Kosovo pulls plug on energy-guzzling Bitcoin miners
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Well, risk evaluation is part of founding a company. Sucks to be them but there is no need to keep having rolling blackouts just because some people didn't do their research.
Would they have donated it to the Kosovan public?
Of course not.
So they should not expect bailouts from the Kosovan public now.
Then warrants can be served equipment can be confiscated and people be put in front of a judge
Isn't it about as difficult as asking someone for their cash? People aren't happy to part with it, but the $5 xkcd wrench usually does it.
You can hide a paper wallet or storage medium in a sock at a friend's house, but that's no different from cash. Cash is also easy to spend anonymously; try hiding a bitcoin transaction from others or make its traces vanish to avoid problems later.
I don't foresee many issues with banning bitcoin at all, it's more of a political problem.
In the real world refusal to pay a fine or surrender an item is itself a crime and punishable with state power. You're right that the government can't extract crypto assets without the consent of those controlling the relevant keys. You're forgetting the depth of ability of a government to compel consent.
No, you, can't exist outside of society and its influence, even if your "money" is digital.
These are just bullshit libertarian feel good narratives that are as realistic as people declaring themselves sovereign citizens
Now the detainee gets to choose between remaining in prison or giving up their assets.
This is too much a TV show story. Since the state doesn't really know how much bitcoins they have, the key owner can share only a fraction of their wallets (and they can have as many wallets as they please).
Without crypto currency being regulated, state can seize the physical assets but getting all the bitcoins is highly unlikely.
Taxing it is easy, tax the transaction which is public on the blockchain.
Institute KYC rules and enforce them, punishing anyone who holds an anonymous wallet.
Bitcoin isn’t some magical thing; the old crowbars reverse engineering works even better on it since all transactions are public on the blockchain forever.
The thing will out generate money, until the government recognizes bitcoins as an asset and requires moving those assets to be centralized, tracked, you can't do anything about. So prior taxation, it has to be regulated.
They need to eat, buy cars, houses.
If they have more money they buy more -> more tax income.
Even if a company wouldn't donate any of their profits, if they make an investment based on laws, and the government then changes those laws to make what they are doing illegal, that's still an outcome that we should avoid; both out of a sense of fairness, but also out of self-interest, otherwise people will make fewer investments, which is a bad thing.
(Though no idea on the details in this specific case - I just dislike this question and its invalid assumption.)
But, I was answering the conclusion of parent's post:
> So they should not expect bailouts from the Kosovan public now.
Bailouts might make sense if the government broke an implicit or explicit promise to the company about what kind of business can be done.
Unfortunately, production of energy is one of the very things which is driving one of our biggest global problems - global warming.
I don’t see how the two can be decoupled.
Bitcoin’s value isn’t coupled to energy. However, it does have a perverse incentive to miners to consume as much energy as possible.
Each additional miner that comes online doesn’t really add anything of value to the network at this point. It just consumes more energy. Each miner plays a game of maximizing their own energy usage to maximize their take of the fixed rewards structure.
It has to be the single most inefficient large-scale engineering project I can think of, and certainly the only one that literally pays people globally to make it less and less efficient.
Then what would happen if the energy and materials needed to compute the hashes were literally zero cost?
The reason it consumes so much energy is because people really don't trust each other.
Not necessary people in general. But people interested in crypto certainly don't trust each other.
So the more demand there is for irrefutability, the higher the energy costs.
Its a distribution layer built on top of it.
Not even that. A large majority of Bitcoin holders actually store 'their' Bitcoin in exchanges (who are known to be completely untrustworthy). Binance's cold wallet is actually the largest single holder of Bitcoin. It's just a get rich quick scheme
That there's a link between how irrefutable the ledger is and the energy cost/how distributed the miners are is what I find quite interesting. It's not quite E=mc^2, but it feels like it's getting there.
What does this quality imply for most commodities?
Sorry, but it is?
"The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation. In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended."
If the price rises, the mining becomes more profitable, more miners jump in, and mining gets more difficult so the issuance rate stays roughly constant.
If the price falls, mining becomes less profitable, some miners drop out, and to keep issuance from slowing down the difficulty is decreased.
Whatever the price does, the energy usage follows. So we can't really say that energy usage is the foundation of BTC's value, it's the other way around.
Unfortunately this seems to be more like wishful thinking. As one example: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
The second thing is that there's no certainty that bitcoin mining is actually causing us to kill ourselves or that it causes meaningful levels of harm. Lots of panicky hand waving around the subject, but little concrete evidence of the hysterical thing you stated.
Furthermore, energy consumption per se is not inherently bad, even for very dubious uses. It's how you procure your energy that defines harm, not that you use lots of it. If for example, we were seeing people mine bitcoin with say, solar power, or mini nuclear fusion reactors, it wouldn't matter that they choose to use energy they paid for on something some perceive as wasteful.
A Bitcoin miner powered by a solar panel isn't contributing to global warming beyond the manufacture of the solar panel. The problem is how we generate energy.
If someone wants to consume electricity mining bitcoin thats every bit as valid use as their time as playing video games imo. I choose to play games because I prefer that.
Should we count the cost of manufacturing the computer(s) doing the work? More so if ASIC? The recycling-or-not of same?
I’ve been thinking about “mining something” since I will soon have a surplus of solar energy I can’t sell back into the grid. Not a ton but enough to maybe join a pool and make a small profit.
But even then it strikes me as wasteful… gotta do something with that box when it’s obsolete.
No economist would say the value of anything is based on scarcity. Scarcity is basically a code word for supply. The value of things is determined by the intersection of supply and demand, not supply floating in a vacuum.
b) > If value of a commodity is predicated on scarcity - eg gold - then isn’t it the case that Bitcoin is actually using energy as the scarce commodity on which its value is based?
What are you even trying to say here? Do we say cars are subject to some impossible contadiction because they consume energy? Do we say the heater in your home is valueless because it consumes energy? Do we say your bank is somehow invalid because it's operations consume energy? What does any of this have to do with the fact that bitcoin doesn't have an unlimited supply (ie is scarce)? This is complete gibberish.
We can't go around claiming BTC is green while mining in countries that use the dirtiest of the dirtiest coal for their energy.
Has anyone, anywhere, actually convinced someone that BTC is green?
The argument is bananas, but that’s the line that Bitcoin celebrities like @jack have been pushing.
Do you think yourself or @Jack has better perspective and visibility of planetary money flows, inflation, energy productive and distribution and peer to peer payments and networks?
It is in Dutch but there is a link to English PDF.
DNB is the Dutch equivalent of the Fed.
It's at least an argument that is used, see here e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29839868
It is designed to be energy inefficient so we can't go around claiming it anyway.
So how exactly are they mining if they aren't paying for electricity ? Illegally connected to the grid and/or bribed someone from the electric company to turn a blind eye ?
Personally I don’t see the value in crypto-currencies, but that doesn’t mean it not useful to someone. The crypto community should find a way to address the energy consumption of Bitcoin, before the whole thing is regulated away. Right now it’s pretty hard to defend Bitcoin, based on the environmental impact alone.
Proof of work is the core of bitcoin; it has a built-in deflation on top it. In short it won't happen. And yes, if someone mentions proof of stake, there is still no working case for it.
I didn't know that, but it helps with my hope that PoS will become the default. People bringing up how long they've been trying to switch had been hurting my confidence.
It cannot be addressed. By definition. It's not like sadly there is a part of the Bitcoin algorithm that is very expensive computationally and therefore energetically and if we could only optimize that part the problem would go away. There is an intentionally hard part that is a part of the Bitcoin protocol to make the Proof-of-Work algorithm, that obviates the need for a central source of authority or trust, work.
Anybody who tells you that Bitcoin will overcome the exorbitant energy needs is ignorant or a scam artist.
I always understand it as a way for anyone anywhere being able to join just with a computer and electricity, without having to beg any existing centralized entity for permission to exchange their "real" money for the crypto tokens.
And it seems to have been right, as exchanges are indeed where most fraud happens a what is actually targeted when a government does not like a cryptocurrency.
Still not sure how one is supposed to avoid this without handing over the given crypto network to a centralized entity that decides who gets what.
Hardly an unbiased source (has "The best links to articles debunking Bitcoin FUD " as the subtitle). I read through some of the links and they are all high on big words and philosophy.
We will know soon enough whether there's merit to any of these. Ethereum plans to move to PoS early this year so we'll have a real world data point.
It does what it says in the tin, no more no less.
BTC doesn’t need to overcome its energy needs, so long as people just stop wasting any energy. There is an infinity of things with massive wasteful energy use that no one does (such as sending rocks into space or boiling lakes for fun) simply because there is no financial gain.
Like, the big private players in crypto-nonsense just aren't _that_ big.
A16Z or Goldman Sachs?
Block or JP Morgan Chase?
Coinbase or Vanguard?
I farm it completely with old hard drives that I had lying around that weren't being used anyway.
Every proof-of-work solution in Bitcoin commits to the transaction history, but the proofs-of-space in Chia only commit to the farmer public key.
Which is used to separately sign for a block of transactions. Which allows a collusion of recent farmers to produce alternate transaction histories at no cost.
"farmers could theoretically create a foliage re-org where foliage is replaced"
As you can see, Chia devs consider this an impractical attack. But it's definitely a weaker security guarantee than what PoW provides.
> As soon as one honest farmer has added a foliage block, the foliage becomes impossible to re-org beyond that height with the same PoSpace
With ~350k Chia full nodes, the likelihood of colluding farmers being able to pull this off is a lot lower than if there were only the ~14k full nodes of Bitcoin, no? And Chia is still pretty new — it had a maximum of ~750k full nodes before.
I guess it's kind of a trade-off, huh? Bitcoin's big centralized pools are a worrying source of attack that's not there in Chia (the official pooling protocol has the farmers sign blocks so it's completely decentralized and pools using it can't orchestrate attacks). https://docs.chia.net/docs/11pooling/pooling
Currently 1.5 zettabytes of new HDDs are sold each year which is around $65 billion. So HDDs are a pretty mature market with massive data centers buying most of that storage.
One of the hypotheses with Chia was that there is a lot of over-provisioned storage already out in the world — on both consumer and idle enterprise drives. This is in line with the original intent of Bitcoin that anyone could mine which would make the network more secure.
It's obviously cheaper to use existing storage to secure the Chia blockchain than to buy new drives so the market will move toward maximally using existing storage. Datacenters could use their existing idle storage for Chia farming before a more lucrative use came along. And the storage doesn't need to be very reliable for Chia farming, so old hard drives that are no longer viable from datacenters can be used (apparently datacenters just destroy HDDs outright currently?)
Currently there are about 35 exabytes of storage in the Chia network, which is about 2-3% of the entire yearly supply of HDDs. Given that supply chains weren't really disrupted, I think it's pretty safe to say that the Chia bet was right and that it's actually utilizing a bunch of unused space already out in the world. And the IDC agrees: https://idcdocserv.com/US47836321
Now, obviously if the market valued Chia extremely highly then supplies of HDDs would be impacted. But I wonder how much that would affect everyday folks like you and I since most storage in devices are now SSDs, which are not very storage-dense so aren't really as economical for Chia. Would it be the case that consumers couldn't buy HDDs? At some coin price, yeah, definitely. I have no idea what that price could be.
And use dar more power than bitcoin.
Not sure if you were just joking or if you simply didn't know that miners can double as heaters without loss (or if you meant something else).
Also heaters are way better at converting energy to heat, since they don't have to do the whole mining thing. And they can reach higher temperatures without frying themselves. Being a simple resistor rather than complex logical circuit.
If I spend 1kWh to just warm water vs I spend some part of that 1kWh to mine bitcoin and warm water, the former will be more efficient.
Sure but the point is that this will be earned back easily. If it didn't turn a profit then nobody would buy them today, let alone when they have an extra purpose.
> they can reach higher temperatures without frying themselves
Sure, we can't replace industrial processes like forging steel with mining. But residential heating requires no more than, say, 70°C which is easily within reach of any chip today. I was specifically talking about replacing something like a space heater, not a process that needs hundreds of degrees.
> If I spend 1kWh to just warm water vs I spend some part of that 1kWh to mine bitcoin and warm water, the former will be more efficient.
Is that so? How much then? Because I've always heard it's 1:1 for all intents and purposes.
Edit: of course I have to look it up myself... https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Gaming-PC-vs-Spac... Looking at the graph, it's like I said /edit.
---
Note I'm not saying this is necessarily a good idea, it seems ripe for abuse (running the miner also when you don't need the heat) and we'd have more chip shortage issues, but I am interested from a technological standpoint. It seemed to me like it would be an improvement if their waste heat was used.
No, it won't. Most chips go in the trash without ever mining a block. This is just more crypto theory that doesn't match reality.
If you find me a way to cut down on my heating costs in the winter using chips, you can bet I'm going to use it. The problem is, you can't.
"Most chips go in the trash without ever mining a block" that's your own choice, isn't it? If you don't want to waste the product you bought, don't trash it?
"This is just more [nonsense] crypto theory" I do not invest in cryptocurrency. I bought socks for like 2BTC back in the good old days when it wasn't yet apparent (to me at least) that bitcoin was going to be a major problem; bitcoin was interesting technology for teenage me back in 2012. I'm not some delusional trader that is making profit off the backs of everyone's climate and wants to justify mining. See basically everything else I said above. In particular the part where I said "Note I'm not saying this is necessarily a good idea, it seems ripe for abuse [...] but I am interested from a technological standpoint." The person was making technological arguments, not some nonsense about "crypto theory".
"If you find me a way..." Do you own a computer? There, turn it on during winter, have fun gaming. Now you're generating heat using electricity that you'd consume for gaming regardless.
I don't think you understand how all of this works. Mining chips have a lifespan, they don't last forever. They stop working, then you can't use them to compute hashes anymore. Most mining chips die--as in stop working--before they ever mine a block.
>turn it on during winter, have fun gaming.
I already do that. Mining Bitcoin to heat my home, on the other hand, will lose me money. I'll just burn through expensive chips without ever getting a reward, because a home mining rig can't compete with the industrial operations. The idea doesn't work.
Any device that converts energy to heat can be replaced by another that converts the same amount of energy to the same amount of heat while doing POW work.
But it doesn't matter, because the reward would be so small in this case that it wouldn't outweigh the cost of buying a chip to put in an appliance. If you think I'm wrong, then by all means mine hardware with all of your heating devices. Hell, if the money is really there, create a startup selling mining appliances and get rich. It's easy money, right? Start today.
So the trend there has been for reduction in use in energy (particularly in Europe, where the regulators are leaning on the manufacturers). A modern heat pump dryer is far more efficient than a traditional dryer, say, and will be the dominant type in Europe soon, and probably shortly afterwards in the US.
Crypto-nonsense, on the other hand, tends to use _more_ energy over time.
And, frankly, if you banned hairdryers and clothes dryers, literally billions of people would be very annoyed. If you banned crypto-stuff tomorrow, certain parts of twitter would be very annoyed, and the vast majority of people would not even _notice_. Totally different political calculus.
"Real" money is essentially free. Only cost of producing real money is in materials needed to print a miniscule amount of it.
Vast percentage of money currently in circulation is already virtual - in the form of bits inside computers. Your bank has desks with computers, a server where the actual data is stored and a vault with a mandatory reserve in the form of printed currency.
So, only reasons to prefer Bitcoin are if you want to, for some reason, avoid the banking system or you don't have cash ready.
Either way, Bitcoin is a murky ground to tread on.
- Some countries are undergoing hyperinflation in which the value of their money decreases daily. Authoritative governments implement currency controls which prevent free market exchange for other currencies, and so citizens are forced to hold worthless bills.
- Electronic banking is mass surveilled and your bank and credit card companies are selling your data.
- The yield on a 10 year US treasury note is 1.79%. The interest rate on a Bank of America savings account is 0.01% APY. There is no "risk-free" return for savings in today's world; people are increasingly pushed to take risk just to keep up with inflation.
Everyone living in Western democracies think good times will last forever, that this kind of debt and money creation is sustainable, and that the party will never end.
But Bitcoin is not an answer to western consumerism. Nor will it prevent future debts. On the contrary, imagine what a shitshow it would be if someone started selling "bitcoin credit" to the masses. How would you keep the interest stable?
* Consume less as I see how the time value of my money is preserved
* know that spending now means less in future, so weigh priorities of purchases
* priorities longer term thinking with regard to ownership of assets
* constantly consider the cost of capital and trade offs owning one instrument vs another
There is indeed a working credit market for Bitcoin backed tokens! The largest is aave, and interest rates are driven by liquidity pool usage and incentive programs by the chain devs. There is one level removed from the actual BTC but we are getting close here.
You can borrow WBTC right now, consumer facing defi!
Your argument is coming across as vaguely racist and appears to be based on nothing but the divisions imposed between the second and first world.
All 4 of them (if you count Poland, counting Finland or Sweden would be even harder). Here is a Latvian joke about Estonia: "no sex or future in Estonia". I have been in pretty much any European country, minus Portugal. No idea where the racism idea comes from, though.
You just showed how stupid of a construct the whole 'western/eastern' nonsense is
Is there a hard criteria at all?
And even in "the west" (by which I would mean the top ~40 countries by HDI), "the west" is a poorly-defined term.
Edit: turns out Wikipedia has an article about "Western world", which makes it quite clear that the term is vague. Apparently the original meaning was "Western Christendom", so it's a religious thing. TIL.
> USA-centric concepts
It means the same in other languages. And English is, AFAIK, also spoken outside the USA. If I'd call anything to the east of the Poland "Mongolia" or "Eastern Asia", I think people wouldn't understand me or think I was being obtuse.
(In a similar way, the Europe / Asia / Africa divide is fundamentally a Mediterranean concept. The farther away from the Mediterranean you go, the less sense it will make.)
So here we would consider the balkans to be eastern.
To ban mining itself (calculation) you could only address things like construction permits or environmental permits for industrial mining operations. That’s also easy, and in no way interferes by saying what anyone “can compute”.
It's dismaying: HN used to be pretty united about digital rights.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/16/17128678/plattsburgh-new-... [2] https://www.govtech.com/policy/washington-utility-will-uphol...
Unless some actual systemic and global changes happen.
> The largest-scale crypto mining is thought to be taking place in the north of the country, where the Serb-majority population refuse to recognise Kosovo as an independent state and have consequently not paid for electricity for more than two decades.
> global bitcoin mining consumes 125.96 terawatt hours a year of electricity, putting its consumption above Norway (122.2 TWh), Argentina (121 TWh), the Netherlands (108.8 TWh) and the United Arab Emirates (113.20 TWh).
The absurdity of the bitcoin mining in the middle of the climate crisis is mind boggling.
Not that I blame them at all, there was no way to predict the scale of the damage that a single paper could have on the world, and someone else would have eventually come up with the same idea.
Bitcoin is not ab attack in banks but on inflation.
It is undermining government ability to create poverty and oppress people.
> @halfin
> Thinking about how to reduce CO2 emissions from a widespread Bitcoin implementation
> Jan 27, 2009
https://twitter.com/halfin/status/1153096538
Bitcoiners cannot claim they weren't told early, by bitcoin's second developer.
I still find this wording very interesting, and somewhat loaded. It's not that the population is somehow collectively refusing to pay for their electricity. A mechanism for them to pay it has not existed since 1999.
Discussed previously here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29809078
> While the Kosovo government remains unclear on how to proceed after the six-month deadline, Serbs in the Kosovo north remain confused on how and to whom they should pay their electricity bills.
> Miodrag Milicevic, of the North Mitrovica-based NGO Aktiv, says Serbs in the north of Kosovo are in a “grey zone” when it comes to their electricity bills.
> “Some still favour of maintaining this status, partly because they do not know who to pay, no one has complete information about it, about the method of calculating electricity, or who will be responsible for payment,” Milicevic told BIRN.
[0]: https://balkaninsight.com/2021/05/06/kosovo-pledges-to-solve...
Do we need to attach the climate crisis to everything these days? It’s very important but picking on one thing relentlessly and not others is just silly. We’re not going to solve the climate crisis by trying to stop people from doing things that use a lot of energy. We need to find ways to make those things sustainable/carbon neutral.
One thing that sets POW apart, though, is how it is designed to resist efficiency improvements through the difficulty adjustment mechanism. When hashrate per watt goes up with efficiency improvements, the network difficulty goes up to compensate, so more efficient hardware does not improve the efficiency of the system.
If people today aren’t willing to change their lives (and they clearly aren’t), then it’s time to enjoy the ride and hope we die (fingers crossed) before things get awful (which they will).
https://twitter.com/thenib/status/1098281126743937031
If you think the comic is hyperbole, I've literally had people say "but you exhale CO2, AHA!" to me when I've suggested we need more people on bicycles for personal transportation.
The fact that bicycles are the most energy-efficient form of personal transit? Irrelevant, apparently, because we exhale CO2.
We should tax the hell out of every ounce of carbon emitted and use money from this tax to pay basic income so that people are able to live with increased prices. Free market will sort the rest out
Energy is so cheap that some renewables could be decomissioned if not for bitcoin: https://www.reuters.com/technology/costa-rica-hydro-plant-ge...
Sarcasm?
Which they will use as an excuse for more taxes.
See the pattern?
——
This comment has two further comments, both of which ask questions. But since this comment is heavily downvoted, I cannot reply to the replies to answer the questions.
In short: no such thing as “negative externalities”, thats just make-believe to whitewash oppression and poverty creation. Taxes are not a market signal by definition. Its interesting how blithely people accept using violence to force others to comply with their wishes.
If you really wanted to reduce CO2 you would support safe clean nuclear. But CO2 isnt causing warming- its historically low, earth started at %100 CO2. Plants evolved to need levels 5 times higher than present. Increased CO2 would improve the environment. We had an ICE AGE at 10 times higher CO2 then now. ETC.
Unfortunately Government propaganda has replace science education.
Taxing carbon emission significantly sends price signal to every actor in the market that uses products and services that have carbon emission upstream to maybe reduce usage of such products and services or switch to another.
Your comment is blatant virtue signalling -- it's taking a moral high ground without providing any alternatives.
[edit] At least you've provided an alternative now: nuclear energy. Then again, you only did it when pushed to.
> We should tax the hell out of every ounce of carbon emitted and use money from this tax to pay basic income so that people are able to live with increased prices.
So far so good.
> Free market will sort the rest out
Under free market, the basic income will cause a further price increase, rendering the effort moot.
Subsidizing energy, as Kosovo and Kazakhstan have been doing (resulting in the same consequences on coin mining and crackdown), is necessary, and thus so are the consequences.
Would you really just keep paying more for energy because you have that? The payback period on solar panels just went *0.3, batteries just became a affordable option for day/night balancing, many alternative investments in renewable energy just became profitable.
Many people will use that opportunity to get ahead financially. I think that’s what GP meant with “the free market will sort out the rest”
> we’ll give you $2000p.a. to compensate for the increased energy bill. Would you really just keep paying more for energy because you have that?
In the suggested policy I was replying to, the $2k would decrease if I (and many others) switched to renewable. That loss would muddy the gains, discouraging the switch. Besides, the methods you are describing tend to have high upfront costs.
Hence, the need for subsidizing instead, something very close, but without a negative-feedback-loop incentive.
To be fair, while that is a reasonable policy (and why so many countries enact it), I would favor requiring each company to be individually carbon-neutral, with an exponential penalty. As a result, it is not a tax which could weaken the vulnerable, and yet it forces companies to choose between reducing their negative externalities, and bankruptcy.
But computing carbon-neutrality is hard.
My underlying assumption is that you would reduce the 2k compensation in my example. So the incentive for any saving remains.
On duration: I installed solar for 0.80€ (ex vat) per Wp (which generates about 1kWh p.a.). In NL electricity rates recently spiked to 0.45 euro per kWh. Based on that, payback time is now less than 2 years (that includes everything, panels, inverter and installation, etc.)
but I think we agree the challenge is to find a way to create a good market incentive for consumers and industry to reduce their externalities/CO2.
I'm thinking probably ignorance as the comment also thinks that raising the costs of energy used to produce BTC will somehow make it less profitable to mine when in fact it will simply increase commodity value and most likely drive more interest and increase speculation thus consuming more energy.
> ...as part of emergency measures to ease a crippling energy crisis.
They aren't identifying "electricity is too cheap" as the problem. And it doesn't sound like the climate crisis is on their radar right now.
Norway recently experienced its highest energy prices ever, in large part because of tighter coupling with the European market. Some people got bills 10x of previous years. Using less energy simply isn’t an option here, otherwise you freeze to death, or damage your home. It led to a massive political outcry that was easily exploitable by populists.
You can’t go back on decades of energy policy in that short a time frame, and you can’t do it without easing the tax burden somewhere else. The current government in Norway is polling extremely low. So low they probably won’t recover by the next election in 3 years. And they didn’t even cause the spike in energy prices here. I dread to imagine what would happen if a government intentionally hiked the enrgy prices just to stop bitcoin miners…
Then this tax will only influence economy making ways of doing things that don't emit carbon insanely competitive.
Same way you pay i.e. for electricity.
If you can get somebody to capture it for 1$, well, good for you. If there are only buyers for -10000$, then that's your problem.
We're not there yet as far as carbon capture goes, but I do think we'll get there.
What if we figure out something good to do with that carbon, and capturing it becomes profitable? Should we return all that money to those it was stolen from?
Well consider this. We have these things called taxes. Everyone pays them.
Sometimes we change the tax rate.
Once we change the tax rate we don't go back years and give people refunds for the new rates.
Nor do we retroactively go back and charge people more if we raise their tax rates.
Carbon taxes would, perhaps not surprisingly, work the same. At the moment we consider adding carbon to the environment to be a negative event and well tax is as such.
If at some point in the future we decide we really want more carbon in the atmosphere then we can incentivize people to do that, but we generally don't go back and retroactively give people refunds for their old taxes:)
And for the second question: no. Why would we? You pay for the pollution you emit. If a company agree to provide you the means for free, or even pay you to emit this pollution, all the power to you. What happen in the present should have no impact on current taxes.
Arguable false.
The freest markets price in all externalities so that the user pays the whole costs and doesn't outsource the externalities to others.
Taxing is one way to help pass on these externalities.
Arguably this makes it a more free market as taxes help make people pay closer to their actual costs and takes part of the burden off those who don't
0. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/01/suv-conquere...
The "odd leap" from carbon tax to basic income is exactly to address this issue of the cost to the less well-off. In a tremendously simpler, more effective, and freer way than detailed bans of particular uses of energy which also have successful industries with strong lobbies behind them.
Electricity is not just a discretionary commodity, it serves an essential need enabling our modern society. It makes no sense to increase electricity prices and hike up inflation for the common person in an effort to dissuade crypto miners. If we really wanted to go that way, a better solution IMO is to introduce two electricity rates, one for things that perform useful services (by broad positive impact to society) and one other for PoW crypto mining.
Carbon emission are not priced according to their future impact. We need to price it correctly. And it's better to overcorrect rhan undercorrect. The only downside is that this pricing will propagate into the economy (as it should). When it reaches people that can no longer afford to live we can prevent them from dying by giving them money we got from tax.
It's possible to use coal for power without subsidies (coal is cheap) and bonus it's even more economically efficient
The truth is that nobody cares about energy usage. It has exploded in the last decades whilst fully knowing about the problem. People only care about somebody else's energy usage and call for the banning of things they don't use or care about.
That's your bubble, not mine. This is not my experience at all.
That's not quite right. In the West, energy usage per capita has risen until the 1970's or 80's, then stayed flat or fallen. (Of course, it's continued to rise in Asia, but fairly linearly; I wouldn't call it an explosion.)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/03/12/world-energy-consumpti...
It can be said much more broadly that people are changing behavior. Not everyone for sure, but there are few people left that will not claim to be making different personal choices for environmental reasons. I think a lot of them are worth very little and there are definitely hypocrites that take multiple flights per year and compensate that by plugging out phone chargers while not in use, but it's still something that's apparently on their mind. People do do things, and some people do significant things. If GP says that they only see people complaining about others without doing anything themselves, that must be a quite narrow bubble (from my point of view, at least).
Edit: maybe a less debatable example is meat replacement products in supermarkets popping up. It's not as if we have more compassion with animals today than ten years ago, what changed is that more people are aware of the climate impact of meat. If nobody was willing to do anything, who's financing the production and buys the shelf space? The products don't even hold that long before spoiling, so they must be sold nearly as fast as meat.
Giant faceless banks in bed with the government good.
You dind't get the memo when you signed up?