironmentDay — we don’t have a planet B remember that! -- cut back, recycle, optimise!
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pinterest epic wins pinboard → brand advocate for nokia, 1000heads, verisign → won vloggie for node666 (san fran 2006) → television for time team history hunters 1999 → sold me.dm to evan williams in april 2011 → went to phil campbell, alabama to help raise money after tornado (was on sky news, bbc news)→ CNN for sxsw 2013 about austin sxsw → video chat with robert scoble → music video can you spot me?
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