The carbon footprint optimization is an abritrage between hardware costs and "ecological" impact. The ecological impact minimization is a societal issue, and is against the short-term individual economical self-interest (as it could be cheaper also to throw toxic waste in the toilets as to properly drive to deposit those in some appropriate center, leading to recycled drinkable water to have some trace of toxicity).
If no carbon footprint was involved in the equation, the miner would simply chose the cheapest hardware to meet mining requirements, including resiliency/availability.
The issue could be the miner being audited on an optimal expensive hardware design, and then reselling it and putting a plain cheap PC instead once the audit is done. Although power-consumption efficiency is less a criteria than performance in the hardware market, it is however possible to use a standard PC with an emulator simulating any kind of possible hardware so that remote performance difference between the audited hardware and the real procuction one becomes unnoticable, even by cryptographic techniques (such as Garbled cicruits that can assess the hardware performance even when the hardware wants to hide behing a fake specification).
As there are no technical possibilites to assess the "no-virtualization" of miner on bad carbon-footprint design, it is required to pay some auditor to visit the node infrastructure at some random day with 2H prior notice only, so that the miner cannot buy some express configuration to some specialized seller with express-delivery system. The miner will have to stake 50% of the reward (as Issue 1 suggested) that will be lost if suprise-audit was proven unsuccessful.
It is particularly interesting to act this way when the network will get to important size (as an example, Ethereum has already 2TO of history and being a full node takes important resources to revalidate all the chain, and can last 2 weeks on expensive hardware.
The carbon footprint optimization is an abritrage between hardware costs and "ecological" impact. The ecological impact minimization is a societal issue, and is against the short-term individual economical self-interest (as it could be cheaper also to throw toxic waste in the toilets as to properly drive to deposit those in some appropriate center, leading to recycled drinkable water to have some trace of toxicity).
If no carbon footprint was involved in the equation, the miner would simply chose the cheapest hardware to meet mining requirements, including resiliency/availability.
The issue could be the miner being audited on an optimal expensive hardware design, and then reselling it and putting a plain cheap PC instead once the audit is done. Although power-consumption efficiency is less a criteria than performance in the hardware market, it is however possible to use a standard PC with an emulator simulating any kind of possible hardware so that remote performance difference between the audited hardware and the real procuction one becomes unnoticable, even by cryptographic techniques (such as Garbled cicruits that can assess the hardware performance even when the hardware wants to hide behing a fake specification).
As there are no technical possibilites to assess the "no-virtualization" of miner on bad carbon-footprint design, it is required to pay some auditor to visit the node infrastructure at some random day with 2H prior notice only, so that the miner cannot buy some express configuration to some specialized seller with express-delivery system. The miner will have to stake 50% of the reward (as Issue 1 suggested) that will be lost if suprise-audit was proven unsuccessful.
It is particularly interesting to act this way when the network will get to important size (as an example, Ethereum has already 2TO of history and being a full node takes important resources to revalidate all the chain, and can last 2 weeks on expensive hardware.