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Comment by skohan | Hacker News Reader

One role of government is to curtail negative externalities. If it's possible for a few people to profit by causing general harm through accelerating climate change, that would be well within the government's mandate to regulate against this.

It's possible that cryptocurrency will be the future of finance. It's also entirely possible that crypto - which is incredibly expensive energy-wise per transaction - is actually a waste of energy and is a net drain on economies which embrace it. It might be a competitive advantage to ban mining.

I guess Sweden will be a part of that experiment and we will see what happens.

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I don't see how banning mining will have any negative consequences at all. What benefits would a country get from having a lot of miners? A few people would get rich at the cost of everyone else getting less electricity or higher prices. The miners relocate, and you can enjoy using bitcoin without any of the local externalities of having miners around.

That is an argument against having most non-service industries. Indeed, a similar argument would have been used for off-shoring huge amounts of manufacturing from Western societies to China (why put up with the pollution externalities when the Chinese could pick those up for us?).

The upshot is lots of the know-how now lives in China, the wealth is being generated in Shenzhen instead of the west. The argument was correct, but in hindsight it does look like the positive externalities were greater than the negative. China's growth has been much more impressive than the EUs.

Actually using government mandates to curtain negative externalities would look way different though, right? The negative externality of energy production is the same per unit energy regardless of what the energy ends up being used for.

It’s not about the negative externality of energy production, but the negative externality of Bitcoin mining. Using significant percentage of the available renewable energy, driving up prices and forcing other industries that are far less optional to resort to non-renewable energy. And probably even preventing other net-good uses of cheap energy from ever coming into existence.

Yeah exactly. Another example would be the impact on GPU prices: mining almost certainly plays a role in making GPUs less accessible, which raises the cost of ML for example. There's probably innovations which would affect the world in a positive way which we don't have right now because of the barrier to entry to ML research created by high GPU prices.

“It might be a competitive advantage to ban mining.”

I agree, but couldn’t this be said for a lot of activities? It might be a competitive advantage to ban the production of reality tv shows or video games or cars or steel. Is it really a good idea (or even morally defensible) for the state to make these kind of macro decisions (based on what might be best for the economy)?

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