> What, if any, government interventions could be put in place to somehow add value to BTC mining? Well, the typical answer to "what can government do about th

> What, if any, government interventions could be put in place to somehow add value to BTC mining? Well, the typical answer to "what can government do about this thing that is bad for society, but not bad enough to ban outright" is "tax it", though as another poster pointed out offshoring limits the efficacy of this strategy. I'm going to interpret your second question as "What are your thoughts of governments using a resource such as hydroelectric dam or wind power to mine BTC and using it to increase their budget?" since in general, money spent on Expense X doesn't remember whether it was generated from Assets Y or Z; money in the budget is money in the budget. That said, I suppose I'm not strictly opposed to the idea, though I'd be interested in an analysis of the returns you can get on those CPUs when you're optimizing for a community rather than an individual - for example, how much benefit does society get from putting all that CPU to work for something like folding@home?