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Comment by ComodoHacker | Hacker News Reader

This would just increase the cost of electricity and thus the cost of living for everybody, and won't affect crypto miners much.

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IMO the ethical thing to do is a re-distributive carbon tax. All the tax revenue should go directly back to the population as income/subsidy.

In this case, I think you could work around that, as they could implement a high capital gains tax rate for cryptocurrency sales. Then it would only impact people who mine.

Obviously it seems they are going in the exact opposite direction on this, though...

Miners typically get their funds as income, not necessarily cap gains.

It's a gain based on your invested capital, isn't it? It's textbook capital gains. PoS, PoW, whatever.

No, mining is in no way capital gains. Capital gains is asset price increase.

Odd that you call it textbook capital gains, what textbook are you working from?

It seems pretty clearly like income to me.

Under that definition, almost all income would be considered capital gains.

A baker buys an oven which they use to bake bread. They sell the bread for dollars. Is that capital gains?

Mining is reportable as ordinary income in the US.

Cryptocurrency earners have to report ordinary income taxes as well as capital gain/loss taxes.

Its not that hard, less than ideal, its also easy to immediately convert to USDC or fiat automatically, or find other deductions to reduce or eliminate the tax burden.

The parent is simply pointing out that all consumption taxes are regressive. A CO2 tax by itself is a tax on the poor, especially the rural poor who have longer commutes and are more dependent on automobile travel.

A CO2 tax is only fair if it's paired with progressive tax breaks in other areas and/or subsidies for transition to renewable energy. An example would be a progressive subsidy for electric vehicle purchases and for upgrades to CO2-heavy (coal) electricity generation infrastructure in poorer areas.

A CO2 tax and rebate is progressive. The poorest people would receive more back in a rebate than they pay. But the biggest CO2 users would pay way more than they receive back.

> I guess we need a proper CO2 tax to encourage better technology than proof of work

The statement replied to does not mention "rebate."

> But the biggest CO2 users would pay way more than they receive back.

This statement does not seem believable given the recent stories about tax avoidance strategies of the wealthy.

While I generally like CO2 tax/rebate/cap-and-trade systems: given how inefficient and polluting many low-cost techs are... not sure I can agree with that, particularly on the small scale down to individual people. Individuals have the least agency on decisions like this, since they have next to no purchasing power. Though we are talking about bitcoin, which does raise the technical/money base-level a fair bit.

Wouldn't it be easiest to tax some of the raw materials that go into fuel production, rather than tracking every fuel use? In that case, the CO2 tax will naturally fall equally to everyone, including individual people. The rebate is just there to cancel out the effect of an inherently regressive but technically convenient way of doing things.

That's generally the idea of a flat tax, yeah. Tax everything at point-of-collection/creation (e.g. "you cut down a tree" or "you burned a log") or point-of-import (likely offset for similar taxes collected by the origin country), and there's no need to track anything beyond that point. E.g. re-use or re-selling is (CO2-)tax-free because it doesn't change the net input/output of the whole system.

Which rarely happens in practice, and we're so far from accurately taxing all these processes that it isn't even a dream of a dream. It's mostly tackling big targets, since that's where a ton of the impact-per-dollar-and-per-outrage can be found.

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