Decentralized Hydroponics

I was talking to someone on Twitter about about the possibility of creating a blockchain version of eBay/Amazon, and the conversation led to my mentioning some of my ideas about using such a distribution system to grow and deliver hydroponically grown vegetables. I decided to just gather my thoughts in my inaugural blog post for the Futuroptimist brand.

What is hydroponics?

Hydroponics is a technique where you grow plants using water as a medium instead of soil. You add a mineral nutrient solution, keep an eye on pH levels, and either use sunlight or indoor artificial lighting. It's easy to get started if you're a beginner, but there's quite a lot of depth to this topic, which I won't have time for in this blog post. I've dabbled in hydroponics as a hobby in the past, and while this hobby is currently in cold storage while I work on other projects, I absolutely do want to follow through with everything I'm describing here. Subscribe to my newsletter to keep up with said projects :)

Economies of scale

The thing about hydroponics is that while it's pretty accessible to hobbyists and small business owners, it really benefits from economies of scale, which is why you tend to see companies building gigantic factories outside high-population cities. These factories have are filled to the brim with racks of plants, artificial lighting, and robots. That's cool (I guess), but as someone who's obsessed with the world of crypto and web3, buzzwords like "decentralization" and "trustless systems" make my brain really happy, so I often wonder if there's a better (or at least more fun) way to do things.

A distributed model

Before we discuss why to use a distributed model, let me briefly outline my plans. This deserves a proper whitepaper down the road, but for now I just want to start a conversation and gather people's thoughts.

My primary inspiration for this model is deeper.network, which is a decentralized VPN protocol that rewards you with cryptocurrency for providing VPN-like bandwidth to a network of clients. If you connect a Deeper device to your network, you essentially have free VPN for life because you're also providing your own connection as well. While I'm a bit apprehensive about personally using this protocol (as it essentially makes me the equivalent of a Tor exit node and risks making my ISP or 3-letter agencies angry), but in general I think this model is widely applicable.

In the context of plants, a decentralized network of growers are growing a commodity (analogous to the bandwidth in the above example). This commodity can then be consumed personally by the grower if they so choose, in which case they would earn zero revenue, but their appetite would be satiated. Going back to the Deeper example, this would be the equivalent of turning off bandwidth sharing and using the device as a way to remotely connect to your local network.

If the grower chose to sell their plants instead, they would contribute their plants to the network, and those plants would be delivered to (somewhat) local hungry buyers. Inversely, anyone (including growers) could order plants from the network and have it delivered to them.

Let's talk about the delivery network. Right now, we have ride share networks owned by large corporations like Uber and Doordash. These provide a great service, but human drivers are not compensated that well, and the companies take a huge cut at the cost of restaurants and end users.

We're seeing the beginnings of an improvement to this model, thanks to companies like Tesla working on autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots. Once distribution of goods is truly automated at scale with robotics, the cost of delivery will plummet, and the proliferation of electric vehicles and renewables will further reduce the burden on our planet. The convergence of all of these technologies makes previously unprofitable business models much more accessible, and I think that this is key to enabling the sort of decentralized grower network I'm talking about.

One other major challenge that I see with this model (but certainly not the only other one) is the fact that without central control of the growers, the risk of low quality control or abuse is high. We'd need to build robust trust and reputation systems to ensure that no one is harmed due to bad actors. This is definitely doable, and we can use some of the tools used by elicit darknet markets, which include multisig transactions, escrow accounts using smart contracts, and collateral mechanisms.

One other benefit of the big factory model is standardization, and this is an important component of a decentralized grower market, as a heteregeneous grower population inherently leads to inconsistencies and high variance in quality control. For this reason, it would make sense to have a dedicated community of engineers designing hydroponic systems that can be cheaply replicated by the community of growers. This will most likely involve 3D printing, as this helps democratize the manufacturing process. A DAO is a mechanism that could be used to pay these engineers for their designs and ensure that the hydroponic systems continue to improve in efficiency and quality over time.

Ok, so why should we decentralize something that benefits from economies of scale? I can think of a number of reasons:

The big factory hydroponics model is inherently capitalistic, which certainly rubs some people the wrong way (myself included, to a certain degree). Plus, this model may lead to companies closely guarding trade secrets, creating patents, and generally being really unfun and corporate. Perhaps these are not strong reasons, but they're meaningful enough to me.

Stay tuned for Part 2, which will discuss how this relates to climate change, NFTs, and a sustainable civilization on Mars.

If you're interested in this topic, I recommend you join my Discord server and talk about it.

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