Definitions
“Things” will henceforth be used to describe “Goods”, “Services”, “Products”, physical « objects » and/or “Items”.
“CEoT’s” , as explained in more depth below, is a decentralised autonomous self-organising public record in the form of bespoke Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT’s) [9] e.g. Smart Contracts/ Group of Smart Contracts, written on the Loopring zkRollup L2 [10] on the Ethereum Blockchain [10] . They are generated upon request by a self service webapp website which features an API for more automated machine-to-machine processes. Their intended use is a kind of digital wallet/ ledger for each Thing in existence and produced in the future.
The tokens held on the ledger relates to the carbon scoring of the Thing. As part of the CEoT Ecosystem system and its launch, the unique address of the CEoT can be advertised with a QR Code, which can be easily added to virtual and real-world Things. There are several ways to reduce the negligence, incompetence or manipulation of multiple Things QR Codes refering to the same CEoT. Otherwise they’d be no better than the barcodes used for the last 50+ years. CEoT also seeks to solve multiple CEoT’s referring to the same Thing. It’s now technically possible to reference snippets of CCTV footage in the CEoT, to playback video footage corresponding to the specific Things” entire journey from its manufacture to the moment it arrives in your hand. This growing ability to validify the chain of custody of the Thing is, in the case of this whitepaper’s objectives, only restricted by the hypocrisy of the growing carbon footprint this feature would cause. But as the gap between current carbon emission and carbon zero shrinks, so too will the feasibility of making the CEoT-Ready Thing and its corresponding CEoT record inseparable.
“CEoT In Thing” doesn’t mean the Thing hosts a node that contains a unique CEoT. Without breaking much of a sweat, IoT capabilities in Things could achieve this, perhaps using Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) and Near Field Communications (NFC) to ensure maximum uptime for synchronisation with the blockchain and offline intractability. But the bandwidth of USSD and other factors between now and the carbon countdown clock deadline, doesn’t permit this or is so challenging at his juncture, that complication and perhaps failure appears to be inevitable.
In the interim the CEoT Ecosystem will instead exist on the Loopring/ Ethereum blockchain online for added security, better bandwidth, adoptability, support etc. But this isn’t to say that CEoT won’t be able to source a web3.0 device which would connect into the Thing owner’s wireless access point, so the general public have an almost physical possession of the CEoT’s which correspond to the Things in their possession. In fact, by simply adding mesh capabilities between neighbours there would be no more need for any web2.0 infrastructure, not even the ISP. But this migration should perhaps be explored after 2028 since more centralised infrastructure running on greener energy and using more efficient industrial scale energy saving techniques are far better for our current greenhouse-gas emission goals than depending the CEoT Ecosystem on residential end-users, with less efficient residential-grade energy saving solutions or bandwidth.
Tradeoffs like this, perhaps not all so sovereign in nature, will need to be considered to ensure the 2028 deadline is priority and not the ego of technical supremacy. One example of this is the Palm NFT platform which has chosen to use a centralised Proof of Authority algorithm [11] which is even more energy efficient than proof-of-stake. Although efforts are being made to decentralise their Proof of Authority algorithm, it’s somewhat a better priority to have, in light of the approaching carbon clock deadline, than prioritising decentralisation which is currently worse for the environment.
Both environmental impact and architectural integrity, particularly security, are paradoxical when it comes to prioritising them, because poor structural integrity could jeopardise the CEoT Ecosystem from ever fulfilling its goal in time for the 2028 deadline, but equally what is the point of having such a durable and rigorous ecosystem if in doing so it defeats its own objective by having a carbon footprint which could have been avoided. Striking a balance is even an understatement because we will miss our window. Environmental impact must be a non-negotiable top priority for the next 6 years. And this is why the tradeoff is made to describe the CEoT being “in the Thing” when it’s actually not technically physically in it, we’re just trusting people in the manufacturing process and supply chain to be diligent in their duties. It’s either that or we exhaust resources and raise our carbon footprint to catalogue and survey the Thing, from cradle to grave, to try to absolutely ensure a bad actor doesn’t corrupt or manipulate the CEoT Ecosystem and data. So yes, eggs will be broken in this race to make our CEoT omelette, but its floor, quite literally, will be cleaned after the carbon clock strikes zero.