Great place to start is shutting down Bitcoin and reclaiming one full country of electricity consumption currently doing literally absolutely nothing. Low-hanging fruit so to speak.
That's a bold proposal.
Bitcoin mining doesn't cause pollution, running a power plant does. If the power plant isn't publishing reasonable records as to pollution caused and tax recovered then you add it to the estimated total for the country and tax imports, that way the country fixes itself because they don't want to lose trade.
In the short period Australia had a carbon tax, the profits were used to reduce the cost of other taxes so the average person came out even but you would be incentivized to constantly beat the rest by reducing your emissions so if you cause less damage than the average person, you pay less.
Even if Pigovian taxes were implementable[1], that's how they work. Since there is an optimal amount of pollution, the taxes are supposed to be set where the marginal cost to society of an additional unit of pollution is equal to the marginal benefit to society of that extra unit of pollution.
Note the hand-wavy terms "benefit", "cost", and "unit". The devil is in how those are measured. Since central planning authorities are horrible at figuring stuff like this out, one generally ends up in a situation worse than the one which one would like to fix.
As for the "clean up" aspect, I heartily recommend that one read and understand Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen[2]. Here is an excerpt[3].
Specifically, "clean up" is not free.
[1]: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/230475696.pdf [2]: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674281653 [3]: http://webpage.pace.edu/dnabirahni/rahnidocs/law802/The%20En...
The easiest way to solve this is to ban PoW coins in favor of PoS coins. There is nothing inherently valuable about BTC that wouldn’t be just as valuable in an equivalent PoS token.
I agree that raiding individual mining locations is counterproductive. Instead, go after the exchanges, where bitcoin is exchanged for real money. Without an economic incentive to mine bitcoin, the mining would slow down and stop.
The lack of reversible transactions is a bad thing. Without reversibility, there is no recourse against fraudulent transactions. Reversing a transaction requires the active participation of the fraudulent actor. This is why ransomware really started taking off once bitcoin and friends picked up. Before that, there was no economic incentive to hold computers for ransom, because any payment made could be reversed after the hard drive is decrypted.
And that might be possible by getting people and businesses that don’t cheat on their taxes to sell any holdings with something like a wealth tax.
The only bad thing about bitcoin is its electricity consumption.
There's also the way it allows those with access to energy they don't own to launder that access into money. Plus facilitating all manner of illegal activities (and I'm favor of making some things, like drugs, legal. Tax evasion or murder-for-hire, not so much).
It's pretty hard for me to imagine that either of these things are going to happen. I don't think that cryptocurrencies are ever going to be really useful because they're so inefficient, but I also think that they're here to stay as a speculative/gambling tool.
PaaS, pyramid schemes as a service.
Bitcoin just has to be the second easiest way to gamble from home to be utterly worthless.
Why is the green solution to everything more prohibition and rules? What happened to believing in the future, in innovation and technology...
Of course I want to live in a world like that, just like I like living in a world where my neighbor is not allowed to just break into my house without consequences. Just like I like living in a world where people are not allowed to dump unbounded amounts of toxic waste into lakes and oceans.
We have regulation for what's allowed in food. Are you okay with that? Or do you prefer becoming an expert at food sciences so that you can test yourself that a food brand isn't trying to sell you something poisonous as a cost cutting measure?
> Why is the green solution to everything more prohibition and rules?
Because otherwise greedy people with no concept or care of long or even mid term effects mess things up for everyone else, and even themselves.
> What happened to believing in the future, in innovation and technology...
That has never been the case without regulation. We made cars and airplanes, we added tomes of regulation to make sure cars and airplanes work well enough to keep the people dying directly from them at a minimum.
If I wasted all energy available to us both on growing poisonous fruit that smells bad, would you object to that? Oh, but doing so would be deciding what is useful and what is not!
Again, the same applies to everything. You might not find a regulation about how much mercury is allowed in food items necessary or even "useful", but I, and many other people, are glad it exists.
You already do because here in reality resources are constrained.
> Why is the green solution to everything more prohibition and rules? What happened to believing in the future, in innovation and technology...
The green solution is to build technologies that become more efficient as people use them not less.
None of the unimaginable amounts computations wasted on proof-of-concept have any inherent value at all, until someone hits that final "lucky" one, that allows the transactions to take place.
This is a prime example of the monetary system having been made more efficient over time.
What then guarantees the security of the financial system and of our money?
My mind on this is is not settled, but how does this factor in the unknown future of radioactive waste? We're not even through 0.1% of the time it will remain a threat. Every single nuclear TWh comes with a debt that must be repaid over thousands of years. Ensuring the death toll from that remains at zero is basically impossible to guarantee right now.
[1]: We need to go from 51 billion tons of greenhouse gasses per year to 0 by 2050.
Declaring a war on bitcoin would be as futile as War on Drugs and the Prohibition. Might as well embrace it, try to tax and regulate it, and move the revenue from it to worthwhile initiatives that can buy humanity more time.
Having said that, in an ideal world, I’d agree with you and say we should shutdown bitcoin and all other activity that’s superfluous to humanity’s struggle against climate change. Industrialized meat production is out. International air travel is out. Raising all other product prices according to the climate externalities they cause. Doubly or triply replanting the forests in the Amazon and elsewhere. It’s gonna take sacrifices now to prevent suffering later, if we’re going to make it past this potential Great Filter.
A single Bitcoin transaction now consumes 30 days of power for the average household, as much as it takes a Tesla to drive from SF to well past New York, at this point closer to SF-NY-Miami. And generates half an iPhone of e-waste (100g).
It also consumes 5X as much energy as mining gold, which is the second worst option.
Electricity can be generated from zero carbon means, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, etc. There’s an order of magnitude more solar energy hitting the Earth every day than humans ever use.
Instead of stopping progress and living in the past, we can find a better way to make use of it.
Just how much power do you think physical currency consumes? Data, citations, estimates please. Because I know handing a $10 bill to my buddy consumes 0kWh, and doing the same with Bitcoin costs $20 and consumes 30 days of power.
If you want progress you'll have to do something that moves the world forward not warms it up.
It doesn’t matter how much power it uses if it’s switched to solar, and there are lower power options like proof-of-stake coming online anyway.
The relevant metric is tons of CO2 released, not kWh used. Bitcoin could be run with zero CO2 released if we chose to, in which case shutting it down would do absolutely nothing in regard to climate change.
Basically, it can't really be economically recycled, and it isn't. It's just thrown in heaps where poor folks in developing nations scrabble through the toxic remains.
"Useful metals" is a few grams of gold, tin and copper. The rest is plastics (non-recyclables) and FR4 (epoxy filled fiberglass). Fiberglass is also not recyclable.
Your plan amounts to little more than greenwashing.
> Recyclers can make money from selling scavenged metal from electronic equipment, says Puckett, but the process to retrieve usable metals is typically extremely toxic. Workers who remove the metals often have no protective equipment and breathe in high levels of toxic chemicals, which are then released into the atmosphere. And most of the countries where the processing takes place -- China, India, Ghana, Pakistan -- do not have regulations in place to protect workers or prevent the primitive recycling operations.
Most of electronics is plastic (epoxy is a plastic), and by and large plastic simply isn't recyclable. That's one of "mother's little lies" the plastic industry has been telling you for years to feel better about consumption. Reducing waste is the only way.
[1] https://recyclenation.com/2017/04/where-does-e-waste-end-up/
[2] https://www.npr.org/2010/12/21/132204954/after-dump-what-hap...
Basically, it can't really be economically recycled, and it isn't. It's just thrown in heaps where poor folks in developing nations scrabble through the toxic remains.
"Useful metals" is a few grams of gold and copper. The rest is plastics (non-recyclables) and FR4 (epoxy filled fiberglass). Fiberglass is also not recyclable.
Your plan amounts to little more than greenwashing.
[1] https://recyclenation.com/2017/04/where-does-e-waste-end-up/
[2] https://www.npr.org/2010/12/21/132204954/after-dump-what-hap...
Meanwhile in reality, Bitcoin's security and value is actually backed by the very scarcity of electricity (computing power) you want to deny, and almost all Bitcoin is mined with the dirtiest, cheapest and most climate unfriendly energy available: Chinese coal.
Most would not claim that a Visa transaction and a Bitcoin payment are close to equivalent (the article you linked even acknowledges this). Mining gold is a more interesting comparison, but even though I can go start mining Bitcoin right now, I can't go start mining gold.
The article provides a more thoughtful exploration that gets into some of the nuance and makes a stronger case against mining. I mention this because someone reading your comment might be tempted to discard it outright because "those comparisons make no sense".
To those people: read the article.
They have burning of resources built in. Proof of work, their primary mechanism so far, is literally: Waste energy on meaningless computations, until you hit a "lucky" one, with all previous computations having no inherent value themselves.
Physical currencies don't have this inefficiency built into their core. In fact, unlike cryptocurrencies, it's in everyone's best interest to make the currency's operation as efficient as possible.