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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

That makes everyone else in the country worse off.

If mining is a net positive for Kazakhstani miners, doesn't that make the country better off? That's a net export.

No, because everyone pays higher electricity bills while a small number of people benefit from selling their mined crypto.

The traditional solution to that problem is taxation.

How is this different from a factory that uses a lot of electricity to produce shoes that are then exported?

I thought that was a good thing to have in your country, but apparently because this is crypto it is suddenly a bad thing?

A factory provides jobs to locals. A factory stimulates the economy by creating local economic activity (suppliers, logistics, construction, restaurants).

A crypto operation might provide a small fraction of everything above while also producing nothing of tangible value to society.

Doesn't matter how "tangible" the value is if foreigners are paying for it.

Dutch disease is a thing even when the economic value isn’t being frequent dismissed as a Ponzi-adjacent scam, precisely because of foreigners paying for stuff in one sector disproportionately to all the others.

I’m not an economist, so I doubt my understanding is either deep or broad enough to make a proper critique in Kazakhstan’s case.

>If mining is a net positive for Kazakhstani miners, doesn't that make the country better off?

How does that work?

Trickle down economics kicks in, surely.

If mining is profitable that means electricity is costing less than the proceeds of mining. If these miners are Kazakhstani, presumably they are spending the majority of these gains in-country, or are paying taxes on the proceeds. As such this should be a net gain for Kazakhstan, since I assume the majority of people buying the crypto the miners are generating are not in fact Kazakhstani.

This doesn't seem complicated tbh and I'm actually struggling to understand why you wouldn't get this if you generally understand net imports/exports.

I understand the imports and exports for goods that employ people create services and etc.

Coin mining doesn't fit / necessarily that pattern at all.

In the meantime they have power shortages so I'm not sure at all what you're thinking about here... your idea of cheap power is pretty meaningless when there's a shortage.

> If these miners are Kazakhstani

Article implies a lot have moved from China.

> presumably they are spending the majority of these gains in-country

Unevidenced assumption, that they are even spending the gains at all - it's crypto, after all.

> or are paying taxes on the proceeds

Unevidenced assumption, probably false for crypto libertarians.

This is my sarcastic answer of "trickle-down economics" just with more hand-wavy elaboration on how that might work. Amazing!

Trickle-down economics is different.

Read and be enlightened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

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