Money is too important to leave only in the hands of politicians and bankers, who historically have been poor custodians of the money supply. Our view is that crypto has a role to play and a bright future.
For cryptocurrencies (crypto) to work better and best serve people who want to use it, crypto needs to be democratized and put in the pockets (literally!) of the people who use it.
The blockchains that underlie crypto must be robust and resilient in the sense that they are reliable and available from day-to-day and resistant to attacks whenever and wherever they come from. To that end, the network and compute resources that sustain them must be big and small, and geographically and technologically varied and not wholly dependent on the power grid and internet. Help remove single points of failure and concentration of resources, where possible, from the crypto infrastructure without compromising it. Accessible to rich and poor. In a word: diverse.
The network and compute that sustain crypto is today too wasteful of energy and more should be done to harvest the abundant ambient energy in the environment around us to power it. It's not enough to reduce energy consumed per unit of computation, it's important also to reduce energy consumption overall across the whole crypto ecosystem while at the same time not impairing it; indeed, we want to augment it.
By using free energy from the ambient environment we take load off the grid, and make crypto activities more "green", so to speak. And, hey, the energy is free so tokens you mine are free! Some crypto is better than no crypto.
Also, pocket mining devices are relatively easy to recycle, reducing their impact on the environment at end-of-life.
Both ambient energy harvesting and recycling will make the crypto infrastructure more sustainable.
Mining and other activities that sustain crypto have become too concentrated in the hands of the few and, for the sake of resilience, diversity, and democratization, need to be spread and widened to the hands of the many, including those economically disadvantaged (by removing cost as a barrier to entry).
What We Will Do - A New Direction and Future for Crypto
Perhaps ironically, we want to create a "solo-miner collective", a group of people that supports crypto infrastructure by people walking around with small devices (ideally, pocket and purse sized) that work by harvesting energy for free from the ambient environment around them.
Put crypto figuratively and literally in the pockets of people. Figuratively in the sense that people can acquire and accumulate small amounts of crypto over time. Literally, by using small low-cost devices in their pocket or purse.
Give people complete control over what, when, why and how (solo or pool) they mine crypto.
Allow anyone to develop new coins and tokens in the crypto space and launch and deploy them quickly onto an existing and established network of widely available and distributed green devices. Given the numerous small devices onto which such new coins can be deployed, this has the added advantage of encouraging diversity and wide adoption by many people. Allow people to experiment.
Encourage people to adopt crypto at low cost and with low risk, and learn something useful about crypto while doing it.
Allow individuals, schools and universities to educate themselves about blockchain and crypto in a hands-on and participative way.
Explore network topologies and infrastructure to support crypto beyond the internet, both globally and at the campus/community level. And not just for crypto, but also to encourage other technologies and networks that encourage community and social good by providing an existing and currently operating infrastructure, bypassing — whenever possible (within the bounds of the law) — the oppressiveness of corporate and government surveillance.
Join us! The more of us there are, the better the crypto ecosystem will become.