This seems like a fair solution that could have the same impact - if the pollution tax is high enough and the mining profits are low enough then mining would no longer be profitable. At a minimum it at least makes sure people are "cleaning up after themselves" by paying to mitigate the damage they cause

Exactly, and then its not limited to just bitcoin, but any process that creates pollution (coal power, dirty manufacturing, forest removal, etc).

If pollution stops being free, the market will finally be incentivized to reduce it.

This is totally how I feel, and it's even worse than that - we're still subsidizing fossil fuels, so we're not only NOT taxing the pollution, we're actually helping to make it cheaper for companies to do. I think step 1 should be stopping all the subsidies.

I haven't actually seen the numbers before but this is pretty absurd:

https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/Glo...

> Globally, subsidies remained large at $4.7 trillion (6.3 percent of global GDP) in 2015 and are projected at $5.2 trillion (6.5 percent of GDP) in 2017

> coal and petroleum together account for 85 percent of global subsidies

Absolutely insane. And people sometimes argue that renewables are only viable due to subsidies.

Unfortunately, that won't work. Bitcoin is designed so that material/energy approximately equal in value to mining revenue is wasted. What you waste it on is ultimately irrelevant.

Bitcoin can be designed however it wants, that doesn't magically grant it value.

It's value is only based upon how much value people ascribe to it. And for that, I don't really care how what people ascribe to it, so long as they pay for the pollution they produce in the process.