Re:Should Ethereum be okay with enshrining more things in th...
by someplaceguy on Saturday September 30, 2023 @03:21PM
(#37718811)
> "if you don't like me wasting electricity you should institute a carbon tax"
As I mentioned, no "wasting" is happening. The "wasting" is all in your head. I can assure you that every watt is being used to its capacity (up to the unavoidable physical and other loss limits, like any electricity use).
> is the free-market equivalent
No, it isn't. That's not what "free-market" means. A carbon tax would have to be enforced by a government or government-regulated authority, it wouldn't be done in a free market. Free markets do not price externalities such as carbon emissions.
> The truth or falsehood of the statement is irrelevant, it's politically ludicrous.
Well, I don't think that's true, but even if it were, if you keep blaming Bitcoin and similarly singling out other uses of energy as the culprits of carbon emissions, it would keep being politically ludicrous, because there are always people and businesses who would be affected by the demonization of such uses and would feel personally (or corporately) attacked.
Which means that the only real, efficient and fair way of reducing carbon emissions is to tax them equally. Whatever businesses (or other energy uses) stop being lucrative and go bankrupt, are exactly the businesses that should go bankrupt, because they are not sustainable (as long as the carbon emissions are taxed at an environmentally sustainable level and not more).
If you're going to reduce emissions, and practically all developed countries are working to do it AFAIK, then it should be done this way and I don't see why right-wingers or anyone else should object to such a plan, rather than what is really ludicrous, which is to arbitrarily demonize uses of energy, one by one, until you reach a critical mass of users who eventually are going to say "enough is enough".
Now, if your argument is that right-wing governments are in principle opposed to reduce carbon emissions, that's a completely different argument and again, it has nothing to do with Bitcoin. It's a political issue alone and the blame-shifting is not going to solve it.
> that means that avoiding spending excessive electrical energy on inefficient vanity projects is a matter of personal responsibility.
See, here are the problems with that argument:
1. There's no "excessive" electrical energy being used.
2. The project is not "inefficient".
3. It's not a "vanity" project.
4. It's not a matter of personal responsibility either. Once again, that's blame shifting.
Personal responsibility in the way you are imagining it is not going to solve this problem.
It'd be way, way, way, way easier to actually influence a right-wing government to solve it, once and for all, in the most efficient way possible, for the entire population than to change the behavior of hundreds of millions of people (especially by writing non-convincing arguments on the Internet).
As I mentioned, no "wasting" is happening. The "wasting" is all in your head. I can assure you that every watt is being used to its capacity (up to the unavoidable physical and other loss limits, like any electricity use).
> is the free-market equivalent
No, it isn't. That's not what "free-market" means. A carbon tax would have to be enforced by a government or government-regulated authority, it wouldn't be done in a free market. Free markets do not price externalities such as carbon emissions.
> The truth or falsehood of the statement is irrelevant, it's politically ludicrous.
Well, I don't think that's true, but even if it were, if you keep blaming Bitcoin and similarly singling out other uses of energy as the culprits of carbon emissions, it would keep being politically ludicrous, because there are always people and businesses who would be affected by the demonization of such uses and would feel personally (or corporately) attacked.
Which means that the only real, efficient and fair way of reducing carbon emissions is to tax them equally. Whatever businesses (or other energy uses) stop being lucrative and go bankrupt, are exactly the businesses that should go bankrupt, because they are not sustainable (as long as the carbon emissions are taxed at an environmentally sustainable level and not more).
If you're going to reduce emissions, and practically all developed countries are working to do it AFAIK, then it should be done this way and I don't see why right-wingers or anyone else should object to such a plan, rather than what is really ludicrous, which is to arbitrarily demonize uses of energy, one by one, until you reach a critical mass of users who eventually are going to say "enough is enough".
Now, if your argument is that right-wing governments are in principle opposed to reduce carbon emissions, that's a completely different argument and again, it has nothing to do with Bitcoin. It's a political issue alone and the blame-shifting is not going to solve it.
> that means that avoiding spending excessive electrical energy on inefficient vanity projects is a matter of personal responsibility.
See, here are the problems with that argument:
1. There's no "excessive" electrical energy being used.
2. The project is not "inefficient".
3. It's not a "vanity" project.
4. It's not a matter of personal responsibility either. Once again, that's blame shifting.
Personal responsibility in the way you are imagining it is not going to solve this problem.
It'd be way, way, way, way easier to actually influence a right-wing government to solve it, once and for all, in the most efficient way possible, for the entire population than to change the behavior of hundreds of millions of people (especially by writing non-convincing arguments on the Internet).