Even an extremely efficient car uses a ton of energy to move around. New cars often have engines in the multiple hundred kW range, which is insane compared to any other appliance you own.
If fossil fuels were taxed properly, that would discourage using/wasting fossil fuels. But please don't tax based on what you feel is acceptable usage was wasteful usage, cause the atmosphere does not care if the CO2 came from kerosene on a plane bringing tourists to vacation, or if it was used to power the ambulance that brings you to the hospital.
But when we tax all fossil fuel uses equally and heavily, I'm sure the ambulances will still drive around cause they save lives, but weekend trips to the other side of the Atlantic will be a thing of the past.
"Wasteful" = "using more resources than it genuinely needs". We're saying very, very similar things here. I don't find the difference between them significant enough to be worth arguing about honestly. I'm just suggesting an alternative that I think might be more viable, but if we go with your proposal, that's enough progress to make me happy.
The latter is roughly equivalent to the US's CAFE standards and leads to gaming the system by manufacturers.
The former is much harder to game - either you use the gasoline (and paid the tax at purchase) or you don't. Doesn't matter (to the tax authority) what car you drive - only how much gasoline you burn.
Are you going to create a commission which decides what a "genuine resource usage" is?
Uhm... if it's necessary, sure? I already suggested a starting point: the current state-of-the-art provides a baseline to compare against. If we need a commission to gauge this, then sure, how about have an agency like the EPA or DoE figure it out. We can even give a good name to products that meet high energy-efficiency standards... like, I don't know, maybe "Energy Star"?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/06/13/report...
meanwhile, gold stripmines the soil in poor countries, where children die in mines, while the loot is carried off to the west, AND it uses much more energy than bitcoin.
and bitcoin is technology to replace, at least partially, those two things. And like a car versus a bike, it does so with more utility: better to store, better to transport, better to divide into units.
and it can use energy anywhere, whereas banks and gold mining have to use it where there is gold and people to use banks, which means that energy for these uses is actually newly made for this purpose. Bitcoin often and increasingly uses energy that was made, but not used: 1/3 of all global energy production is produced and then just seeps into the metaphorical ground, which is necessary as a network safety measure. Bitcoin miners put their ASICs there and take it, meaning no additional energy was produced and the opposite of waste occured: it prevented waste. Not to speak of the fact that bitcoin incentivizes green energy, because solar and wind are problematic for everyday use (bc you're so highly dependent on the whims of nature). Bitcoin is not your dryer; it can run whenenever it happens to be there, thereby increasing the efficiency of renewables massively.
This whole argument suffers from a lot of ignorance about what's actually going on here.
It seems fairly utopian to me, given that wars existed on the gold standard too, and if they were less destructive it was for want of technology. But maybe if I held Bitcoin I’d be more inclined to believe it was the solution to world peace.
Also, it's trivial to freeze BTC accounts too; that just means controlling the network - which in the even of a physical occupation is going to be obvious anyhow.
Then there's the fact that occupiers may be able to engage in a 50% attack (assuming occupation is large scale and impacts many miners) - and may well force usage of their fork of the chain, even in absence of a global 50% control, making the whole thing rather tricky to predict.
Let's hope it never comes to that, but I'm certainly not convinced BTC would be immune from a physically occupying force's influence. I bet it depends hugely on the details of that occupation.
Or we ban heating in houses because you can just wear warmer clothes instead.
Note that I didn't claim it's easy to come up with a good way to do this. You might have to settle for some partial progress. But that doesn't mean I'm putting up a strawman either.
I would actually support this for urban areas. I wish more people would see that this would significantly benefit everyone.
If a technology is objectively more wasteful than it could be it should be penalized, and as we move forward with newer/better/more efficient technologies the standards bar should raise with them.
For anyone who has further concerns: let’s imagine that we have a magic calculator that tells us the total and complete cost of anything, from the true local socioeconomic impact of extracting materials to the CO2 emitted in production to the cumulative future cost of disposing of it. And that we could use that as the measuring stick.
E.g. a quick google finds this: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22256-3 or this https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952 - so let's say bitcoin uses 150 TWh in 2021. Here's another one: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
By contrast, various sources list global datacenter power usage as "just" ~200TWh (e.g. https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-str... or https://energyinnovation.org/2020/03/17/how-much-energy-do-d...) and it's likely the average datacenter isn't as reliant on coal power plants in china as bitcoin is, so I'd say it's at least plausible that bitcoin by itself emits as much if not more CO2 than all the worlds datacenters combined. Let alone just teeny singular sites like youtube.
Of course, if you're going to include client power consumption, that's a different story... Then again, a youtube video is an actual desirable product in and of itself, whereas a bitcoin transaction is not; it's just a way to (perhaps in the future) acquire something desirable.
Ideally we'd price carbon conservatively (i.e. higher than necessary), and then this would all be a moot point. However, by the time we get all the relevant countries on board with that, and get democrats and republicans to sufficiently cooperate (even harder), the universe's heat death is likely nigh, so perhaps in the interim it's reasonable to just outright ban exceptionally pointless wasteful activities such as bitcoin mining.
In any case, to reiterate my counterpoint (which you have not disputed, but given your ad hominem I assume you don't agree with): estimating at least an order of magnitude impact of bitcoin isn't that hard, so your suggestion that it's hopeless to compare somebody streaming gangnam style with a bitcoin transaction is unfounded. One can compare bitcoins environmental impacts with other environmental impacts.
Why does he have a "vested interest" in Bitcoin failing? Are you sure you know what "vested" means? :-)
Do you mean to say that he wants Bitcoin to fail because he's bitter?
We will see if Bitcoin is relevant in 5-10 years from now. My guess: it will be a niche thing with a very narrow set of uses.
If anything, you sound a bit like a Bitcoin supporter (maybe an investor?), so you sound more like someone who has a <<vested>> interest in it succeeding.
definition: 'a personal reason for involvement in an undertaking or situation'
The personal reason here may well be bitterness, but that was your word not mine.
If, in 2011, we were discussing what bitcoin succeeding looks like, I would have said that if it was worth 5 figures (and I would have meant low 5 figures, so $10,000) it had succeeded. If, alongside the value, my parents knew what it was (not through me) then it would have succeeded.
In truth I would also have expected it to take closer to 20 years to reach that point. So in my mind it has succeeded. It is still around over a decade later, it surpassed the dollar value I would have assigned success even without this latest runup. There are few people in the world, who have internet acccess, who have not heard of it.
So I disagree with you, because on metrics I would have measured it with in 2011 it has met and exceeded them. Therefore it has succeeded already. I have skin in the game, so perhaps I have a vested interest, but only in as much as it would make me more money than it already has. And I dont need more money. If it went to zero tomorrow my life would not change.
This is not a fair comparison. Did you count all the banking services and data centers? Also, cryptocurrencies provide features which banks can't provide, e.g., independence on a third party.
I mean, not that this kind of ban is likely to happen; it's probably not even a good idea (unless we can be much more specific about what counts as wasteful, and what counts as comparable existing technology, and have a way to make that simple, please no patent prior art search 2.0 nonsense).