Hacker News Reader

Comment by perfunctory | Hacker News Reader

> while Kosovo has the cheapest energy prices in Europe due in part to more than 90% of the domestic energy production coming from burning the country’s rich reserves of lignite, a low-grade coal, and fuel bills being subsidised by the government.

> 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.

View on HN

Pricing electricity so low that bitcoin mining is profitable during peak hours is absurd.

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...

>>> 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

Sarcasm?

I don't see why you think this is sarcasm. Sounds very reasonable to me.

How will taxes improve the environment? They will give politicians more power to oppress, snd since governments are the largest polluters in the world the environment will get worse.

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.

Taxes infom the market about externalities.

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.

Governments have a role in taxing negative externalities. What alternative do libertarians like you have? Forgetting whether or not you believe in climate change, if it does indeed exist as a possibility, what would libertarians like you do about it?

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.

I also don’t think it is sarcasm, but I don’t think it is reasonable.

> 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.

No it doesn’t. Example, imagine you currently have a energy bill of $1000p.a. With the proposal above, we’ll move you to a $3000p.a. bill with CO2 taxes. And, 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? 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”

I’m not exactly sure we are disagreeing.

> 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.

Maybe not that far apart. The challenge with subsidies is the administration and making sure you exhaustively subsidize different options. It’s also infeasible for smaller investments such as radiator foil.

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.

Well it is either sarcasm or ignorance to say that Taxes, UBI and a Free Market could ever exist in the same economy or be part any economic device.

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.

You give everyone equal amounts of co2 tokens. CO2 pollution costs tokens. You have now democratized CO2 pollution. Every single person gets to decide how much pollution they want in the world. Replace pollution tokens with dollars and taxes and you have the same democratic system.

https://ec.europa.eu/clima/eu-action/eu-emissions-trading-sy...

The article sayeth:

> ...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.

Increasing the energy prices isn’t a solution. It’d affect to poor disproportionally, while also being greatly destabilizing for society at large. It’s basically a flat tax for heating your home.

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…

That's why poor (and for simplicity everybody) should be subsidized to counteract the effect of taxing carbon.

Then this tax will only influence economy making ways of doing things that don't emit carbon insanely competitive.

It's not a free market if we tax it to distort it.

It’s not a free market if some costs are externalized to society instead of priced in. Like pollution.

There is absolutely no way to set a fair price for something like that. We have no way of knowing the cost, if there is any at all.

Sure there is. The cost of emitting a ton of carbon should ideally be the cost of capturing a ton of carbon. Managed in a free market kind of way.

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.

Which is exactly what I said. We don't know how much it will cost to capture that carbon, so we can't set a price, so it's unfair to set any price.

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?

Currently we deem it not desirable, so it's alright to me if we price it very high, thus stimulating investment in this area to bring the cost down or even make it profitable.

> 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:)

We know the price with current methods though. It is prohibitively expensive, so no one will agree with it.

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.

> It's not a free market if we tax it to distort it.

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

By pricing in the externalities you turn it into a market. Before that, it was free riding (rent seeking).

It's an odd leap from electricity prices to carbon tax to basic income. And with free market as a cherry on top! There are better, more effective ideas that are effectively ignored rather than disrupting the economic and financial systems in place and letting "free market sort it out" as if it were ever possible in such a scenario. For one such example, immediately ban or heavily tax the sale of massively polluting vehicles such as SUVs, that as a category pollute as much as UK and Netherlands combined [0], making road circulation safer in the process too, and riding the wave of EV getting more adoption. But this won't happen, since it's a successful industry with a strong lobby behind it. And as per usual, concrete is the major culprit of CO2 emissions. That's where one could look for opportunities (such as reprocessing plants where emissions are redirected) and stricter regulations. Don't increase prices like so many in Germany feel would be the right thing to do, it only impacts those who can't afford better housing (insulation, heating efficiency).

0. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/01/suv-conquere...

I'm all in to ban SUV. But by doing that you're gonna threaten the masculinity and sense of identity of a large set of people. Intelligent politicians will use this to drift the debate into elite green progressists vs working class who just want a piece of the cake. To not get into this minefield lets not forget that corporations acount for a very large part of energy use and that perhaps useless transport of useless goods should be restricted, also restricting putting energy-intensive electronics in gadgets that don't need them.. There are tons of measures that can target corporations that will be easier to control, have more measurable and predictable outcomes and won't contribute to desintegrate the social cohesion and will stop the working class from getting eaten up by the far right.

why ban SUVs instead of raising the cost to operate them?

> It's an odd leap from electricity prices to carbon tax to basic income. . . Don't increase prices like so many in Germany feel would be the right thing to do, it only impacts those who can't afford better housing

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.

It's not an odd leap at all. The core problem is that we don't pay for the externalities of fossil fuels. If we fix that, then the next question is what to do with the money, and a simple, efficient, and equitable answer is to return it to the population, equal amount per person. That's why carbon fee-and-dividend is a popular proposal with the support of a lot of economists.

> Pricing electricity so low that bitcoin mining is profitable during peak hours is absurd.

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.

It's not to dissuade bitcoin mining. It's to move us away from emitting carbon as fast as possible. Crypto is just sideshow.

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.

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

I read the discussion and the piece referenced therein, but I couldn't find a reference to the Serbs not being able to pay. Can you elaborate on this?

My understanding is that the billing infrastructure for that part of Kosovo still hasn't been established. Quoting another article from balkaninsight [0]:

> 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...

The irony of eating meat/driving gas guzzling cars/using air conditioning/flying/…

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.

We’re talking about Bitcoin here because the news is about Bitcoin, it doesn’t mean we don’t care about reducing emissions in other areas. There are articles on HN regularly about EVs, synthetic meat, etc.

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.

The climate crisis will solve itself when flying, eating meat, gas guzzling cars, etc. are impossible to use because the climate crisis has made life an (as of today) essentially unimaginable hellscape. Sure it’ll be a few centuries of abject misery but as a result the world’s population will contract a lot and things will “reset.”

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).

Such a boorish attitude that Bors made a specific version of Mister Gotcha just for you:

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.

Hey, air conditioning doesn't belong on that list. It uses a lot of energy but it also significantly improves quality of life in hot and humid regions of the planet. And unlike the other items on your list, there's no ethical or intrinsically pollutive aspect to it. Also lots of developments in newer more energy efficient compressors and DC ACs with smarter control algorithms meant to run with solar.

From a purely practical political point of view, none of those things can be banned outright without an _enormous_ political backlash, so the approach has to be slow improvement and phaseout. Crypto-mining, on the other hand, could be banned tomorrow, with virtually no political fallout.

The other two quotes you’ve posted suggest that mining is a significantly smaller issue in this particular scenario. The principal culprits for climate change instead seem to be government-sponsored majority-coal energy expenditure and irredentist nationalist policies.

I sometimes wonder if Satoshi, whoever they are, is incredibly guilt-ridden by this. I know I would be.

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.

No because he wanted to take revenge on the "banks" after the 2008 crisis. He must be incredibly proud of the gigantic pyramid he built, knowing if he move just one btc out of his wallet he'll cause so much ruin people will suicide.

Satoshi has been selling bitcoin to pay expenses every year. You just don’t know it because “Satoshi’s coins” is a myth. He wrote off the identifiable ones but still had years to mine cheaply.

Bitcoin is not ab attack in banks but on inflation.

It is undermining government ability to create poverty and oppress people.

I heard that the person who invented single serve coffee pods felt a similar guilt when they witnessed the amount of trash created from such a popular invention.

Both of these sentiments probably deserve the good old "Woody Harrelson drying tears with 100 dollar bills" meme.

I will also cast judgement back in time, to all families owning cars both fossil and electric, to all the people not recycling every ounce of garbage they've thrown. The people whom consumed even the slightest, I cast my judgement, they've doomed the world with their existence. The judgment I cast even lands upon you, hackernews commenter, when it's all laid out.

Hal Finney (who beta-tested bitcoin before its release) flagged it almost immediately:

> @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 like putting it another way: 125.96 terawatt-hours at 11 cents per Kwh (my local rate which is quite a bit higher than many places mining happens) is about $13.8 billion. This is much less than what the world spent on toothpaste in a year ($30bn), isn't much more than Americans spent on Halloween ($10bn), cigarette companies spent on US marketing ($8bn, with much more than that being how much American spent on cigarettes), and is only about 10x more than a single banking player (Bank of America) spends on cybersecurity per year. Do any of these figures seem as absurd to you?

BTC bad.

Giant faceless banks in bed with the government good.

You dind't get the memo when you signed up?

So are giant TVs, PC gaming rigs, ACs, large cars, overconsumption of meat, etc. None can be justified given climate change, but everyone wants to keep it.

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.

> 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.

> nobody cares about energy usage. It has exploded in the last decades

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...

I was thinking of bringing up the same point, but one could argue that it's for own gain to pay less on the energy bill.

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.

Both subsidizing dirty coal and using it to mine bitcoin both sound criminal to me. Subsidizing coal is the most evil while mining bitcoin with it is a meaningless act that's fun to dislike

It's a poor country, they have lots of dirty coal. Their options are use it and have pollution, or pay money to import energy/electricity or build new nuclear power plants ( seems out of the question) or invest into renewables. Coal seems the cheapest option, especially for a country with complicated relations with many of their neighbours, which would make energy/electricity imports highly risky.

I think you replied to the wrong comment. Mind was about a poor country wasting govt money on populist subsidies

It's possible to use coal for power without subsidies (coal is cheap) and bonus it's even more economically efficient

Climate crisis aside, the absurdity of bitcoin mining parasitically profiting out of a local geopolitical situation like this is very ...illustrative.

Maybe if countries stopped giving away free energy people would waste less...

The poor population of those countries needs that cheap energy to not freeze to death and in general for everyday living.

So ration is accordingly. Just telling everyone they can have enough energy to run a Bitcoin mining op, and then being surprised when they run a Bitcoin mining op seems silly...

So, if everyone was mining Bitcoin, they would earn around US$0.15 per month (assuming 8e9 people, a 6.25 BTC coinbase mining reward every 10 minutes plus some 10% transaction fees, at a price of US$40,000/BTC, and zero energy/mining rig cost). Yay, Bitcoin is solving global poverty!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com