User:Chris at GreenCoin Foundation/sandbox

Overview
The GreenCoin Foundation is a Delaware Not-for-Profit Corporation headquartered in Seattle, WA. The GreenCoin Foundation operates an alternative cryptocurrency called GreenCoin. The purpose of the coin is to incentivize renewable Producers (such as solar array owners) with an open-market based carbon credit designed for private ownership.

The principle responsibility of the Foundation is to distribute newly mined coins directly to Producers in the GreenCoin Network on a daily basis. Producers are renewable commodity production entities, such as home solar array owners and biofuel producers.

As of November 20th, 2014, the GreenCoin Foundation has registered 16 active Producers in 5 countries, and has offset 15,497.7 kg of CO2. One kg of CO2 is currently valued at 29,157.42 GreenCoins.

It is possible to trade GreenCoin for Bitcoin (and other coins) on third party exchanges. These are not operated by the Foundation.

Detail
On June 7th, 2014, the GreenCoin Foundation released a peer-to-peer cryptographic asset called GreenCoin. It operates similarly to Litecoin which is based closely on the Bitcoin software protocol. The GreenCoin developers introduced code into the software that splits the coin award, and which makes it dissimilar from most other coins. When a block is solved by a miner, half of the new coin award is retained by the winning miner, and half is sent directly to an address owned by the Foundation (GZdib7W1cxd2VaEfYAw4ppe6dXhkhbScE2). Currently those coin awards are 1,000 each, and are solved about every 62.5 seconds. . Approximately 1,400,000 coins are awarded each to both miners and Producers. There will never be more than 10 billion GreenCoins in existence.

GreenCoin is a privately held, open-market incentive credit for renewable producers in energy, fuel and other carbon intensive areas. Few open market carbon credit systems exist that are highly scalable, have no participation production deminimis, and operate free from any government law or mandate. GreenCoin represents a mechanism to provide an additional payment for renewable generation that produces a commodity that is non-differentiable from non-renewably produced counterpart. One example is solar electrical energy generation. One kWh produced via solar comes with a calculated carbon life-cycle emission of 46 grams CO2. Based on widely published government data, one kWh produced by all electrical generation worldwide produces 527 grams CO2. Therefore, the difference of 481 grams CO2 results from producing one kWh utilizing solar energy versus the generic grid as a whole. GreenCoin presents a mechanism to reward the solar production that generated 1 kWh in the absence of this additional 481 grams of CO2.

GreenCoin users, known as Producers, sign-in to their personal GreenCoin webpage and update meter readings for their respective renewable system. A typical Producer currently is a home solar array owner. Once every day, the GreenCoin Foundation calculates the carbon impact of each Producer (see example above) and aggregates the total carbon emission offset for the day. The Foundation issues the coins that have been mined into the central Foundation address directly to the Producers pro-rata to their production versus the total production.

Ultimately the goal is to reduce global carbon emissions by providing an additional incentive for renewable production, such as solar electrical generation, that makes it more financially competitive with carbon intensive natural gas and coal electrical production, without penalizing the latter two for existing. It is simply an additional, socially-derived revenue added to the renewable production that is determined by an open market price based on the collective trading of individual market players. When the market decides this useful carbon reduced production should be worth more, the price goes up, when they don't, it goes down.

The coin specifications are as follows:

Scrypt, Secure and Open Source

Total coins: 10,000,000,000 (ten billion)

Block Time: 60 seconds target (approximately)

Initial coins per block: 2,000

Coins per block awarded to miners: 1,000 (50%)

Coins per block awarded to Foundation: 1,000 (50%)

Halving rate: 2,500,000 blocks (about 5 years)

Difficulty Retarget: Every 30 minutes

Confirmations on Transactions: 5 (about 5 minutes)

Confirmations on Mined Blocks: 60 (about 1 hour)

Ports: P2P 11036, RPC 21036