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doggosphere

I have a shocking proposal that may seem too good to be true:

1) Stop subsidizing fossil fuels. [0]

2) Tax carbon emissions.

Bonus:

3) Incentivize clean energy.

[0]: https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subs...

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Yup, this would ensure the benefits of bitcoin mining would not outweigh the costs, and it would make most of it unprofitable. One great thing about crypto mining is that it makes unsustainable subsidies very obvious.

The difficulty adjustment would just make it a little easier to mine bitcoins, so miners would spend the same money. But at least they'd be using clean energy if the carbon tax were high enough.

The reward for Bitcoin mining is fixed. The work required is variable. If electricity costs globally shot up, there would be far smaller mining operations but the payout would be the same because the Bitcoin network adjusts its difficulty.

PoW is a beast that consumes everything it can.

>PoW is a beast that consumes everything it can.

It doesn't really "consume everything it can" like a paperclip optimizer would. Like you said the reward for mining is fixed, so the amount of money/resources it can consume is limited to (mining reward * bitcoin price).

Sure but the issue is the power consumption (which would go down) not the payout.

> Yup, this would ensure the benefits of bitcoin mining would not outweigh the costs, and it would make most of it unprofitable.

How did you conclude that the price or difficulty factor would not adapt to make it profitable?

The difficulty goes down as a direct result of less mining being done. Long term, blocks will be generated at the same rate, but each block would have less work behind it.

This would give an advantage to Bitcoin miners in 3rd world countries where carbon credits and other fanciful notions are optional.

We [the developed world] would be outsourcing our Bitcoin pollution to these 3rd world countries and also contributing to “environmental racism” or whatever the left is calling it these days.

You can't control everything. The west already scrutinizes many commodities it imports: diamonds, gold, shoes, phones. There's no reason to suggest bitcoin mining sources can't be discriminated against.

So at scale, damage is mitigated.

In the long run, renewable energy from wind and solar are already the cheapest forms of energy anyway.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2020/01/21/ren...

https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth

Ok so you now have only single-origin bitcoins available that are legal to purchase though a government dealer?

What if it is a worldwide mining pool that is paying out worldwide, like most coin mining pools currently do?

That would result in income earned in many different tax jurisdictions paid to many more tax jurisdictions, kinda impractical as the pool is contributing compute but the winnings are shared among all the miners.

And would we just use the honor system for Monero mined in China/India/Africa/Indonesia/wherever? There is no incentive apart from these hypothetical miners import agreement being revoked to not mix the coins up.

This might sound a little crass, but while I do agree that wind, solar, and nuclear are the future of power generation I also believe that cap and trade and its resultant currency of offset credits are morally equivalent to the indulgence system that the catholic church had set up in the medieval thorough early modern era.

So basically when Bill Gates is trying to offset his carbon credits he's basically paying the priests of his new religion to be able to fly all over the world without a guilty conscience, whilst the poors are agonizing over bagging their groceries with plastic bags because the red states don't want to ban them.

It doesn't have to be so comprehensive. You can incentivize green coin without making it the baseline standard.

Ex: You sold some coin on an exchange for USD? If you can show the coin's origin, you get capital gain credit or something. And vice versa.

Exactly. We need to ban, and aggressively prosecute the use of crypto to prevent this. Useful side-effect: reduction of ransomware attacks.

You're going to have to find a different way to deal with that. Without completely changing the way the US government and justice system works I don't think that's possible.

I don’t know about banning crypto to stop ransomware attacks, if we followed that train of thought we shouldn’t even have an internet where people can steal personal information.

That has worked terrible with the war in drugs. How do you think its going to work when no smuggling us required and anyone with a solar panel and a satellite dish can mine?

Is this sarcasm/hyperbole? There’s nothing wrong with cryptography.

I’m afraid this would just further incentivize mining in countries who don’t have such taxes. Further centralizing Bitcoin and shifting the energy production to places who are even worse environmental abusers.

> 1) Stop subsidizing fossil fuels.

This should include kerosine for flights.

> 2) Tax carbon emissions.

Progressively.

Not a detail at all.

AFAIK Canada does this by giving everyone a fixed amount of tax credit to offset the tax. That way poor people aren't taxed more but everyone are still incentivized to reduce their emissions

The best way is to take all the carbon tax collected, divide it by the number of people in the country, and distribute it evenly to everyone.

That way, if you use less than the average amount of carbon, you actually make money.

That's essentially what Canada has done, except on a subnational level (as it only applies in individual provinces that don't have their own emissions reduction mechanisms with at least equivalent effects)

Poor people will still pay in the form of higher prices that bake in the coat of the carbon tax.

1. that's how the tax would be collected for most peope. ie. you'll pay $x/gal more at the gas pump, rather than declaring how much tons of carbon you emitted on your tax return.

2. whether they pay or not is irrelevant. what actually matters is whether they end up paying more or less in net. for a scheme that taxes people according to their consumption but gives everyone the same amount of tax credits in return, poor people would be expected to come out ahead because they consume less on average.

Poor people are also the most exposed and suffer the most from carbon emissions.

Progressive taxes on carbon emissions will discourage economies of scale. This means for the same amount of co2 produced you have less production (good things for society) which is pretty bad. Ideally the co2 should be taxed at exactly the cost to reduce it to an easily stored or safe molecule.

carbon dividend.

Great idea. Not gonna happen quickly, particularly worldwide.

So now what do we do about Bitcoin in the meantime?

Perpetually being stuck in a cycle of implementing politically expedient but half-assed measures? See also: "oh no, there's too much plastic! let's uh... ban plastic straws!"

More like perpetually being stuck in a cycle of voter appeasement to get re-elected because they are “doing something”...

Not sure why the downvotes. It is not realistic for every country in the world to pass an equivalent carbon tax. The mining will just move to he locations with no (or lowest) carbon tax

So now what do we do about Bitcoin in the meantime?

Exactly as the commenter above proposes: "Change the subject"

And Legalize drugs so crypto market dies off.

Drugs are not the primary use case any more (if ever), time to move beyond that talking point to something credible.

There are other good reasons to legalize drugs

Aside from pure speculation, which is fine by me, I really don't know what else they're used for significantly.

What goods or services are regularly purchased in crypto?

Bitcoin was as created to resist censorship— hence Wikileaks was able to raise money after visa et al banned them. It was created to resist debasement- as a result it maintains its value as inflation ramps up.

Thus you would actually not want to buy things with bitcoin, and instead spend rapidly depreciating USD.

That didn't answer my question at all.

Ransomware is the other big area where bitcoin is used for payment.

This I suspect is a large(st) use case, also NK (others?) may be using it to circumvent sanctions.

Bitcoin is a tool for turning coal into evading CCP capital controls and financial repression, with the externalities of pollution and emboldening libertarians

The main crypto to goods and services market is drugs.

Everything else is a consequence of the value that family of transactions have added.

> Drugs are not the primary use case any more (if ever), time to move beyond that talking point to something credible

If you’re willing to dismiss the argument so vehemently, then it would also be good to follow up with a justification for your dismissal.

If you tax all CO2 emissions you will not “incentivize clean energy” because “clean energy” produces more CO2 emissions.

You will incentivize nuclear, though, which is the cleanest energy.

A much more efficient way to do that, though, would be to simply cut the science denying red tape.

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