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Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

The government[0] has regulatory authority over environmental issues, so why wouldn't this be the government's job?

[0] ie: all of them

If the government is able to ban crypto currency because it's unnecessary and uses too much energy, couldn't they apply that logic to nearly any other modern luxury?

They do! Gas taxes, bans of gas vehicles, required emission standards, etc.

I think the real solution here is banning coal, natural gas, etc., not the downstream users of it. If I want to mine BTC with 100% nuclear/wind/solar energy, then the problem is solved right?

technically, any process with negative externalities should not necessarily be free of societal (i.e. governmental) limits. All of the "renewable" sources of energy you've mentioned here have some form of negative externality.

of course, in my non-expert opinion, it would be preferable for the government to focus directly on the negative externalities rather than second or third order causes thereof.

Miners pay for the electricity they consume which includes environmental taxes. Why ban them?

I pay 66% taxes on fuel. My car has a $15k tax when sold and $1.5k/yearly tax. In Denmark it would have been much much worse than this (probably north of $30k fees when new).

You don’t ban things you can tax with good results. Banning is for things you can’t tax. It’s a clumsy instrument.

Banning crypto is a gigantic overreach when the government won't even try the obvious solutions like carbon taxes (which would indirectly discourage crypto mining).

I see the situation in the exact opposite way. Passing a Carbon Tax, while sensible, would run in major opposition because it would basically effect every citizen. But banning cryptocurrency would be much easier since the majority of the population doesn't own any and it can be framed in very positive terms.

> But banning cryptocurrency would be much easier since the majority of the population doesn't own any and it can be framed in very positive terms.

Sounds unrealistic. Remember the war on drugs?

In my personal experience most people think of cryptocurrencies as a Ponzi scheme, some kind of money laundering operation, a tremendous waste of energy, or some combination of those three. In light of that, I think a cryptocurrency ban would be easy for politicians to sell to the public using those terms.

How effective the ban would be is another question, but I am mainly talking about how I think the politicians would justify the ban.

Oh, I didn't realize you only meant how easy it would be to pass the ban. Of course it would be easy to pass a federal ban in the United States, where it's easy to pass many things even when they're extremely unpopular. Marijuana is still banned federally despite well over two thirds of the country opposing the ban!

Usually across-the-board regulation is seen as upholding the free market more than regulation that targets specific individuals or industries.

> But banning cryptocurrency would be much easier since the majority of the population doesn't own any and it can be framed in very positive terms.

How exactly do you ban or confiscate bitcoin? New bitcoin wallets are created without touching the internet access. Internet access is only needed when sending bitcoin but not when receiving bitcoin. By the time someone sends it, it’s too late, you can’t confiscate it because they don’t have it anymore. If the government bans or starts monitoring the bitcoin network for activity, people can still send slips of paper through the mail with the private and public key to one of their wallet.

Combine that with a brain wallet and you can literally store bitcoin in your brain. Try doing that with gold.

> But banning cryptocurrency would be much easier since the majority of the population doesn't own any and it can be framed in very positive terms.

How exactly do you ban or confiscate bitcoin? New bitcoin wallets are created without even touching the internet! It can be done from the middle of the Mojave desert without any proof of it ever happening or existing. Internet access is needed when sending bitcoin but not when receiving bitcoin. By the time someone sends it, it’s too late, you can’t confiscate it because they don’t have it anymore. If the government bans or too heavily monitors the bitcoin network for activity, people can still send slips of paper through the mail with the private and public key to one of their wallets and trade around pieces of paper instead.

Combine that with a brain wallet and you can literally store bitcoin in your brain and pass through borders carrying nothing on hand. Try doing any of that with gold, Euros, Dollars, or Chinese Yuan.

The only thing stopping bitcoin is exponentially higher transaction costs but paradoxically higher transaction costs make small bitcoin holders effectively illiquid. This reduction in supply further drives up the price infinitely until most bitcoin is rendered illiquid or until people think slow cryptocurrencies with high transaction fees are stupid.

The problem with carbon taxes is it affects jobs that can’t easily use less electricity and still produces a lot of jobs/value. The paper and steel industry wouldn’t like carbon taxes high enough to affect Bitcoin. Bitcoin power use is also very easy to move internationally.

Most crypto (I believe currently approx. 90%) is mined outside of the US. Miners have already been moving from China to Iran[1], in part to avoid environmental regulations. As long as there exist jurisdictions that are not party to a carbon tax, crypto mining is highly incentivized to move there. Putting aside the issue of overreach, if the US wanted to reduce carbon, blocking inflows to crypto exchanges would be more impactful than taxing domestic mining.

[1] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/inner-mongolia-to-shut-down-...

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