Bitcoins and similar digital currencies have taken off recently because of an advance in Computer Science regarding how to do secure bookkeeping regarding the origin of a coin and all its transactions. The crowd maintains a record of who owns the coin so you can't cheat forge the currency and still participate in the market because your records will be out of sync with everyone else's. Coins can also be mined, or created, by performing complex computations to keep them scarce. The idea of carbon credit markets is to give countries and companies a certain amount of credits relating to the amount of carbon they are allowed to burn. To go over that limit without fines they would need to buy credits off countries that have a surplus because their energy is produced sustainably.

I wonder if the ideas behind digital currencies could be used to make carbon credit markets more dynamic and more liable to be used on a large scale. For example, what if a new digital currency was created for everyday use on the internet but is also tied to carbon credits. Countries could mine new coins in this currency via a combination of their percentage sustainable energy production and total carbon emmisions. I'm not sure if you'd need the algorithmic mining component at all. You just use the bookkeeping aspect of bitcoin and replace "Country has produced x% of their energy sustainably" as the "hard" function needed to mine coins.

Greener developed countries like Germany would be relatively richer in this currency but it would also be easier for developing countries to generate because their absolute pollution levels would be much lower. These countries could then sell these credits to other countries or individuals for use on the internet. They could give or sell at a discount to their own citizens thus rewarding them with some virtual income. This would essentially create a new economy that creates wealth where it is needed most while rewarding those who are making the world more sustainable.

I'm not sure if that is useful, but it seems to me there might be something there.