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My take on this is the following. Everything we do as a society I think should be from time to time evaluated from a point of view of benefits for society/world

My take on this is the following. Everything we do as a society I think should be from time to time evaluated from a point of view of benefits for society/world and then depending on this evaluation, the incentives should be updated to support things that we consider useful, and to penalize things that we do not. A few years ago Bitcoin didn't really register there, and it was okay to disregard. Now with so much energy/efforts spent there, one should ask oneselves, is it good allocation of resources? Is it good that so much cheap electricity is used for mining bitcoin? Can we think of a way of either taxing, or changing incentives, so that society benefits from this. I don't know what's the best way of changing the incentives, but it must be done in my opinion.

whimsicalism 6y ago
What if rather than taxing bitcoin, we just tax carbon usage?
- sega_sai 6y ago
  I think it is probably good to tax for Co2 production as a way of addressing global warming. I just don't think we should equate bitcoin production with other CO2 producers. I.e. I personally think that the CPU-cycles used for science on HPCs are much more valuable than the bitcoin mining (that's just my opinion though).
  - xur17 6y ago
    As you noted, this is just your opinion - are we going to have a person or group that decides what forms of Co2 usage are most "worthy", and adjust taxes accordingly? And let's say we do go down that path - one could certainly make the argument that Bitcoin usage from folks fleeing oppressive regimes are much more worthy than Co2 used to search for aliens or participating in far out HPC research.
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      Incentivizing stupid things (like taking on mortgage debt or over-coverage by employer health plan) is already the status quo of the tax code. > Bitcoin usage from folks fleeing oppressive regimes Have bitcoin people (I don't know what else to call the people who want to talk about it all the time) actually convinced themselves that this is a substantial share of bitcoin usage?
      - imtringued 6y ago
        >Have bitcoin people (I don't know what else to call the people who want to talk about it all the time) actually convinced themselves that this is a substantial share of bitcoin usage? It's not because this is literally Monero's value proposition. Why would anyone who wants to flee an oppressive regime publicly announce to their government that they bought Bitcoin in the oppressed country and sold it in a less oppressive country? Information about Monero (don't dare to even think of buying it for speculation) https://www.monero.how/how-does-monero-work-details-in-plain-english https://www.monero.how/how-does-monero-work-details-in-plain...
        whimsicalism 6y ago
        How do I cash out monero?
        noobly 6y ago
        >don't dare to even think of buying it for speculation why not?
    - sega_sai 6y ago
      I think, yes, somebody should adjust taxes accordingly. The status quo with existing costs and taxes already effectively establishes some preferences for industries/goals, just implicitely. I think trying to explicitely express those preferences is better. (and it will never be 100% optimal that's for sure)
    - imtringued 6y ago
      This is a terrible argument because the transaction fees on Bitcoin are high enough that anyone who wants to flee an oppressive regime would just buy any other cryptocurrency that isn't suffering from power consumption problems.
- xur17 6y ago
  I agree, taxing carbon usage is the correct way to go about this. All the ways I can think of taxing Bitcoin directly wouldn't modify the right behaviors. It seems like the options would be: * Tax Bitcoin transactions - decreasing Bitcoin transactions wouldn't decrease energy usage * Tax Bitcoin holdings - this is already accomplished via capital gains taxes, and again, it isn't the holding or usage of Bitcoin that causes the energy usage. It's the fact that Bitcoin has value that causes usage.
  - toyg 6y ago
    * Aggressively taxing GPU sales, with exemptions for some sectors and hard monitoring of commercial flows.
    - xur17 6y ago
      Well for 1, that won't affect Bitcoin mining since it hasn't been profitable to mine on a GPU for years, and 2 that will just force mining overseas to locales that don't have this tax (possibly to locales that have less carbon efficient energy sources).
    - gruez 6y ago
      GPUs are made in china/taiwan so good luck with that.
- thysultan 6y ago
  You tax carbon, country B now has an advantage over you. You loose! Now all your products are produced in country B, you've changed nothing and country B is probably using coal so you're worse off from your initial goal. You loose double!
  - jbay808 6y ago
    This is why you sign up for an international treaty that has teeth, ratify it, and back it up with penalties including carbon tariffs.
    - thysultan 6y ago
      Name one international treaty that has ever had teeth where the benefits of non-conformance out weight the teeth. Country B could tarrif country A in return and some countries cannot afford the cost of what that may do to them. So you end up with an international treaty without international conformance or a treaty with no real teeth because the signee's have contributed to it what would allow "them" to game the treaty.
      - jude- 6y ago
        Banning CFCs globally via the Montreal Protocol.
        thysultan 6y ago
        To put it bluntly China still has CFC emissions.
        jcranmer 6y ago
        And funnily enough, it's still lower than it would have been without the treaty. It's almost as if compliance doesn't have to be perfect to be effective, fancy that.
  - galangalalgol 6y ago
- pyrale 6y ago
  While taxing carbon usage is a good idea, there is something fundamentally wrong with the idea of allocating so much resources, in servers, in power and in space, for what essentially doesn't improve people's lives. That this craze receives so much attention and funding while we face very real existential challenges is maddening.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    If the owners of the miners are actually able to turn their coins into wealth that increases their lifestyle, then the mining did improve someone's life. Just because it affects a very small number of people isn't much different than most other "traditional" financial products in exsistence.
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      > then the mining did improve someone's life On net, was it welfare enhancing for our species though? If I make $1 off of emissions that cause external harm worth $2 distributed among the 7 billion people on this planet, I'm basically just laundering money through a loophole in what the law today considers to be harming someone else.
      - seibelj 6y ago
        You just keep moving the goalposts by using the most extreme argument you can muster. To be honest the sports industry uses tons of energy in lighting stadiums, streaming them, training players, it goes on and on. Entertainment could be done much more cheaply and effectively. I think society should outlaw sport - so many people are hurt in injuries, and the climate is just utterly demolished through all the energy waste. I can’t see a reason why society would allow sports. It’s ultimately beneficial to a very small amount of owners and their players (who are exploited!) that take all the cream off the top. Completely immoral honestly. The fact society wastes so much thought, effort, energy, focus, when we could instead be going to Mars or training STEM graduates is just criminal.
        6y ago
- undefined1 6y ago
  > we just tax carbon usage? yes please, that would be the holistic approach. externalities like carbon need to be priced in. if it's in the price, then the market will adjust accordingly. a $4 [thing] will jump to $12, people will buy fewer until producers figure out ways to reduce externalities in order to bring the price down. what's free will be overused. price it in to force efficiency and alternative seeking.
- Qwertious 6y ago
  I agree with every part of that sentence except the "just". People have been trying desperately to do that for 40+ years without success, it's clearly not easy.
- whywhywhywhy 6y ago
  Can we have a solution that doesn't mean giving the government yet more money.
amelius 6y ago
Yes. New business-models should not be accepted by default, especially if they are disruptive.
- mgberlin 6y ago
  Reductio ad absurdum.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    I think the argument they made was dumb, but I have never understood why "reductio ad absurdum" is popularly considered a 'fallacy'. It seems like a perfectly logical argumentative technique, designed to point out when a general-statement is actually false in at least one case.
    - erikerikson 6y ago
      A contradiction (A ^ ~A) is the point at which reductio ad absurdum is achieved. It proves that a false assumption was made. A counter example to a universal proposition is but one means of finding a contradiction since the universal allows you to assert the positive. A proof that no examples exist would contradict the statement that some do, just as effectively achieving reductio ad absurdum.
      - whimsicalism 6y ago
        What you're saying is not incongruous with what I'm saying. statement leads to contradiction -> "general-statement is actually false in at least one case", so if reductio ad absurdum is defined as achieving a contradiction, then the original statement is false in at least one case.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > I have never understood why "reductio ad absurdum" is popularly considered a 'fallacy'. > It seems like a perfectly logical argumentative technique, It's both. The strong form of the valid argumentative technique involves what amount to a series of valid syllogisms, where each step from the premise to the false conclusion involves a true premise and a logical (and therefore absolute) implication. The false conclusion drawn through valid implication and and a series of premises all but one of which is accepted as true thereby disproves the premise that was in doubt. There is a weaker but still valid (though not in the logical sense) form, where the steps aren't logically necessary but contingently true, with both the intermediate premises and the inferences with high enough likelihood that the conclusion is very likely true if the questioned premise is true. The fallacy has a similar shape but involves intermediate premises that are false or at least unjustified, or intermediate steps that are unwarranted, or consists of steps that are a likely enough individually but which in aggregate are not sufficiently likely to justify the conclusion that the premise is false. Most commonly, the fallacy form rests on what reduces to the reasoning: 1. If A, it is most likely that B 2. Most likely A. 3. Therefore, most likely B.
bluecalm 6y ago
Is BTC really more stupid way to burn resources than making sports cars? F1 racing? Gold mining? There are tons of things the society could do without and be better off. Or maybe not, who decides? Surely it shouldn't be majority as then we will approach Idiocracy level of civilization in no time with Kayne designer flip-flops getting a yay and NASA or a new semi-conductor start-up getting a may. I think there are two problems with crypto currencies: 1) Pollution and carbon emission is not taxed but should be. 2) Regulators allowing the situation where magic token is the only way to do certain kind of trades while competition faces insurmountable mountain of regulation and requirements. If it was possible to make fast money transfer system without hiring the army of lawyers in every country you want to operate then BTC would never gain any traction.
- spaced-out 6y ago
  > Is BTC really more stupid way to burn resources than making sports cars? F1 racing? Gold mining? Even looking at the usage of graphics cards specifically, is Bitcoin an objectively worse usage of those chips than playing video games? Than running ML models at Facebook?
  - imtringued 6y ago
    >is Bitcoin an objectively worse usage of those chips than playing video games? I have done a lot of activities in video games that would require significant CO2 emissions in real life. Potentially millions of tons. So yes, it's much better. There is also a significant population of software developers that picked up programming because of video games. Economic simulation games can help you develop an intuition on how to run a company and how they work without having to risk starting a real company with the potential to fail and ruin you financially. Meanwhile the only worthy claim that Bitcoin has is that it's a middleman for central bank money. Yes it probably funded a lot of good economic activity, but it's the job of the central bank and government to do that. If they didn't fail then Bitcoin would have literally nothing to do.
    - mnouquet 6y ago
thysultan 6y ago
You tax industrial bitcoin miners that you can detect, country A now has an advantage over you. You loose! You actually haven't changed anything it has just moved to another country that is probably using coal. You loose!
- imtringued 6y ago
  You're making the mistaken assumption that people care about whether Bitcoin is being mined. They only care about it not being mined in their backyard because the low electricity prices are just meant to be a subsidy to local residents. The electricity is being exported to a different location for a fat profit. If that other location is mining Bitcoin you're just giving the local residents more money. It's a pure net loss for Bitcoin miners.
- guenthert 6y ago
  By that logic we should legalize slavery.
  - thysultan 6y ago
    The goal however is not to prevent bitcoin mining, that can be easily achieved, the goal was to reduce. carbon emission, and now they are being emitted by the ton in another country that uses cheap coal to power the them. You've achieved a net negative from the stated goal.
- tomatotomato37 6y ago
  You say that as if having an industry based around a speculative asset that is more volatile than OTM stock options sucking up a third of your countries energy resources is actually an advantage in some way.
djoldman 6y ago
Capitalism seems to be the best of the possible solutions to the resource utilization problem. Bitcoin seems to be just the latest in a long string of events suggesting that humans are irrational, not necessarily that capitalism or markets are bad. If Bitcoin were processing a zillion transactions at a very very low fee per transaction, I believe few people would be saying it was a waste of resources.
collinexander 6y ago
I do not understand this argument. The fact that bitcoin mining is profitable inherently means that society has already deemed it useful, no? Users would not pay for it if it were not useful. > Everything we do as a society I think should be from time to time evaluated Who should do this evaluation? If not users freely allocating their own resources on the free market, then who? > the incentives should be updated to support things that are consider useful, and to penalize things that we do not. Please define useful. Humans have different needs and value things differently. What is useful to one may not be useful to the other. Any system that picks winners will also pick losers.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  > I do not understand this argument. The fact that bitcoin mining is profitable inherently means that society has already deemed it useful, no? Users would not pay for it if it were not useful. Just because there is a market for something doesn't mean that "society" as a whole has decided that it is useful. There's an underground market on taking out hits on someone else, that doesn't mean that "society" has decided that murder is good. > Who should do this evaluation? If not users freely allocating their own resources on the free market, then who? A public body that is democratically constrained. > Please define useful. Welfare enhancing for humanity. Sometimes, a welfare enhancing step will involve losers and winners, you're right. For instance, if one person held $200 billion and the rest of humanity held $1, redistributing that money would almost certainly be a welfare enhancing step given diminishing marginal utility of the $.
  - collinexander 6y ago
    Thanks for the reply, it helped me understand where you are coming from. For purposes of discussing bitcoin, it is a global good, and environmental concerns are a global concern. If there is a global market for bitcoin, then taxing bitcoin mining (or other such measures) in one country would just incentivize miners to move to another country. So any such action as you describe would need to be coordinated on a global level among several or all nations. > There's an underground market on taking out hits on someone else, that doesn't mean that "society" has decided that murder is good. Not sure if it is fair to compare bitcoin production to murder. I agree that we need some sort of action for climate change, but I am not sure regulating bitcoin is the answer. We'd have to apply the same subject "utility" measuring stick to _any_ activity that consumes electricity and regulate that. Like others have suggested, maybe taxing certain types of energy usage directly according to their climate change impact would be more effective and would apply evenly to all goods / services without deciding on behalf of individuals what is useful and what is not.
marshmallow_12 6y ago
my point exactly! The only reliable indicator of whether btc is good or bad overall is time. I was of the latter opinion, but what am i compared to the Great Musk? (judging by past experience, the answer is nothing).
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> Everything we do as a society I think should be from time to time evaluated from a point of view of benefits for society/world and then depending on this evaluation, the incentives should be updated to support things that we consider useful, and to penalize things that we do no This is vague to the point of meaninglessness. On one level, it describes democracy and lawmaking. On another level, it describes communist-style state control of economic factors.
insert_coin 6y ago
You'll be chasing your tail forever. The problem with bitcoin, or the issue to be more honest because it is not really a problem, is that right now there is no "better" use for that electricity than bitcoin. That is the truth you must grapple with. Or as Google would say, the best option for the collection of arguably the most brilliant minds that have ever walked this planet is to work for Google, trying to get people to click more on ads. That that is true, that is your problem and everything else is noise. If you really want an environmental problem to tackle go fight the oil industry killing thousands of animals every day, destroying communities every day, destroying them literally. But, if you insist you must "fix" something about the current crypto boom because somehow they do not adhere to your morality then you should look at everything else but bitcoin and ask yourself, why is the thing I consider moral not attractive to the market?, what can we do differently to make doing something else at least as profitable as mining bitcoin? If you just tax it or try to ban it they'll just move and you'll be a)poorer and b)left without a say.
- paulgb 6y ago
  > Why is the thing I consider moral not attractive to the market Because markets are notoriously unable to price in externalities on their own. I realize there is a temptation here to throw up your hands and say "well, all human activity emits carbon", especially if you are long bitcoin, but it's a false equivalency. Bitcoin is an energy consumption monster by design, and its difficulty adjustment mechanism neutralizes any attempt at making mining more efficient.
  - WanderPanda 6y ago
    Also its limited market cap and halving schedule will probably eventually phase out the energy consumption. Provided people are not willing to pay hundreds or thousands of (current day) dollars for transactions. Edit: And if they are willing to pay that much that should be a clear sign of the value provided by the network Edit2: And wether this will also phase out Bitcoins security model will be very interesting to observe across the next 10-20 years (depending on when btc will hit its market cap threshold in real terms)
  - 6y ago
kortilla 6y ago
> My take on this is the following. Everything we do as a society I think should be from time to time evaluated from a point of view of benefits for society/world and then depending on this evaluation, the incentives should be updated to support things that we consider useful, and to penalize things that we do not. Who is “we” and why to “we” get to decide instead of “they”? This approach to governing only sounds good when you’re not in the sights of those with the legislative pen. In Iran, “we” (the government) have decided that “they” (gay people) should not be able to live openly gay.
- sega_sai 6y ago
  I am not an anarchist or libertarian, so I believe in democratic governements. And I do believe it's their job to establish rules/regulations/laws that benefits society as a whole. Obviously and important point is the government must be democratically elected, to be able to control/revert things if the governement screws up.
  - solosoyokaze 6y ago
    So do you admit that to an anarchist or libertarian that Bitcoin does have value? The US military is the #1 user of energy on the planet. I definitely consider them a net negative to humanity, yet they're what's propping up the same neo-liberal democracy you think should be establishing the rules. Is that an acceptable use of energy to you? I think Bitcoin is an excellent use of energy because it's at least a potential alternative to our current governmental systems. A small piece of the puzzle but a prerequisite to change none the less.
SubiculumCode 6y ago
bitcoin is now significantly contributing to an existential threat. Its not alone of course...most things we do daily do so. However, I wish it wasn't such useless work.
kortilla 6y ago
Do we not realize the massive incentives Bitcoin is providing for energy production? If we could just agree to tax carbon emissions (the thing most of the world agrees is bad), then we should encourage this behavior as much as possible. We’re creating a wonderful scenario where miners would be investing in as much cheap energy as possible. If their cost gets to close to average, then they can just leave it to the market.
- ZitchDog 6y ago
  It would still increase energy costs for everyone.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    Not if it creates a race to the bottom on energy production. The miner that wins is the miner with the cheapest energy that can scale.
- p_l 6y ago
  Miners are interesting in extracting the cheap energy from the market. There's literally no incentive for any of that benefit to fall to anyone else, and in fact using up low-carbon electricity for cryptocurrency PoW "mining" takes away the benefits of the low-carbon investment from everyone else.
hombre_fatal 6y ago
Show me a list of what you do in a day and I’ll find questionable, selfish uses of cheap energy that don’t benefit society. That’s not a game you want to play. People making noise about Bitcoin energy consumption seem to have little idea how much energy anything else uses kinda like how Americans only compare everything to Hitler because WW2 is all we’re really taught in school. People suddenly act like they care about how others choose to spend their energy when it comes to Bitcoin but not anything else, like the incredible amount of land and energy it took to bring that pound of meat to your table that you only eat because it pleases your tastebuds. Or the tech gadgets you own. Seems convenient to only turn on the ol careface when it’s something you don’t happen to indulge in, yet it makes you blind to the inconsistency of your position. There are a lot of necks on the chopping block long before you get to Bitcoin mining when you start bringing up the metrics that you think damn Bitcoin mining, probably your entire way of life.
- ZitchDog 6y ago
  Whataboutism at its finest. Current energy waste doesn’t justify future energy waste. Especially waste as avoidable as PoW mining.
  - lifty 6y ago
    Folks, please stop with the ‘whataboutism’ argument. We are debating the morality of energy usage so comparative arguments are perfectly fine. You don’t hear every day articles about the huge nr of gaming PCs or gaming consoles sucking energy, but you do hear about bitcoin. I have absolutely no problem with taxing dirty energy or disincentivizing high energy consumption but do it for everything. It’s hypocritical otherwise.
    - Qwertious 6y ago
      Gaming PCs actually improve peoples' lives in a non-zero-sum fashion. I have yet to hear an argument for how bitcoin does the same. >I have absolutely no problem with taxing dirty energy or disincentivizing high energy consumption but do it for everything. It’s hypocritical otherwise. Nobody sane is arguing for conditional carbon pricing (although obviously some will say that carbon pricing should be accompanied by e.g. an explicit transport subsidy for poor people), the "argument" is that while we absolutely should do it, nobody is able to get it passed into law - so while it's the best solution, we can't wait for it and we need to focus on other solutions in the mean time.

whimsicalism 6y ago

What if rather than taxing bitcoin, we just tax carbon usage?

sega_sai 6y ago
I think it is probably good to tax for Co2 production as a way of addressing global warming. I just don't think we should equate bitcoin production with other CO2 producers. I.e. I personally think that the CPU-cycles used for science on HPCs are much more valuable than the bitcoin mining (that's just my opinion though).
- xur17 6y ago
  As you noted, this is just your opinion - are we going to have a person or group that decides what forms of Co2 usage are most "worthy", and adjust taxes accordingly? And let's say we do go down that path - one could certainly make the argument that Bitcoin usage from folks fleeing oppressive regimes are much more worthy than Co2 used to search for aliens or participating in far out HPC research.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    Incentivizing stupid things (like taking on mortgage debt or over-coverage by employer health plan) is already the status quo of the tax code. > Bitcoin usage from folks fleeing oppressive regimes Have bitcoin people (I don't know what else to call the people who want to talk about it all the time) actually convinced themselves that this is a substantial share of bitcoin usage?
    - imtringued 6y ago
      >Have bitcoin people (I don't know what else to call the people who want to talk about it all the time) actually convinced themselves that this is a substantial share of bitcoin usage? It's not because this is literally Monero's value proposition. Why would anyone who wants to flee an oppressive regime publicly announce to their government that they bought Bitcoin in the oppressed country and sold it in a less oppressive country? Information about Monero (don't dare to even think of buying it for speculation) https://www.monero.how/how-does-monero-work-details-in-plain-english https://www.monero.how/how-does-monero-work-details-in-plain...
      - whimsicalism 6y ago
        How do I cash out monero?
      - noobly 6y ago
        >don't dare to even think of buying it for speculation why not?
  - sega_sai 6y ago
    I think, yes, somebody should adjust taxes accordingly. The status quo with existing costs and taxes already effectively establishes some preferences for industries/goals, just implicitely. I think trying to explicitely express those preferences is better. (and it will never be 100% optimal that's for sure)
  - imtringued 6y ago
    This is a terrible argument because the transaction fees on Bitcoin are high enough that anyone who wants to flee an oppressive regime would just buy any other cryptocurrency that isn't suffering from power consumption problems.
xur17 6y ago
I agree, taxing carbon usage is the correct way to go about this. All the ways I can think of taxing Bitcoin directly wouldn't modify the right behaviors. It seems like the options would be: * Tax Bitcoin transactions - decreasing Bitcoin transactions wouldn't decrease energy usage * Tax Bitcoin holdings - this is already accomplished via capital gains taxes, and again, it isn't the holding or usage of Bitcoin that causes the energy usage. It's the fact that Bitcoin has value that causes usage.
- toyg 6y ago
  * Aggressively taxing GPU sales, with exemptions for some sectors and hard monitoring of commercial flows.
  - xur17 6y ago
    Well for 1, that won't affect Bitcoin mining since it hasn't been profitable to mine on a GPU for years, and 2 that will just force mining overseas to locales that don't have this tax (possibly to locales that have less carbon efficient energy sources).
  - gruez 6y ago
    GPUs are made in china/taiwan so good luck with that.
thysultan 6y ago
You tax carbon, country B now has an advantage over you. You loose! Now all your products are produced in country B, you've changed nothing and country B is probably using coal so you're worse off from your initial goal. You loose double!
- jbay808 6y ago
  This is why you sign up for an international treaty that has teeth, ratify it, and back it up with penalties including carbon tariffs.
  - thysultan 6y ago
    Name one international treaty that has ever had teeth where the benefits of non-conformance out weight the teeth. Country B could tarrif country A in return and some countries cannot afford the cost of what that may do to them. So you end up with an international treaty without international conformance or a treaty with no real teeth because the signee's have contributed to it what would allow "them" to game the treaty.
    - jude- 6y ago
      Banning CFCs globally via the Montreal Protocol.
      - thysultan 6y ago
        To put it bluntly China still has CFC emissions.
        jcranmer 6y ago
        And funnily enough, it's still lower than it would have been without the treaty. It's almost as if compliance doesn't have to be perfect to be effective, fancy that.
- galangalalgol 6y ago
pyrale 6y ago
While taxing carbon usage is a good idea, there is something fundamentally wrong with the idea of allocating so much resources, in servers, in power and in space, for what essentially doesn't improve people's lives. That this craze receives so much attention and funding while we face very real existential challenges is maddening.
- dylan604 6y ago
  If the owners of the miners are actually able to turn their coins into wealth that increases their lifestyle, then the mining did improve someone's life. Just because it affects a very small number of people isn't much different than most other "traditional" financial products in exsistence.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    > then the mining did improve someone's life On net, was it welfare enhancing for our species though? If I make $1 off of emissions that cause external harm worth $2 distributed among the 7 billion people on this planet, I'm basically just laundering money through a loophole in what the law today considers to be harming someone else.
    - seibelj 6y ago
      You just keep moving the goalposts by using the most extreme argument you can muster. To be honest the sports industry uses tons of energy in lighting stadiums, streaming them, training players, it goes on and on. Entertainment could be done much more cheaply and effectively. I think society should outlaw sport - so many people are hurt in injuries, and the climate is just utterly demolished through all the energy waste. I can’t see a reason why society would allow sports. It’s ultimately beneficial to a very small amount of owners and their players (who are exploited!) that take all the cream off the top. Completely immoral honestly. The fact society wastes so much thought, effort, energy, focus, when we could instead be going to Mars or training STEM graduates is just criminal.
      - 6y ago
undefined1 6y ago
> we just tax carbon usage? yes please, that would be the holistic approach. externalities like carbon need to be priced in. if it's in the price, then the market will adjust accordingly. a $4 [thing] will jump to $12, people will buy fewer until producers figure out ways to reduce externalities in order to bring the price down. what's free will be overused. price it in to force efficiency and alternative seeking.
Qwertious 6y ago
I agree with every part of that sentence except the "just". People have been trying desperately to do that for 40+ years without success, it's clearly not easy.
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
Can we have a solution that doesn't mean giving the government yet more money.

amelius 6y ago

Yes. New business-models should not be accepted by default, especially if they are disruptive.

mgberlin 6y ago
Reductio ad absurdum.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  I think the argument they made was dumb, but I have never understood why "reductio ad absurdum" is popularly considered a 'fallacy'. It seems like a perfectly logical argumentative technique, designed to point out when a general-statement is actually false in at least one case.
  - erikerikson 6y ago
    A contradiction (A ^ ~A) is the point at which reductio ad absurdum is achieved. It proves that a false assumption was made. A counter example to a universal proposition is but one means of finding a contradiction since the universal allows you to assert the positive. A proof that no examples exist would contradict the statement that some do, just as effectively achieving reductio ad absurdum.
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      What you're saying is not incongruous with what I'm saying. statement leads to contradiction -> "general-statement is actually false in at least one case", so if reductio ad absurdum is defined as achieving a contradiction, then the original statement is false in at least one case.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > I have never understood why "reductio ad absurdum" is popularly considered a 'fallacy'. > It seems like a perfectly logical argumentative technique, It's both. The strong form of the valid argumentative technique involves what amount to a series of valid syllogisms, where each step from the premise to the false conclusion involves a true premise and a logical (and therefore absolute) implication. The false conclusion drawn through valid implication and and a series of premises all but one of which is accepted as true thereby disproves the premise that was in doubt. There is a weaker but still valid (though not in the logical sense) form, where the steps aren't logically necessary but contingently true, with both the intermediate premises and the inferences with high enough likelihood that the conclusion is very likely true if the questioned premise is true. The fallacy has a similar shape but involves intermediate premises that are false or at least unjustified, or intermediate steps that are unwarranted, or consists of steps that are a likely enough individually but which in aggregate are not sufficiently likely to justify the conclusion that the premise is false. Most commonly, the fallacy form rests on what reduces to the reasoning: 1. If A, it is most likely that B 2. Most likely A. 3. Therefore, most likely B.

bluecalm 6y ago

Is BTC really more stupid way to burn resources than making sports cars? F1 racing? Gold mining? There are tons of things the society could do without and be better off. Or maybe not, who decides? Surely it shouldn't be majority as then we will approach Idiocracy level of civilization in no time with Kayne designer flip-flops getting a yay and NASA or a new semi-conductor start-up getting a may. I think there are two problems with crypto currencies: 1) Pollution and carbon emission is not taxed but should be. 2) Regulators allowing the situation where magic token is the only way to do certain kind of trades while competition faces insurmountable mountain of regulation and requirements. If it was possible to make fast money transfer system without hiring the army of lawyers in every country you want to operate then BTC would never gain any traction.

spaced-out 6y ago
> Is BTC really more stupid way to burn resources than making sports cars? F1 racing? Gold mining? Even looking at the usage of graphics cards specifically, is Bitcoin an objectively worse usage of those chips than playing video games? Than running ML models at Facebook?
- imtringued 6y ago
  >is Bitcoin an objectively worse usage of those chips than playing video games? I have done a lot of activities in video games that would require significant CO2 emissions in real life. Potentially millions of tons. So yes, it's much better. There is also a significant population of software developers that picked up programming because of video games. Economic simulation games can help you develop an intuition on how to run a company and how they work without having to risk starting a real company with the potential to fail and ruin you financially. Meanwhile the only worthy claim that Bitcoin has is that it's a middleman for central bank money. Yes it probably funded a lot of good economic activity, but it's the job of the central bank and government to do that. If they didn't fail then Bitcoin would have literally nothing to do.
  - mnouquet 6y ago

thysultan 6y ago

You tax industrial bitcoin miners that you can detect, country A now has an advantage over you. You loose! You actually haven't changed anything it has just moved to another country that is probably using coal. You loose!

imtringued 6y ago
You're making the mistaken assumption that people care about whether Bitcoin is being mined. They only care about it not being mined in their backyard because the low electricity prices are just meant to be a subsidy to local residents. The electricity is being exported to a different location for a fat profit. If that other location is mining Bitcoin you're just giving the local residents more money. It's a pure net loss for Bitcoin miners.
guenthert 6y ago
By that logic we should legalize slavery.
- thysultan 6y ago
  The goal however is not to prevent bitcoin mining, that can be easily achieved, the goal was to reduce. carbon emission, and now they are being emitted by the ton in another country that uses cheap coal to power the them. You've achieved a net negative from the stated goal.
tomatotomato37 6y ago
You say that as if having an industry based around a speculative asset that is more volatile than OTM stock options sucking up a third of your countries energy resources is actually an advantage in some way.

djoldman 6y ago

Capitalism seems to be the best of the possible solutions to the resource utilization problem. Bitcoin seems to be just the latest in a long string of events suggesting that humans are irrational, not necessarily that capitalism or markets are bad. If Bitcoin were processing a zillion transactions at a very very low fee per transaction, I believe few people would be saying it was a waste of resources.

collinexander 6y ago

I do not understand this argument. The fact that bitcoin mining is profitable inherently means that society has already deemed it useful, no? Users would not pay for it if it were not useful. > Everything we do as a society I think should be from time to time evaluated Who should do this evaluation? If not users freely allocating their own resources on the free market, then who? > the incentives should be updated to support things that are consider useful, and to penalize things that we do not. Please define useful. Humans have different needs and value things differently. What is useful to one may not be useful to the other. Any system that picks winners will also pick losers.

whimsicalism 6y ago
> I do not understand this argument. The fact that bitcoin mining is profitable inherently means that society has already deemed it useful, no? Users would not pay for it if it were not useful. Just because there is a market for something doesn't mean that "society" as a whole has decided that it is useful. There's an underground market on taking out hits on someone else, that doesn't mean that "society" has decided that murder is good. > Who should do this evaluation? If not users freely allocating their own resources on the free market, then who? A public body that is democratically constrained. > Please define useful. Welfare enhancing for humanity. Sometimes, a welfare enhancing step will involve losers and winners, you're right. For instance, if one person held $200 billion and the rest of humanity held $1, redistributing that money would almost certainly be a welfare enhancing step given diminishing marginal utility of the $.
- collinexander 6y ago
  Thanks for the reply, it helped me understand where you are coming from. For purposes of discussing bitcoin, it is a global good, and environmental concerns are a global concern. If there is a global market for bitcoin, then taxing bitcoin mining (or other such measures) in one country would just incentivize miners to move to another country. So any such action as you describe would need to be coordinated on a global level among several or all nations. > There's an underground market on taking out hits on someone else, that doesn't mean that "society" has decided that murder is good. Not sure if it is fair to compare bitcoin production to murder. I agree that we need some sort of action for climate change, but I am not sure regulating bitcoin is the answer. We'd have to apply the same subject "utility" measuring stick to _any_ activity that consumes electricity and regulate that. Like others have suggested, maybe taxing certain types of energy usage directly according to their climate change impact would be more effective and would apply evenly to all goods / services without deciding on behalf of individuals what is useful and what is not.

marshmallow_12 6y ago

my point exactly! The only reliable indicator of whether btc is good or bad overall is time. I was of the latter opinion, but what am i compared to the Great Musk? (judging by past experience, the answer is nothing).

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

> Everything we do as a society I think should be from time to time evaluated from a point of view of benefits for society/world and then depending on this evaluation, the incentives should be updated to support things that we consider useful, and to penalize things that we do no This is vague to the point of meaninglessness. On one level, it describes democracy and lawmaking. On another level, it describes communist-style state control of economic factors.

insert_coin 6y ago

You'll be chasing your tail forever. The problem with bitcoin, or the issue to be more honest because it is not really a problem, is that right now there is no "better" use for that electricity than bitcoin. That is the truth you must grapple with. Or as Google would say, the best option for the collection of arguably the most brilliant minds that have ever walked this planet is to work for Google, trying to get people to click more on ads. That that is true, that is your problem and everything else is noise. If you really want an environmental problem to tackle go fight the oil industry killing thousands of animals every day, destroying communities every day, destroying them literally. But, if you insist you must "fix" something about the current crypto boom because somehow they do not adhere to your morality then you should look at everything else but bitcoin and ask yourself, why is the thing I consider moral not attractive to the market?, what can we do differently to make doing something else at least as profitable as mining bitcoin? If you just tax it or try to ban it they'll just move and you'll be a)poorer and b)left without a say.

paulgb 6y ago
> Why is the thing I consider moral not attractive to the market Because markets are notoriously unable to price in externalities on their own. I realize there is a temptation here to throw up your hands and say "well, all human activity emits carbon", especially if you are long bitcoin, but it's a false equivalency. Bitcoin is an energy consumption monster by design, and its difficulty adjustment mechanism neutralizes any attempt at making mining more efficient.
- WanderPanda 6y ago
  Also its limited market cap and halving schedule will probably eventually phase out the energy consumption. Provided people are not willing to pay hundreds or thousands of (current day) dollars for transactions. Edit: And if they are willing to pay that much that should be a clear sign of the value provided by the network Edit2: And wether this will also phase out Bitcoins security model will be very interesting to observe across the next 10-20 years (depending on when btc will hit its market cap threshold in real terms)
- 6y ago

kortilla 6y ago

> My take on this is the following. Everything we do as a society I think should be from time to time evaluated from a point of view of benefits for society/world and then depending on this evaluation, the incentives should be updated to support things that we consider useful, and to penalize things that we do not. Who is “we” and why to “we” get to decide instead of “they”? This approach to governing only sounds good when you’re not in the sights of those with the legislative pen. In Iran, “we” (the government) have decided that “they” (gay people) should not be able to live openly gay.

sega_sai 6y ago
I am not an anarchist or libertarian, so I believe in democratic governements. And I do believe it's their job to establish rules/regulations/laws that benefits society as a whole. Obviously and important point is the government must be democratically elected, to be able to control/revert things if the governement screws up.
- solosoyokaze 6y ago
  So do you admit that to an anarchist or libertarian that Bitcoin does have value? The US military is the #1 user of energy on the planet. I definitely consider them a net negative to humanity, yet they're what's propping up the same neo-liberal democracy you think should be establishing the rules. Is that an acceptable use of energy to you? I think Bitcoin is an excellent use of energy because it's at least a potential alternative to our current governmental systems. A small piece of the puzzle but a prerequisite to change none the less.

SubiculumCode 6y ago

bitcoin is now significantly contributing to an existential threat. Its not alone of course...most things we do daily do so. However, I wish it wasn't such useless work.

kortilla 6y ago

Do we not realize the massive incentives Bitcoin is providing for energy production? If we could just agree to tax carbon emissions (the thing most of the world agrees is bad), then we should encourage this behavior as much as possible. We’re creating a wonderful scenario where miners would be investing in as much cheap energy as possible. If their cost gets to close to average, then they can just leave it to the market.

ZitchDog 6y ago
It would still increase energy costs for everyone.
- kortilla 6y ago
  Not if it creates a race to the bottom on energy production. The miner that wins is the miner with the cheapest energy that can scale.
p_l 6y ago
Miners are interesting in extracting the cheap energy from the market. There's literally no incentive for any of that benefit to fall to anyone else, and in fact using up low-carbon electricity for cryptocurrency PoW "mining" takes away the benefits of the low-carbon investment from everyone else.

hombre_fatal 6y ago

Show me a list of what you do in a day and I’ll find questionable, selfish uses of cheap energy that don’t benefit society. That’s not a game you want to play. People making noise about Bitcoin energy consumption seem to have little idea how much energy anything else uses kinda like how Americans only compare everything to Hitler because WW2 is all we’re really taught in school. People suddenly act like they care about how others choose to spend their energy when it comes to Bitcoin but not anything else, like the incredible amount of land and energy it took to bring that pound of meat to your table that you only eat because it pleases your tastebuds. Or the tech gadgets you own. Seems convenient to only turn on the ol careface when it’s something you don’t happen to indulge in, yet it makes you blind to the inconsistency of your position. There are a lot of necks on the chopping block long before you get to Bitcoin mining when you start bringing up the metrics that you think damn Bitcoin mining, probably your entire way of life.

ZitchDog 6y ago
Whataboutism at its finest. Current energy waste doesn’t justify future energy waste. Especially waste as avoidable as PoW mining.
- lifty 6y ago
  Folks, please stop with the ‘whataboutism’ argument. We are debating the morality of energy usage so comparative arguments are perfectly fine. You don’t hear every day articles about the huge nr of gaming PCs or gaming consoles sucking energy, but you do hear about bitcoin. I have absolutely no problem with taxing dirty energy or disincentivizing high energy consumption but do it for everything. It’s hypocritical otherwise.
  - Qwertious 6y ago
    Gaming PCs actually improve peoples' lives in a non-zero-sum fashion. I have yet to hear an argument for how bitcoin does the same. >I have absolutely no problem with taxing dirty energy or disincentivizing high energy consumption but do it for everything. It’s hypocritical otherwise. Nobody sane is arguing for conditional carbon pricing (although obviously some will say that carbon pricing should be accompanied by e.g. an explicit transport subsidy for poor people), the "argument" is that while we absolutely should do it, nobody is able to get it passed into law - so while it's the best solution, we can't wait for it and we need to focus on other solutions in the mean time.