The users and buyers of cryptocurrency sponsor that spending, and find it worthwhile.
Who is the government to say otherwise?
Who is the government to say otherwise?
Without that you have an anarchic lawless society where individualism can flourish and people can exploit whatever they want without regards for the 2nd, 3rd, n-th order impact that an action might cause unto others, because it's invisible or severely hidden to them. Or that they simply don't care about said impact because their personal reward is worth more to them than the benefit of society as a whole.
Who is the government to say otherwise?
Oh yeah, that's right, the government SHOULD actually make policies to cut down on negative affects of things that some people want to do. You know, because that's the whole point of government.
Not because they are god, because they are how society codifies what it wants and sets policies to achieve it.
Cryptocurrency isn't even banned, only proof of work.
It's a completely valid thing for a government to set a policy about.
Especially now that the experiment has been allowed to run without meddling for many years, and the results are well and truly in.
There might be an argument about invalid interference on day one, but not now.
Banning proof of work is tantamount to banning computation, it's silly and infeasible unless you want to start monitoring what people calculate.
Which for anyone remotely sane is laughable on its face.
The purpose of a state-level policy (state as in government not state as in NY) is to have a state-level agregate effect, not to actually care about each microscopic individual instance.
If you make a policy that in effect Bitcoin is illegal, that will have a population-scale effect.
The fact that you can make an argument that 'it's just computation no different from any other computation' is ignorant of the point and kind of jeuvenile. You didn't say anything they didn't know perfectly well.
Why call me juvenile? That's not necessary to make your argument. It's rude too and against the rules.
> Enforcement practicality is a separate issue.
No it's not, enforcement practicality is the only important issue regarding a law. An unenforceable law is useless.
The question of if a thing is harmful or should be controlled or declared illegal, and the question of how the implimentation mechanics of controlling a thing might be done, are two completely different questions. If you had no way to physically prevent murders, that does not then follow that therefor murder shouldn't be illegal. Failing to realize that is yet another example of jeuvenile.
Practically every law, policy, regulation, code, etc has some element of arbitrariness, interpretation, and discretion or selective enforcement. This one is no different.
Why not a carbon tax scheme for everyone, period? This is what I'm asking.
Why is cryptocurrency mining banned, while other "profiteers" (oil companies, gas-electric companies and so on) would not be penalized equally?
The US has among the highest per-capita carbon emissions.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?most_rec...
Given that the global carbon tax is unlikely to happen, we might has well take action against proof of work now since it would still be a net benefit for mankind.
Because the world is not fair and a general carbon tax will not get passed.
That's discounting a federal carbon tax that would go this deep, because that's certainly not happening.
The goverenment, in liberal democracies, are the people elected representatives.
It's the will of the people and it overrules the will of some cryptobros.