Crypto is so inherently wasteful it's completely unethical. At least they're trying to use hydro here but by and large, this is an unreasonable resource grab.
To add to this, the article states it's the equivalent of 570,000 apartments worth of energy.
To what end? There is still no real use case for bitcoin, it can't compete with any modern financial transaction system in performance, it's difficult to secure, it's just a bad deal and I can't understand how we've allowed it to grow as much as it has.
I am not in favor of crypto. I don't think it is a better alternative than our "centralized" economy. I don't own any crypto, I don't encourage it to flourish, I don't encourage people to buy it.
>Crypto is so inherently wasteful it's completely unethical.
skateboarding is inherently wasteful, should we ban that too?
if people choose to do something voluntarily, and devote resources to it, I don't see a basis for you declaring it unethical. If climate change is your fear and we all decide to save ourselves by living in caves, some cavemen might still choose to engage in the cave-crypto-currency equivalent (carving big giant rolling stone coins?): it's not unethical, it's just not what you would choose.
Without delving too much into the utility of the practice, skateboarding as a past time is a rather commonly banned activity in common spaces.
The issue here is not that someone is doing something voluntarily and devoting resources to it, but rather that someone is taking an action that involves the consumption of a rivalrous good. The court's ruling notes this explicitly (from the article) "the very real prospect that devoting such a large proportion of the available electrical power supply to one industry would leave less energy for other uses which might result in increased costs to all other residential and industry customers in B.C.”
Not just energy, crypto is also using far more rare earth minerals and metals in their excessive utilization of CPUs and GPUs. Batteries to keep things running when power goes out. It's wasting so very many of our resources. There is no defense.
skateboarding doesn't scale to take up all available resources. I could be 10x the skater as Tony Hawk and I'd still only use one skateboard at a time. Doesn't matter if it's a $1,000,000 skateboard, I'm still only using one at a time. Meanwhile, $1,000,000 of cryptomining by one person is going to use so many more joules, and for what?
Is the commercial exploitation of several finite resources —skyrocketing their market prices— to generate nothing of actual value really just like skateboarding?
That's a bad analogy. The wastefulness of crypto affects us all.
Please sir here's millions of dollars so you won't tank our grid. These things should require co-gen facilities instead of my power bill suffering so they can print money.
Step 1: Calculate the effect on local utility rates.
Step 2: Create a new tax which brings in 150% revenue of the calculated effect which applies progressively on power users one standard deviation above the mean
Step 3: Apply a negative tax on everyone using less > 1 standard deviation above the mean. Either preserve the excess revenue, or put it into infrastructure.
Step 4: recalculate every year and adjust rates accordingly.
Yes. Even in Canada they already have something similar with their carbon taxes. IIRC, tax is collected all year and returned at the end based on income rather than consumption.
Not sure if it would technically be considered a negative tax, but the effect is similar.
I was thinking more along the lines of my purchase price is x + y tax + -z tax. A return eventually isn't quite the same, but maybe it's effectively the same.
In Pakistan, electricity rates are slabbed. 0-100 units are charged very little - often below cost of providing the electricity. 100-200 units more, etc. So ultimately, high consumption users subsidize low consumption users. It makes sense because low consumption users are 'using' cheap electricity from hydropower/gas, but high consumption users are forcing the state to turn on expensive oil based power plants.
Well I was thinking more along the lines of the price of a good is x, plus y taxes, reduced by -z tax. Subsidys might effectively be similar, but it won't be calculated the way "positive" taxes are.
> would have consumed 2.5 million megawatt-hours of electricity each year.
Just to give some level of scale to this request, this is half the annual generation of the new $16 billion Site C dam. They are demanding the use of $8 billion in public infrastructure.
We need to start heavily regulating unchecked industrial resource usage of public utilities like power and water. There needs to be a penalty/incentive for conservation.
It's not easy. Obviously, different industries have differing abilities in how much they can conserve. So, naturally your penalty/incentive structure has to be customized per industry to make it effective. But that immediately leads to rich industrialists to start lobbying (read bribing) politicians to help their industry more than other industries. It's not clear if the country becomes richer by giving the government this type of regulatory power.
You can regulate it pretty easily with appropriate pricing.
The problem is that plenty of jurisdictions are willing to price industrial rates quite low for the sake of jobs and jurisdictions are in competition for those. So "wasteful" is largely determined, as far as the government is concerned, by whether a lot of jobs are produced.
> 1. So it's not so much "not providing power" for some political or philosophical reason but "not providing all the power they want."
this is a pretty incoherent sentence. Not providing all the power they wish to purchase is, as per their argument, "not providing power", and the reasons given, "(a) they plan to use power and (b) not create jobs" are political and philosophical reasons.
The economic argument is "making money creates jobs when you spend the money, or invest it which in turn causes it to be spent".
The "global warming is a negative externality" argument wasn't made, if it were made would need inspection. Is there a current surplus of (hydro, net) power in Canada, perhaps not sustainable into the future but for the lifetime of the mining rigs contemplated?
>2. The miner wants the equivalent of ~500,000 apartments worth of power...which is substantial.
if it's currently in surplus, it's surplus, i.e. there aren't a half million apartments whose lights would go out
>3. The reason the miner wants this particular power from this particular provider is that it's cheap.
it's cheap indicates it's surplus
>4. If the miner got all the power they wanted it would be enough to drive up local utility rates.
price changes are how all economies allocate resources. consumption driving prices higher indicates more economic activity; it's a good thing. Wanting to stop other people from doing things is authoritarian and negative.
>5. The local utility + government aren't keen on this as it's a pretty blatent resource extraction with no local jobs being created.
We can look at the environmental impact of hydro power, and regulate it out of existence if we want, but given that there are existing dams with surplus power, I don't see an argument being made that this "extraction" has any negative impact. "Extraction" is what every human being has lived on since the stone age.
Not necessarily. Water is cheap in California's dry agricultural valleys. It is still not abundant.
The utility asserts - and the court appears to agree - that this project would turn a surplus into a not-surplus.
> price changes are how all economies allocate resources
Not all resources, no. Canada doesn't allocate healthcare this way, for example. There's a significant societal benefit to having power be affordable by individual households; letting someone turn an abundant resource into a scarce one for personal profit isn't something Canada has to permit.
1. So it's not so much "not providing power" for some political or philosophical reason but "not providing all the power they want."
2. The miner wants the equivalent of ~500,000 apartments worth of power...which is substantial.
3. The reason the miner wants this particular power from this particular provider is that it's cheap.
4. If the miner got all the power they wanted it would be enough to drive up local utility rates.
5. The local utility + government aren't keen on this as it's a pretty blatent resource extraction with no local jobs being created.