Carbon tax everything, why limit yourself to cryptocurrencies?

Exactly. To be precise, carbon tax energy, so that everything that uses energy needs to factor carbon emissions in their costs. The whole point of carbon taxes is to internalise the cost of carbon emissions into everything, to put the market to work on better alternatives. Limiting carbon taxes to any particular service or product would be a market distortion and would defeat the purpose.

If carbon taxes hurt cryptocurrency mining and their value collapses in favour of less-energy-intensive digital payment platforms, that would be great. If on the other hand cryptocurrencies innovate towards less-energy-intensive methods of mining and their value continues to soar, that would also be great.

Carbon tax carbon emitting energy.

Don't tax solar panels, that would be short sighted and regressive.

Of course, I meant applying a carbon (i.e. "carbon-dependent") tax at the point of energy production, not on energy production itself in abstract. I can see how it could give that impression by how I phrased my second paragraph in terms of energy-intensiveness rather than carbon-intensiveness, but my intention was to abstract away which specific source of energy each industry made use of, assuming a unified and homogeneous electrical grid.

Ironically, much that I am critical of criptocurrencies' energy expenditure, they may be more adaptable to carbon taxation than conventional digital transaction networks (SEPA, Visa, etc.) because they are in fact more centralised in their energy consumption. A cryptocurrency mining outfit could somewhat easily become self-sufficient in terms of energy relying on wind power or solar power, becoming immune to carbon taxation (and innocent in terms of carbon emissions). The energy consumption from conventional payment networks, even though it is not as inherently energy-expensive as cryptocurrencies, is so massively distributed across countries and businesses at multiple levels that they could not simply go non-carbon overnight.

Good points.

I felt the need to be pendantic on that point because I see a lot of lazy accounting around energy emmission harms. It is unfortunately common for people to write about the harms from an amount of energy consumption without considering what type of energy production is actually used.

I've read several articles in the past month that essentially had the lazy incorrect math such as: Activity Foo uses X MWh, X MWh is Y% of total energy production. Burning fuels emits Z tons of CO2 and W amount of other harmful polutants. Therefore Activity Foo is responsible for Y% of Z CO2 and Y% of W pollution.

Becoming a pet peeve of mine.

Bitcoin (~39%) has about double the proportion of green energy usage as global energy consumption (~17%)! If these numbers are accurate, it seems like cryptomining should be some-amount-less concerning than the broad energy economy in terms of greening our infrastructure.

Gaming uses more energy than Bitcoin.

Shall we place carbon taxes on gaming too?

How about a carbon tax on Gold and Silver, and on the whole of the banking system, which also consume more energy than Bitcoin?

In any case, feel free to contact the Bitcoin CEO and discuss your ideas on how to implement those taxes.

Yes, carbon taxes everywhere so we can solve this stupid problem and focus on other things.

Except you're wrong and all those things consume far less power than bitcoin. That's the entire point.

No they don't.

Gaming is the sole demand for all consoles and GPUs produced in the world. Those devices alone consume a lot more energy than Bitcoin miners (by about an order of magnitude).

Gold and Silver are extremely expensive to mine energy-wise.

The banking system is amazingly expensive to run. Not only it requires lots of buildings and transportation for millions of workers, it also requires a lot of computing resources to be run -- without even guaranteeing you can withdraw your money from banks, and with your money there being corroded due to inflation.

Bitcoin, in comparison, is actually pretty "green" once you consider the value it provides: a distributed ledger with 10+ years of operation and no flaws/attacks detected, meaning it's the safest store of value known to mankind, while not being under any control of any organization or government.

In any case, even if your point that Bitcoin is "evil" as it requires "too much energy to run" is true, what are you going to do about it? Feel free to short Bitcoin in a futures market, and leave all your wealth allocated in assets associated to fiat currencies.

> Gaming is the sole demand for all consoles and GPUs

Well, no, mining cryptocurrency is a significant source of GPU demand; GPUs also have non-gaming, non-cryptocurrency utility.

cryptocurrency mining is mostly done using ASICs

> cryptocurrency mining is mostly done using ASICs

Bitcoin mining is mostly only effective with ASICs, but cryptocurrency is more than just Bitcoin.

Cryptocurrency mining is mostly about Bitcoin.

Bitcoin has maintained at least 60% market dominance year-over-year since its inception (averaging 75% all time dominance). Ethereum (which can be profitably mined using GPUs) has currently 15% dominance, with most of the other top 15 coins not being PoW (except for Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash and Dogecoin, from which only Bitcoin Cash can be mined either with ASICs or GPUs). Also, Ethereum is in the process of moving to PoS.

> Cryptocurrency mining is mostly about Bitcoin.

What cryptocurrency mining is mostly about is entirely irrelevant to either the claim that GPUs, and the power thet consume, are used exclusively for gaming or the counterclaim that, on the contrary, significant sources of GPU use outside of gaming exist, including cryptocurrency mining. It doesn't matter if the coins for which GPU mining is viable are a much smaller share, by whatever measure you care to use, of the cryptocurrency space than Bitcoin, what matters is whether or not mining them (among other non-gaming uses) is significant in the demand for and use of GPUs.

Which it is, which is why Nvidia has recently taken steps to actively cripple mining on some gaming cards so that thet can actually reach the gaming market.

(GPGPU is also a thing, and non-gaming display acceleration; the idea that GPUs are only used for gaming is ridiculous even beyond the cryptocurrency applications.)

Also: how many gamers are there compared to how many crypto traders? It's not a meaningful comparison.

You should compare Bitcoin to some aspect of finance that is similar sized, e.g. a single bank with similar transaction volumes, or something like the Bank Of England CHAPS network, which has about half the number of transactions, but 30 times the total transaction value. https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/payment-and-settlement/chaps

We definitely need a heavy carbon tax on any energy production that has negative externalities. I don't care if its cryptocurrency, video gaming, datacenters or dryers, if it consumes a lot of electricity we need to incentivise people to use less of it or use energy from sources that have smaller carbon footprints. Same should be done for cars.

It would be really tough to enforce for the bigger ones. You can mine a block without revealing your location. You only need a connection to the internet through a vpn. It would be a game of whack-a-mole for enforcers.

It's a good idea though.