This still feels like it’s not answering the fundamental question for any blockchain project: why is this a blockchain instead of just a database with well configured permissions, and why are the advantages of the blockchain relevant to the problem it’s trying to solve? Traditional databases can be configured to be append only, accept new data from users without needing a central authority to approve each new user, be queried by any random person, etc far more efficiently than a blockchain could and without requiring every solar panel owner to download multiple terabytes of historical transaction data just to run their panel.
As for the coins, they don’t really add democratic control over a system so much as they empower whoever is best able to maximize coin generation. In a democratic system, 100 small solar panel owners would have more of a say in the governance of solar panels than 1 really wealthy South African billionaire, because they would represent more votes than the billionaire. In the coin economy, if the billionaire has at least twice as many solar panels as the rest of the small owners put together, the billionaire would have sole control over the governance of solar panels because they would be generating twice as many coins.
I admit I’m skeptic to see anything blockchain or coin related, but I’ve yet to see a problem that either technology are solving for other than “I want to be able to do financial transactions over the internet without using a bank or bank-like institution” and “I want an extremely volatile asset to speculate on”
The really quick summary is that the mods of the 196 community on blahaj.zone wanted to move the community to lemmy.world, but did not announce it publicly to the users or seek their input, and so when the announcement came out, users of the instance felt blindsided by the announcement, and that lemmy.world was a fairly unpopular choice of instance. The resulting discussion from the thread largely did not dissuade skeptical users and contributed to the feelings that the mods were making a unilateral decision based on their desire and ignoring what the users of 196 wanted, and the decision to keep the original community on lemmy.blahaj.zone locked meant that users who did not want to post on lemmy.world were losing out their community.
This resulted in another 196 clone being created on blahaj, the original 196 becoming unlocked, and so now there are 3 196 communities. The newest one, !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone, has a particularly high posting rate right now, as users are attempting to assert that community’s support as opposed to the ones run by the mods of the original and the lemmy.world communities.