This is nonsensical. If you want to tax carbon, tax it regardless what it is used for.
What you are describing penalizes somebody who uses clean energy for mining and ignores somebody who uses coal power for running his bot farm.
What you are describing penalizes somebody who uses clean energy for mining and ignores somebody who uses coal power for running his bot farm.
E: Can't reply below, but here's a very real argument for you. It's completely absurd to bikeshed about banning an activity that doesn't even exist in Sweden at any meaningful scale. Discussing whether or not Sweden should ban cryptomining is utterly pointless when nobody is (planning to start) mining in Sweden at any significant scale.
It really does matter what government officials spend their time on, this is an utter waste. To suggest that they're doing a good thing here is just incredible.
You don't have a real argument do you if you are are resorting to name calling and ad-hominem attacks?
And this will happen, we will pay carbon tax for meat, electricity and electronics. I would like to get a tax discount for planting trees too, but we know that's now how governments work.
On top of this base model one could then also introduce subsidies for specific energy intensive industries that are deemed essential (probably not bitcoin).
That would handle the distribution of limited* amount of energy we have. CO2 emissions should probably be taxed separately and progressive rates would seem reasonable to me here as well.
* Yes, we can still build more, but at some point the energy usage has to stagnate. Exponential growth in usage would lead the Earth to become very hot in a few hundred years since the only way heat gets released to space is via infrared radiation which is limited by the surface area of the planet [1, Section 1.3].
[1] Murphy, T.: Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (2021), a free textbook at https://doi.org/10.21221/S2978-0-578-86717-5
Video games? Banned. Alcohol? Banned. Driving? Banned. Exercise? Banned - it increases your daily caloric needs. Food? Why would you need food? Eat your government rations.
Why should we prefer some activities over others by government decree? Have we not learned from the past?
Oh, you're growing the wrong kind of plant? To jail! Oh, you're doing the wrong kinds of calculations? To jail!