The difference between crypto and things like agriculture or transportation is obvious. People need food and transportation. If crypto was eliminated entirely tomorrow, on average, no one would suffer - some would lose relative wealth but others would gain relative wealth. Unlike conventional financial markets even, it's hard to argue crypto provides any kind of incentive for efficiency.
Indeed, if crypto mining was punishingly taxed but crypto itself continued, almost no one would suffer, including most crypto holders.
Furthermore, millions would be affected if bitcoin were to go offline tomorrow. Particularly people living in authoritarian states[1], or people who do not have access to traditional banking services.
[0] https://twitter.com/gladstein/status/1414065840157347840?s=2... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jul/31/out-of-co...
Not to defend the cruise lines, but that quote appears bogus. The tweet you cite refers to a "carbon footprint", in response to a quote about particulate emissions (using sulfur dioxide as an example).
This [1] puts total cruise line CO2 emissions in 2017 (first source I picked, but I imagine the number won't have changed much) at 21K tons, whereas a recent Reuters article [2] put Bitcoin at 22,000K tons of CO2.
If the above data is correct, then Bitcoin is responsible for more than 1000x as many CO2 emissions as cruise ships.
[1] https://www.tourismdashboard.org/explore-the-data/cruise-shi...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/how-big-is-bitcoins-carbo...
Another option would be continually adjusting the block reward to not over subsidize mining.
The amount issued doesn't change, but the expected value of a number of hashes changes significantly.
The issue is that there is now too much electricity & therefore carbon emissions being spent on security the bitcoin blockchain. If the bitcoin community could adjust this down for slightly lower 51% attack defense they might be able to avoid the pressure from outside groups.
But the bitcoin community has shown it's self unable to make changes or establish any consensus outside of what is already believed.
But regardless by allowing transaction outside of state control, crypto may indeed help some hard bitten business people but simultaneously helps a vast array of criminals, from ransomware gangs to corrupt third world officials expatriating bribes and theft.
Nobody here is trying to stop people in authoritarian states from using crypto.
Bringing up the authoritarian states is just a strawman.
I agree that a general carbon tax would be better, and as a bonus, there's various progress toward just that around the world. But I'd find the argument you're making more compelling as a rebut to focus on cryptocurrency carbon footprint if the players in the cyrptocurrency industry were forcefully lobbying for general carbon taxes. Are there any examples of that?
Globally?
A way to enforce this is tariffs.
What's the solution? We should not tax all things equal.
In a perfect market, a global carbon tax would be excellent. Unfortunately we do not live in (anything resembling) a perfect market.
So what? These whataboutisms add nothing to the conversation.
People aren't going to stop caring about the carbon costs of crypto because other industries also suck. Think about it as an adoption blocker -- if your particular tech fetish can't address an issue that many, many people care about it is destined to be usurped by something that can. Would be awesome if the 'crypto bulls' would expend as much energy into ways to fix the carbon problem as they do arguing it doesn't matter.
Crazy mandated ethanol blending.
Hydrogen "superhighways"
etc
Yes, definitely. I could afford paying 50% tax on flights. Most people in the world could not pay 50% more for their transportation.
The problem with a carbon tax is that it values all emissions equally. But on a global scale, some emissions are more essential than others. (Food, shelter, transportation to work etc)
Example: India vs Us carbon emissions per Capita is 4 times higher than India GDP vs Us GDP per Capita.
Any price increase on carbon will be felt 4x more by an Indian than by an American.
Subsidize the poor as we've always done.
Market value says very little about true value of goods and services globally. Why should we let it decide how to prioritize the little carbon emission we can afford?
Make universally applied carbon taxes across all industries and let the market sort it out. I'm a crypto bull, and fully support greening our energy economy. Advocating taxing energy consumption based on use is a recipe for corrupt insider dealing and political favoritism.