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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

I'm a crypto sceptic, but this is a missed opportunity. Why not apply a mining and transaction tax? Use it to fund carbon mitigation and the de-carbonisation of our grid. Maybe even use it to cut taxes for the poor. Instead, these countries opt to burn pubic funds enforcing a prohibition.

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2 problems with that approach IMHO:

* That tax would have to be so high to fully pay for the environmental damages mining is causing, that it would make mining not economically viable anyway. So might as well save yourself from burning public funds trying to find ways to legislate and enforce that tax (no secret that crypto people tend to not declare a lot of their coins).

* Allowing new/more emissions to happen now counting on the fact that we will just take that carbon out of the atmosphere later on is exactly the wrong thing to do. We will already need gigantic monetary and technological investments to make that technology able to pump out any significant amount of CO2 assuming we do all the right things toward decarbonization until this is possible, so we don't really need to shoot ourselves in our only remaining foot by just adding more CO2 to be removed. Not emitting one ton of CO2 today is much much more valuable than pumping one ton out later on, just because of the massive amount of energy needed to pump it out.

So I think banning is absolutely the right choice.

Environmental damage? My electricity is 99% hydro electric and we have a surplus of it.

Very glad to hear it, but the article isn't talking about Canada, and very little mining happens in Canada anyway. It's talking about countries where mining actually is a large scale activity, and those are predominantly dirty grids: US, Kazakhstan, China (before the ban), Kosovo, Russia, Iran.

So I fail to see how your anecdotal experience generalizes.

It could work in countries with abundant clean power (say Iceland from geothermal or France from nuclear) but in other countries, the 24x7 load on the power grid is still causing extra emissions

Even in clean countries, electric companies aren't willing to invest in additional capacity due to Bitcoin use. It's too unpredictable. (As quoted in the article.)

Because tax's are just a cost of business; a tacit endorsement. The folks this is intended to regulate will scoff and just assume the tax into the cost of business.

I don't see people losing years of their life for mining crypto.

Who cares if people "scoff"? The point of a tax is not to affect someone's emotions. The point of a tax is to affect their behavior and collect their money. If that tax affects their planning and finances (aka they recognize it as a cost of doing business), then you achieved your goal.

While both taxes and bans are hard to enforce on small players in such cases, at least for the big players bans work more effectively. Tax is easily avoidable in any country by large players by moving the money to tax havens, and nobody wants to or can close the loopholes. So your operation is using local power and paying tax elsewhere.

When Big Co. does this at least they pay salaries, and bring some network effects in your country. Mining on the other hand is extremely resource intensive but doesn't presume any substantial local investment to make it worth it for the country.

Because all that a tax is gonna do is to allow the rich classes to continue their ecologically destructive behaviors, the produced goods are only made a bit more expensive. It's somewhat fine to use taxes to nudge people into certain behaviors (e.g. a tobacco tax to steer people away from smoking to vaping or quitting outright, or alcohol/gambling/other "vice" taxes), but stuff that is as destructive as Bitcoin (ffs, Bitcoin and Ethereum alone consume about 1.2% of all electricity generated worldwide [1]!) should be banned world-wide.

We didn't go and tax CFC in the late 80s, we didn't go and tax sulphur and lead in fuels, we banned them for their destructive potential - and we saw drastic results out of these three bans.

Despite decades of "small government"/neoliberal propaganda (since the 90s, which is not a coincidence!), governmental action to global problems works.

ETA: And obviously, countries like China have to worry about their climate targets, and countries like Khazakhstan have to worry about supplying their citizens with power. They are fully in their right to ban rich foreigners from coming in and making life for their citizens more difficult just for profit.

[1]: https://medium.com/gochain/the-truth-about-bitcoin-and-ether...

Not the pubic funds!

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