Crypto Mining Electricity Excise Tax Should Target AI Instead
news.bloombergtax.com
news.bloombergtax.com
No, the best goal for this is to tax carbon.
Obviously a crypto tax is as much about politics as it is about climate change. Most people loathe crypto after the last 2 bubbles and your average news-savvy person can roughly describe why bitcoin and NFTs are a waste of electricity, meanwhile the crypto industry itself isn’t doing great and likely won’t be politically influential, making it a great target. (Unlike say 2021 when a bunch of people were investing in it).
Great optics and little to no actual damage to the constituency, I.e good politics
We all know that's unlikely to happen in reality, the people would be up in arms. What would actually happen if "carbon" were taxed would be a slight of hand, a redistribution from some pockets into others. I've been part of early carbon offset experiments many years ago and seen enough carbon scams in my time.
To be specific, taxing [use of and/or extraction of] fossil fuels. The reasoning is that extracting and using fossil fuels adds carbon to our environment that was previously sequestered within the earth. The goal is to economically encourage the development, production, and use of non-carbon-extraction-reliant technologies that compete with carbon-extraction-reliant technologies.
Yes, it is hard to implement and would be wildly unpopular hence why it won’t happen
> What would actually happen
There’s no point discussing hypothetical issues with hypothetical legislation. What kind of loopholes or corruption can exist is entirely dependent on the legislation itself.
> To be specific, taxing [use of and/or extraction of] fossil fuels.
I can see now that you were actually looking for me to justify a carbon tax from a policy perspective, not define it. I am not interesting in doing so, hence “evading the question”
You've not explained that part at all. It's like saying "I want a wealth tax" and then when someone asks how it actually works you tell them you tax expensive cars. That's not a wealth tax but a luxury vehicle tax.
A carbon tax essentially charges a fee on greenhouse gas emissions, aiming to account for their environmental impact—an externality not usually priced into the cost of fossil fuels.
The concept of a carbon tax has been considered for well over a decade.[0] While it might be a suitcase term on its own – different people interpret the phrase differently – the overall concept has been studied, has a lot support and popularity from economists.[1][0]
Several strategies exist to implement a carbon tax, but a widely favored method is a market-based, "revenue-neutral" approach. Here, the funds raised from the tax are redistributed (through various means, not necessarily something like UBI) to offset any financial burden on consumers or businesses.[2]
As far as my understanding goes, a carbon tax is simpler to put into practice—and explain—compared to other alternatives like specific environmental regulations or cap-and-trade carbon pricing schemes.[3]
[0] https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/carbon-taxes-ii/ [1] https://www.econstatement.org/ [2] https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/comparing-effec... [3] https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/20/8680/pdf
Your own link disagrees with that, it describes it as a tax that, depending on the country:
- "applied to fuel, coal, and natural gas"
- "mainly covers the use of fuels"
- "covered natural gas, petroleum, and other mineral fuels, except biofuel"
- "a tax on fossil fuels, petroleum products, natural gas, and coal"
The user who proposed this as a solution above has the same misunderstanding. What they described when I asked about the details sounds like simply another tax on fuel, on top of the already existing tax. It's not a "carbon" tax at all, it's a fuel tax.
In this thread you're attacking people because they left out a few details. This isn't a good discussion style.
Government wants to tax crypto because they don't like crypto, because it consumes too much electricity for what it has proven to provide to the users and the economy, at least for now.
Tax the carbon, tax overdraft fees, and tax the eons my money spends floating around the financialverse doing whatever it does instead of going from A to B in less time than it took the Pony Express to send a letter across the country.
But I agree, cryptocurrency fans shouldn't be taxed.
They should be arrested. Their counterfeiting equipment should be ground to dust and they should be locked up.
Unlike the field of Deep Learning, which after decades still has not found any viable alternatives to their methods of training, fine-tuning and inferencing operations and continues to waste insurmountable amounts of resources.
The worse part is the outputs after training from such black box AI models; including hallucinations, lack of transparent explainability and a 'high accuracy' of being confidently wrong.
There is nothing 'useful' for a hallucinating glorified unchecked bullshit generator, or a vision system getting confused over a single pixel.
[0] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training...
AI is useful. The vast majority of crypto are just scams and unregistered securities. Crypto mining is wasteful.
Are you going to tax whenever people who use the neural engine inside the iPhone? Makes no sense to tax AI energy use.
Furthermore, carbon tax is a bad idea, as it is regressive, (further) inflation generating, and ends up benefiting polluters from markets with poor regulation - just to list a few disadvantages.
Direct government investment and projects like a Green New Deal would be much more helpful for the Environment.
But I think the OP is mostly concerned about their deflated crypto portfolio...
Cars are also useful but the majority of them (Petrol and Diesel) are extremely wasteful. The difference is however is that there are greener alternatives (Electric). Crypto has also proven to have greener alternatives and a major proof-of-work blockchain moved to a greener alternative method proof-of-stake, showing it is entirely possible.
AI (Deep Learning) has no known greener alternatives, and always requires more compute, data centers, GPUs, FPGAs ASICs, to scale further and the result is more resources is wasted [0][1], for hallucinating chatbots and vision systems that need to be fine-tuned again and at worse retrained.
It makes perfect sense to tax it as after more than a decade, Deep Learning still has no viable green alternative methods to reduce its training, inference and fine-tuning operations.
[0] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training...
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-data-centre-water...
AI in general, and LLMs in particular, will change Society to a scale only comparable to what the Word Wide Web has done since the 90s - hopefully for far more good than bad.
Crypto is basically penny stocks - or actually, in good truth - a glorified pyramid scheme.
It is sad that Hacker News allows and normalizes this self-interested promotion of it, disguised as "opinion".
Indeed: tell us that you don't stand to personally gain monetarily if crypto rizes, user "rvz" ;)
(some goes for the author of the bloomberg piece)
Hit what exactly? You have failed to refute any of my points.
> AI in general, and LLMs in particular, will change Society to a scale only comparable to what the Word Wide Web has done since the 90s.
I don't think you would trust a black-box 'AI' in any high risk activity such as medical, financial, legal advice and especially transportation which there is a lack of a human driver or pilot, end-to-end to hold accountable once something goes wrong. Hence it will be totally regulated and licensed.
Not only techies like you wish to accelerate everyone further into a dystopia no-one asked for, but to even recklessly risk deploying untrustworthy AI models unchecked which can easily hallucinate and confuse themselves over a single pixel or any adversarial input. Making them unsuitable for anything serious, unless they are strictly regulated for that purpose.
Regardless, my environmental argument still stands unchallenged. Crypto has alternative greener methods to proof-of-work right now, and former PoW blockchains like Ethereum have shown that it is possible to significantly reduce its emissions by 99% by moving to a greener consensus method. [0][1] AI (Deep Learning, LLMs, CNNs, etc) however still does NOT have any viable greener alternative methods of training, inference and fine-tuning available and continues to waste tons of electricity and water. [2]
> Crypto is basically penny stocks - or actually, in good truth - a glorified pyramid scheme.
How on earth is a centralized stable-coin like USDC a pyramid scheme? The prime use-case is near-instant low-fee world-wide international payments which is verified publicly on-chain to discourage fraud which once it happens it is immediately traceable, which is why companies like Moneygram [3], Stripe [4], etc have their own crypto offerings under regulattions.
> It is sad that Hacker News allows and normalizes this self-interested promotion of it, disguised as "opinion".
Speak for your self. Since both of you have ZERO sources to your comments. Thus your comment can be simply dismissed.
> Indeed: tell us that you don't stand to personally gain monetarily if crypto rizes, user "rvz" ;)
Not after you learn to spell 'rise' before you comment next time instead of embarrassing yourself.
[0] https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain...
[1] https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption
[2] https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/ai-chatgpt-water-usage-envir...