HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Wendover Productions recently made a very informative video about carbon offsets that goes into much more detail. Certain types of carbon offsets do work, but even those tend to underdeliver.

https://youtu.be/AW3gaelBypY

I think this video by Wendover Productions does a much better job than the article of both highlighting specific examples and laying out the perverse incentive structures that carbon offsetting creates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW3gaelBypY

Here is the list of sources for that video if you're interested:

[1] https://www.hawkmountain.org/news/special-projects/help-the-...

[2] https://www.bluesource.com/demo/hawk-mountain/

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2020/03/18/jpmorga...

[4] https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmc/jpmorgan-chas...

[5] https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/Haya-E...

[6] https://web.archive.org/web/20220605103102/http://apps.who.i...

[7] https://eco-act.com/carbon-credits/cleaner-cookstoves-low-ca...

[8] https://depts.washington.edu/airqual/Marshall_66.pdf

[9] https://blogs.worldbank.org/energy/understanding-cookstove-a...

[10] https://mediamanager.sei.org/documents/Publications/Climate/...

[11] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2019.006...

[12] https://app.hubspot.com/documents/3298623/view/251152947?acc...

> Filecoin - A commodity market for storage that's currently 0.0011% the cost of S3.

This actually proves that there isn't a real use case of Filecoin aside from speculation. Amazon isn't making 99.9989% profit margins on S3, nor is it possible for Filecoin to be a hundred thousand times more efficient than S3. This means that Filecoin's storage product is so uncompetitive that you need to subsidize it a hundred thousand times just to get people to use it.

> Toucan - Tradable Carbon Credits

All the other use cases listed look like parodies of crypto products with plenty of buzzwords, and no real substance. However, this one is especially nonsensical. From their website:

> Working with top DeFi protocols and the community we enable carbon credits to be used as collateral, yields and money, as well as a huge range of novel applications.

That's literally missing the point of buying carbon credits. The only use case for buying carbon credits to blackhole them immediately, so that you can feel like you're offsetting your emissions. There is no reason to resell them. Even if you did want to resell them because you overestimated your carbon footprint and have some left "unused", no buyer has any reason to believe you. If there is anything carbon credits need, it's more centralization and trust, not less.

Excellent relevant Wendover video about carbon credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW3gaelBypY

⬐ krageon

Perhaps if you gave us some insight on what profit margins amazon is making on S3 and why you think so it would help us follow your thoughts. Just saying "pah, patently ridiculous" and then swiftly moving on is not something of use to anyone.

⬐ Aunche

The link claims it costs $0.0000018 to store 1 GB for a year. Their data is 110 PiB, so the total revenue of their services is ~$200 a year. That's not even enough to buy a single enterprise hard drive.

⬐ Dylan16807

> This actually proves that there isn't a real use case of Filecoin aside from speculation. Amazon isn't making 99.9989% profit margins on S3, nor is it possible for Filecoin to be a hundred thousand times more efficient than S3. This means that Filecoin's storage product is so uncompetitive that you need to subsidize it a hundred thousand times just to get people to use it.

A few months ago I tried for a couple hours to figure out how to get files onto the filecoin network and I could not make heads or tails of it. There were some services that used it as a backend, but that wasn't my goal and they had weird pricing too.

Wikipedia says "As of February 2022 the total storage capacity was 15.6EiB, and total data stored was 40 PiB."

Clearly something's wonky here if it's so cheap and so empty. Does anyone understand what's going on there?

For comparison I could mention something like Sia, which seems to be put together fine and comprehensibly, but the total size is single digit petabytes so it's completely irrelevant on a global scale.