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>>Smari McCarthy, a member of the Icelandic parliament for the Pirate Party, tweeted: "Cryptocurrency mining requires almost no staff, very little in capital in
by otoburb 9y ago
>>Smari McCarthy, a member of the Icelandic parliament for the Pirate Party, tweeted: "Cryptocurrency mining requires almost no staff, very little in capital investments, and mostly leaves no taxes either.
Replace "cryptocurrency" with any other technology service and you'll probably be left with the same net result. The datacenter is presumably charging for the co-location services, so there's certainly tax revenue and the operational jobs (as few as they are) to run the facilities that benefits Iceland.
- gruez 9y agoalso, >very little in capital investments what? it doesn't require huge upfront capital compared to say, building a factory, but risk in buying mining equipment is insane given how volatile the price/difficulty is.
- otoburb 9y agoYou're correct, but I believe the MP was referring to the fact that any such capital assets (e.g. miners/servers) are being purchased outside of Iceland, so no tax revenue accrues to Iceland (except maybe indirectly in the form of import duties or shipping costs).
- gruez 9y ago>are being purchased outside of Iceland ...as opposed to any other business? if you're setting up any kind of business[1], chances are most of the capital investments won't be goods from iceland. [1] other than ones centered around processing raw resources https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Iceland_Export_Treemap.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Iceland_...