Every single point in that article reinforces my point... Aside from some hand-wavy warnings which try to appeal to people's emotions that it's not a reason to be complacent.
I don't know how you can read that article and come up with the conclusion that it's 'debunked denialist talking points' - That is 100% emotional appeal. There is no logic behind it. There are financial incentives on both sides. At the end of the day, you have to look at the facts.
This is nonsense. Evolution can radically change a species in just one generation if the selective pressures are strong enough.
For example, if the world governments sterilized every human on the planet except dwarves, in just 1 generation the average human would be half as tall. With strong selective pressure, 1 generation is all it takes for the species to change radically. Evolution doesn't care about your timelines. Again, it's cleverer than you are.
This article from NASA makes it absolutely clear that it's not human tree planting which has caused the greening:
>> From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide
The second point is just as dishonest. The number of different species of birds does not affect forestation. It's mostly about the number of specimens. The variety of species doesn't matter much since many different bird species exhibit the same behaviors. Many different species of birds eat fruits and seeds. Many birds carry twigs and sprouts long distances to use to build their nests. Birds are like forest planting drones which work 24/7 and can replicate themselves.
Even NASA concedes that the last 20 years has seen the planet become greener. Humans planting trees for reforestation have almost nothing to do with that trend. People are trying to claim credit for things they have nothing to do with. The surface area of the earth is absolutely massive. Humans likely occupy less than 2% of it. Even if all humanity was mobilozed to planting trees 24/7 with the most advanced machines imaginable, our labor would mean nothing compared to what birds could do on their own by merely shitting on new pieces of fertile soil and thus inadvertantly planting the plant seeds that they consumed a few hours earlier.
Birds do more for nature using only their assholes than humanity could do with their entire beings... The birds don't even need to think about it.
People who are downvoting this are selfish tree killers.
Collecting carbon offset money in exchange for planting trees in suboptimal locations is pointless when nature already handles this by itself much faster and more efficiently than all humanity ever could... Also, unlike people, nature does it free of charge... No hidden motives.
Humans are the most wasteful and most arrogant species in existence. Look at any other species in existence, they consume very few natural resources by comparison. Why then do humans exist? Maybe nature needed us to increase CO2 levels to maintain the balance. It's arrogant to see ourselves as the center when in fact nature has always been at the center and will always be. We are mere pawns serving nature's intended purpose of balancing the ecosystem.
First, humans thought they were at the center of the universe and solar system, now they think they're at the center of the planet. Science will force us to keep conceding to how pathetic we are... Most people can't even control themselves, why are they trying to control the planet?
Carbon dioxide is good for trees. This will continue the planetary greening which has been occurring over the past few decades thanks to human activity. Trees are very good at adapting to and compensating for additional carbon dioxide. I look forward to further decentralization of forests and an overall greener planet.
BTW, the science behind planetary greening is that higher carbon dioxide helps plants to be more water-efficient. This allows them to grow in areas which would otherwise have been too dry for them.
The buybacks can only be done with real money. This is not an opinion, it's a hard fact since buybacks are done on the open market. Sure, the directors who handle finance could fake profit by taking on debt and using it to buyback the token to drive up the price artificially... But there is no incentive for someone to commit such crime since the buybacks benefit the whole community and not specifically the attacker. Also, the community can see if a director is selling their tokens (since it's all on the blockchain and the director's wallet is known).
A director could potentially do something elaborate like buy a lot of tokens at a low price anonymously, then take a bank loan and use it to pump up the price through fake buybacks then dump for a higher price some years later hoping that they don't get caught by their bank in the meantime for misusing the credit... But then why would they use our blockchain and jeopardize the value of their own large director's stake (from their main wallet) with such scheme? Why not use a random token not affiliated with them and which has lower volume where this scheme would have more effect on price and where the attacker has nothing at stake?
No matter which way you look at it, this is a huge transparency improvement over shares.
Imagine if there was a tamper-proof ledger of who owns what shares of what companies in such a way that no new shares could be issued and existing shareholders could not be diluted in any way. Tamper-proof in this case means that even the company directors themselves could not modify it, even if all of them wanted to.
Now imagine if all share buybacks (which were purchased by the company on the open market in exchange for real money and then permanently taken out of circulation) where recorded on this ledger in such a way that it could not possibly have been faked (can be independently verified using cryptography).
If you see the value in this hypothetical scenario above, then you see the value of our use case.
It costs real money to buy back tokens from the market and to burn them on the blockchain because they are provably scarce. Because new tokens cannot be created, burning them on the blockchain permanently reduces the remaining circulating supply of tokens so the value of remaining tokens goes up (supply versus demand).
Someone could potentially funnel money out from the stream of profits but anyone could independently check expected earnings (looking at the assets in the portfolio) against the on-chain buyback amount. At least, it significantly limits how much money can be funnelled out.
On the other hand, with a regular company, the directors can make up any numbers on the books and funnel out all of the profits and could keep this going for years undetected. That is far worse.
Altogether, it's not 100% trustless but it's orders of magnitude more transparent than a share-based system. As a small business with directors located in different parts of the world (some of which only met over video chat), this model was essential for us to get over the trust hurdle. Now that we can see tokens being bought and burned, it is building trust within the community. Many community members have already sold some tokens back and seen them burned. Some small investors already made a profit over their initial investment and still have half of their tokens left.
That said, it's not going to be ideal until we we multiple real estate companies (run by different people) hooked into the LSH blockchain. The more companies there are, the less trust there is.
There is no single operator. The company is decentralised with each director having the same vote. Even if an insider started embezzling funds, we would be able to see it based on the absense of proof of profit on the blockchain.
Since each person can verify the profits on-chain independently, it would raise raise flags if the amount if profits did not correspond to the expected amount of profits based on the assets which the business claims to have. All assets are disclosed publicly.
We came up with a way to allow investors to independently verify how much profit a business makes with certainty without having to trust company directors or accountants.
Clearly this is a value-add for new/small companies which don't yet have a reputation as it reduces risk for the investor. It's also a value-add for investors of big companies as it prevents them from being mislead about quarterly profits.
In our specific case, we applied it to a real estate rental business. We use the token as the primary store of value for the profits of the underlying economic activity. We have a holding company but the share was made worthless as part of the company's memorandum of incorporation. This can be achieved with a couple of simple clauses.
The token is a much more transparent and more reliable financial instrument to represent ownership of some economic activity than the share.
Being able to then trade it on decentralized exchanges is another advantage but more of a convenience at this stage.
The next phase for the community will be to build search engines which can crawl blockchains and decentralized exchanges to find tokenized businesses.
There is innovation in the crypto space but it's not being talked about or covered in mainstream media. Not yet at least.
Just because the author has fallen victim to the media oligopoly and is thus unable to see any innovation past all the flashy CNN, Facebook and Cointelegraph interfaces, doesn't mean there is no innovation occuring.
I'm involved in an innovative project right now which is creating real world economic value. It's small but we've already proved the concept and are profitable. The blockchain adds undeniable value to our use case.
When people finally find out about all the innovation that has been going on outside of their awarenesses, it's going to be a shock and they will regret it.
The idea is to use blockchain tokens instead of shares but later we will also allow people to use LSH tokens to pay for rent when staying in one of the properties in our network.
We essentially invented a new concept called 'Proof of Profit' - Imagine if you could have irrefutable proof that a company earned a certain amount of profit in a specific month. Typically you need to trust company financiers and accountants. Not so with Leasehold. If you just launch a node to sync with the blockchain, you can verify the profits yourself with absolute certainty; just by looking at on-chain buybacks for that month. Tell me this isn't innovative and useful.
I don't know how you can read that article and come up with the conclusion that it's 'debunked denialist talking points' - That is 100% emotional appeal. There is no logic behind it. There are financial incentives on both sides. At the end of the day, you have to look at the facts.