any infrastructure dedicated to the mining of crypto is opportunity cost. Even if you use renewables, that energy could instead replace traditional energy sources which could be turned off.

This is an example of Jevon's paradox, namely that increases in efficiency or quality are offset by increases in demand. It's one of the reasons why we have globally barely made a dent when it comes to the increase of renewables as a total share of energy consumed despite the fact that the capacity has increased pretty much exponentially.

This is made even worse by the fact that green infrastructure itself necessarily often consumes non-green sources, in particular during construction.

> This is an example of Jevon's paradox, namely that increases in efficiency or quality are offset by increases in demand.

That is kinda the main point of a carbon tax... it is to make carbon usage LESS efficient, since you have to pay an extra tax in addition to the cost of the energy itself. Ideally, the money gained from the carbon tax is then redistributed to everyone equally, and that money can then be used for whatever you want.

> Ideally, the money gained from the carbon tax is then redistributed to everyone equally

i dont think that's a good idea - the redistribution does not decrease carbon.

I think the correct carbon tax is the amount of money it takes to fully remove the carbon emitted (at current tech levels). This pot of money is then used to actually remove carbon.

> that energy could instead replace traditional energy sources which could be turned off.

This is not true. Often, renewables aren't available to some locations but abundantly available in others. Other times, some people buy electricity from renewable providers and others don't.

With 50-75% of Bitcoin mining being renewable, one thing is clear - it's helped the adoption of renewables and made them cheaper.

"...helped the adoption of renewables and made them cheaper." How so?

Miners are chasing profit margin so they'll use whatever's cheapest. If that's renewable where some of them are, so be it. And if everyone else start reducing use of coal and that becomes cheap, miners who exploits that to derive higher profit margin will grow faster I imagine.

I would attribute growth and economies of scale that renewables have achieved to renewable proponents, industries, government subsidies and loan prorams. Crypto miners are energy consumers and some of them use renewable energy. But how do we go from there to miners being some kind of force for good in this context?

It has helped the adoption of renewables in the same sense how polluting the local river has helped the anti-pollution industry. This is broken window logic. The reason bitcoin uses renwables in the first place is because much of it happens in China where misguided state projects and subsidies have created excess capacity. It makes for a pretty decent joke though, the libertarian currency de jure runs on the misguided state planning of the Communist party of China.

Any excess capacity spent on crypto currency is waste. It could go to scientific computing projects, it could simply not be used. The chips for the equipment (we are in a global chip shortage) could go to something that actually contributes to the real economy.

It may not necessarily be the same as "broken window" logic. Consider a world where no one had ever broken a window. There wouldn't be any window repair people. The first time a window breaks, we have a new opportunity to fill a need. Necessity is the mother of invention. The exponential demand for energy creates more pressure to develop more efficient renewable energy generation methods that probably wouldn't be incentivized by a constant amount of energy use. It's a risky bet, but it might be the only way to spur humanity into action.

We just need to increase carbon taxes at the same rate that renewables become affordable.

it's a complete non-argument you can use it to justify literally anything. Dropping atomic bombs on Japan, hey construction boom! Covid-19, pharma industry innovation! Do you turn the heater on and leave the fridge open to accelerate humanity's fight against climate change? No.

We have about a few thousand pressing issues that spur us on to push for renewables as it is, we don't need to waste energy on purpose.

> We have about a few thousand pressing issues that spur us on to push for renewables as it is, we don't need to waste energy on purpose.

Crypto mining is one of those issues, we don't have a choice. Your argument reduces to "if we had no issues pushing us, we would have enough issues pushing us" which is a contradiction.

That’d only partially solve it: we don’t want to waste renewable power which could be going to something of value.

You are moving the goalposts. If Bitcoin miners pay for renewable energy, they are no longer harming the environment.

Who are you to dictate what someone does with energy they pay for? Just because you do not like what they do, doesn't mean you can ban it if it's not harming you.

There is no evidence that Bitcoin's usage of renewables is preventing others from paying for renewables too.

No, that's not moving goalposts. If Bitcoin miners waste renewable energy, the users of energy in general move to renewable later.

If everybody is using renewable energy exclusivity for everything, is still wastage. PoW only work by adjusting it's consumption upwards to create scarcity, e.g. one block per 10 minutes. At that point we will be useless solar panels, covering land uselessly, etc, etc. Bitcoin is arbitrary scalable wastage to create arbitrary, artificial scarcity.

The point is: Energy wasted is energy wasted. Bitcoin will eat everything till the point where some external factor prevents further expansion, e.g. how much are we willing to hurt the environment and ourselfs in exchange of the block reward. The person with the highest threshold wins.

It's not really not complicated. This is literally the last scene of the hitchiker, where they plan to kill all trees, so they can use the leaves for currency. The success of bitcoin makes be loose all hope in humanity.

"Waste". The parent's point is who are you to say? Maybe we should closely audit your energy usage and ban those activities we find objectionable.

Authoritarianism isn't an ideal outcome.

They explained the difference for you in the second paragraph: unless any other system, proof-of-waste systems are uniquely bad because the amount of power used isn't linked to any sort of useful activity — it's just a function of how much competing hash capacity there is in the network. Even something like heating your house to 78℉ is a lower category of waste because you won't increase that to 120℉ or start heating the neighborhood park just because your neighbors matched you at 78℉.

This is also in keeping with tons of existing regulations: you can't buy a monitor which uses 2,000W because various governments have caps for how inefficient you're allowed to be. That's far from perfect — or sufficient to deal with the climate change crisis — but it's not like it's some sort of unprecedented imposition on personal freedoms to cap inefficiency.

> isn't linked to any sort of useful activity

so you made a judgement on what an activity is useful. There's no such objective judgement possible, since usefulness is a subjective matter.

Therefore, pricing carbon correctly (and thus pricing electricity correctly) is the way to provide all parties the full information on cost, and each would decide how best to use their own money to buy energy.

> > isn't linked to any sort of useful activity

> so you made a judgement on what an activity is useful.

No, I understand how the system works. Bitcoin uses power as a function of the aggregate network capacity — it must to avoid a 51% attack — and that means that the power usage not coupled to the number of transactions being processed: even if Bank of America wasn't already many orders of magnitude cheaper, they wouldn't buy a mainframe they didn't have work for just to stay tied with Wells Fargo. It's the computational equivalent of Luftansa flying all of those thousands of empty flights.

> Therefore, pricing carbon correctly (and thus pricing electricity correctly) is the way to provide all parties the full information on cost, and each would decide how best to use their own money to buy energy.

This would help considerably but it's not enough: we need to radically pivot the global energy system and that will involve things like shifting where major power consumption occurs (e.g. ideally things like blast furnaces or smelters would be located near sources of hydro, geothermal, nuclear, etc. power) and getting everyone to convert to things like EVs en masse.

Unfortunately those decisions take a longer timeframe than shipping a container full of cryptocurrency mining hardware to wherever the current cheapest source of power is. That adds a lot of noise to the pricing signals we need to drive business decisions, especially for major capital expenditures which require years of planning. It doesn't help if, say, Iceland adds 10GW of clean geothermal power but the price stays the same or even goes up because a bunch of miners showed up the week after it went online.

>"Waste". The parent's point is who are you to say?

You didn't read or you didn't understand what I said. It's waste because it's designed to create a scarcity. Not by the judgement of anyone of the usefullness. The power bitcoin uses is strictly a function of how much power is available, not what service is provides. Double the number of transaction rate: No change in power usage. Half the price of electricity: Double the power usage. This strange lack of connection between utility and resource usage makes it wastage. It might be hard to grasp, because there is nothing unlike it.

> Maybe we should closely audit your energy usage and ban those activities we find objectionable.

As stated above the energy consumption of bitcoin is not bad because the a decentralised ledger is objectionable, but because it's a controller (in the sense of control theory) tuned to make energy a scare resource. This is a scheme equivalent to poison every aquifer in the world to profit from the scarcity of water. It's doesn't matter if scarcity of water is useful for some apparatus, or if the task the apparatus performs is objectionable. If you want to monitor my non bitcoin energy-usage demonstrates you didn't understand is difference between utilisation of water for the sake of using it and for the sake of wasting it. Usage can be made more efficient, and new resources can cure a lack of water. In the case of wastage the wastage can by definion not become more efficient and new resources will not make it last any longer, but simply call for an increase the rate of poisoning.

Even if bitcoin had any use case besides randomware, which it doesn't, even if it did solve every problem the financial world had, it would see be wasteful. While most other technology becomes more efficient with further use cases, PoW becomes more wastefull, for reasons state above. The only way to make it more efficient is to make energy less aviable to humanity, as such are the perverse incentives of this scheme.

> Who are you to dictate what someone does with energy they pay for?

IMO this is the strongest case for a carbon tax - it respects individual freedom.

You want to cruise in your diesel-sucking massive launch? You want to take your personal 747 out for a joy ride to the Bahamas?

Fill your boots, do what you want without any guilt - your environmental impact has been offset by your higher fuel bills.

No, I'm recognizing that the economy is connected. Many of the best renewables — especially those which are available 24x7 — are things like geothermal or hydropower which have finite capacity, and non-trivial ramp-up time.

Proof-of-waste systems like Bitcoin are uniquely inefficient due to the way the network adjusts to increase the difficulty — an aluminum smelter uses a ton of power but they don't build new ones in excess of market demand for aluminum — and they're easy to ship around the world. That means that demand always goes up and any time some place has cheaper power for a non-trivial period of time someone will probably ship a bunch of mining hardware there.

This is a problem because right now we need the entire global economy to electrify as soon as possible. That means things like industrial processes need to be relocated to cheap sources of clean electricity because you can't just plunk a coal power plant next door, etc. and there are also challenges with peak power demand requiring upgrades to electrical grids or other equipment. Having so much power dedicated to something which has never found a useful purpose is a source of friction we don't have time for.

> Who are you to dictate what someone does with energy they pay for?

A member in a democratic society that doesn't give you a fundamental right to mine bitcoins.

> Just because you do not like what they do, doesn't mean you can ban it if it's not harming you.

Believe it or not, this is not how society works.

>> Just because you do not like what they do, doesn't mean you can ban it if it's not harming you.

> Believe it or not, this is not how society works.

and yet, we are now unbanning a lot of activities that some people dislike - such as smoking pot. the OP's point is that not everyone is in consensus about the energy use of PoW being a waste.

That solves nothing, it only lines politician’s pockets. The cost of electricity is the deterrent currently, which is why you don’t see everyone mining. If you want to make electricity cost more, it’ll “solve” more than crypto mining, it’ll just make mostly poor people have a lower standard of life.

The best carbon fee proposals refund the money to taxpayers, equal amount per person. If you emit less CO2 than average, as most poor people do, then you come out ahead.

It doesn’t make much sense, how would money be guaranteed to come back after making its way to through the government and back? The cost of electricity already functions more efficiently; don’t take money out of peoples pockets so you don’t need to give it back.

A pigovian tax by insurance would work better, I definitely think environmental protection is needed but politicians will just use the money they get in nefarious ways.

How can you guarantee that people will get their tax refunds? Their social security payments? The carbon rebate is easier than that, since everybody gets the same amount. Don't even pass the money through the general fund, where it's accessible to politicians.

Collection can be simple too. Charge at major sources like coal mines and oil wells, and the fee gets rolled into the prices of everything downstream.

Wouldn't all the miners(and every other carbon intensive industry) just move to a place without a carbon tax?

Yes. That's why you need big players - like the US, EU - to use leverage to force the rest of the world to follow suit. But the change has to start somewhere.

All a carbon tax does is punish consumers, while making crypto miners make less profit. The amount of tax it would take to make crypto mining less profitable basically is an imposition of austerity.