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The excellent student run newspaper, The Michigan Daily, has an article about the necessity of regulating Bitcoin. "Mining" even a single Bitcoin now burns as much electricity as a family would use during about 50 days.
Local grids physically cannot withstand this outrageous consumption of electricity. In foreign countries — where mining farm clustering is more severe — local governments suspect Bitcoin mining farms as the cause of power outages and complete blackouts. Entire neighborhoods are facing power shortages or complete outages as a result of energy grid strain. So far, the reliance on domestic energy has not had adverse effects, but it is only a matter of time before these blackouts begin to take place in the United States, too.
Despite the fatal externality flaws in Bitcoin mining, the industry is left unchecked in the absence of federal or international regulation on its use. Unfortunately, without restrictions on the amount of mining that can occur, there is no clear plateau to the electricity consumption of these constantly updating hardware systems.
Previously:
(2025) Bitcoin Mining is Making People Sick
(2025) The Guy Who Accidentally Threw Away $700 Million in Bitcoin Wants to Buy the Landfill to Find It
(2024) How A 27-Year-Old Busted The Myth Of Bitcoin's Anonymity
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aafcac on Saturday November 29, @09:33PM (20 children)
Or we could just address this sort of nonsense once and for all with a wealth tax. Set the cap appropriately and set the rate high enough and nonsense like this just won't get off the ground. There's really no reason for anybody to ever have more than $100m and I'm being generous, $10m is probably already more than enough for any reasonable person to have. Just start taxing the wealth above that at some sort of rate approaching 90-95% of the increase from the previous year and you'd stop seeing these sorts of psychopathic wastes of resources getting out of hand. Crypto could be a useful thing in the same way that ETF and the like are, but a bunch of the use these days are either scams or essentially gambling.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Saturday November 29, @10:02PM (5 children)
But the whole point of bitcoin is to be a stupid untouchable-by-government store of value. I'm willing to wager a lot of tax dodging is already in place for these mining schemes and they wouldn't be profitable without them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29, @10:38PM (4 children)
Exactly this ^^^ "...a lot of tax dodging is already in place for these mining schemes"
Be careful what you regulate, there's a good chance that you will wind up regulating something else instead. Taxing assets visible to the government (IRS in USA) won't touch the bitcoin bros that have their assets spread all over in various tax havens.
If instead, your tax happens to snag someone that hit on a high risk commodity trade (or something similar) you really ought to be prepared to give that tax collection back, when their assets drop due to the next trade gone bad...
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday November 29, @11:35PM (3 children)
I doubt that very much. If you're looking to dodge taxes, crypto is a pretty bad way of doing it, the prices are subject to substantial swings and there is no regulation in place to protect against people just stealing all the money. If you want to move large amounts of money around, it's just not a great way of doing it as banks are required to notify authorities of large transfers already, and transfers large enough to be an issue are ones that forensic accountants can track.
In this context, a wealth tax wouldn't do any of what you're talking about. Income taxes are done on a yearly basis, with payments made along the way. Anybody hit by a wealth tax midway through would get the money back at the end of the year if they turned out to no longer owe it. It's really not complicated, that's how the income tax works, the main taxes I know of that don't work like that are things like excise taxes and property taxes where the taxable quantities are known before the tax is paid, with relatively few situations that would require a refund.
If you've got that amount of money from trading commodities that leads to you hitting the cap, you've got plenty of money, it's not really wealth if it's leveraged all to hell and based on a bunch of loans.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 30, @03:13PM (2 children)
Will the government pay interest on that?
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Sunday November 30, @09:10PM (1 child)
Why would they? We're talking about a fraction of the taxpayers actual net worth. The government doesn't currently pay interest on refunds unless there's an unusual circumstance that delays the refund being paid. The whole system is intended to avoid having large amounts of money changing hands at the tax deadline.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 01, @07:41PM
Why would they ever return anything in the first place? Laws.
My point is that taxation thrashing imposes costs on taxpayers especially under your punitive taxation scheme. Suppose someone starts with $50 million and does an edgy trade that temporarily values their assets at $200 million. As part of their continued brilliance, they end up back at $50 million after the drama is over. With that 90% tax rate on assets over $100 million, they now owe Uncle Sam $90 million. Even if the taxman chooses to be generous and not immediately seizing assets and pushing them into bankruptcy court, that's several million in interest and penalties they'll owe.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 30, @12:06AM (2 children)
You won't see any wealth tax while we continue to reelect psychopaths
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 30, @05:01PM (1 child)
Troll
Hmm, interesting, we have people supporting psychopaths here.
Funny that so many more people prefer to complain than accept the real reasons for their misfortune.
Anyway, to those who want this "wealth tax", tell me, how do you expect to get it if you won't vote for people that would legislate it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01, @12:40AM
Yep, they don't answer questions.. Just kill the messengers, don't let 'em rain on the two minute hate, a weak attempt at self absolution
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Sunday November 30, @03:11PM (9 children)
My favorite counterexample is NASA. The evil Musk put together a company that developed the Falcon 9 (as well as three rocket engines and the Falcon 1) for roughly $400 million dollars. NASA did a study [faa.gov] (see Appendix B, pg 40) that confirmed that price tag by looking directly at the accounting books and then calculated what it would take NASA to do the same. They calculated that NASA would expect a bid of $4 billion to do the same (which would go up massively from there due to the usual cost overruns).
So not only did Musk need well over $100 million to do this, he did it for at least an order of magnitude less than the non-psychopathic wastes of resource could have. There's something wrong with the narrative.
I find your post particularly pathological because you aren't solving a problem. You just have some envy that there are rich people in the world, and you are willing to break the world just to assuage that envy.
My view is that it is of zero relevance to us whether an Elon Musk is worth $100 million or $1 trillion. Your life won't be different in any way by that. But when we punitively restrict peoples' wealth to a small amount (assuming that restriction can be enforced!) then we lose the normal way humans do large projects.
(Score: 1, Troll) by DadaDoofy on Sunday November 30, @08:12PM (2 children)
"I find your post particularly pathological because you aren't solving a problem. You just have some envy that there are rich people in the world, and you are willing to break the world just to assuage that envy."
Not only does it not solve a problem, it creates a massive problem called communism that leads to famine, starvation and death each and every time it's implemented.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Sunday November 30, @09:19PM (1 child)
No, it doesn't. Preventing people from having more than $100m is not going to cause communism to break out. Honestly, I wonder where you people get these notions. A single person is not going to make that much working in a lifetime without a bunch of hyperinflation being involved. $10m is a bit of a stretch, but can be done with smart investment without being too much of a psychopath.
If that's your line on communism, I highly recommend going to places like the PRC or Cuba which are the closest we've got to actual communism and see what's going on. The results will likely surprise you a lot.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday December 01, @02:51PM
If there's no cap on wealth then we don't have to care how much should be good enough for what you think wealth should be used for. That solves a bigger problem than a wealth cap would solve.
Absolute shitshows driven in part by wealth inequality propaganda? I recommend not veering from wealth caps to defending failed states. It's a self-defeating argument.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Sunday November 30, @09:17PM (1 child)
But, it does solve a whole bunch of problems. Even at $10m a person never has to actually work another day in their life and can afford lavish vacations and probably still have a bunch left over at the end of their life. That's definitely the case at $100m. But, the difference here is that if you let them keep wealth above numbers in that range, they literally cannot spend all that money in even 2 lifetimes without deliberately blowing it on stupid things just to spend money.
The material conditions for every day Americans has never been as high as when there were massive taxes on the top income tax earners and with the way things have shifted away from ordinary income as the payment for executives and towards things like shares of stock with the proceeds mostly being used to pay for things that aren't taxable, you need something to fill in the gap or you get the situation that's developed where a bunch of robber-barons can hold the country hostage and use those ill-begotten gains to corrupt the system.
Companies having more than $100m is often times a legitimate necessity, especially in industries where you have large factories or fleets of aircraft involved, but there is no legitimate reason for a private citizen to ever have that much wealth. There just isn't, and allowing more just encourages what's going on in terms of various idiots trying to run up an all time high score at the expense of the workers and the people of the world in general.
Most of the problems that currently exist in the US are either caused by the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few or are being stymied by those few because they don't want to pay for it to be fixed or are profiting off of it. This isn't a matter of jealousy, this is a matter of seeing what's going on and not liking it one bit.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 01, @01:58PM
What problems? gnuman handwaved about "conflict". That's it so far. Elsewhere, the only semiserious argument has been that high wealth inequality would drive up the cost of real estate and electricity (as well as some other resources of lesser importance) - both are key drivers for cost of living. But that argument ignores that there are large obstructions to growing the supply of both real estate, and electricity generation and distribution.
It's an argument by the ignorant for the ignorant.
Then why weren't the wealthy paying massive taxes during those times? You forgot the loopholes (particularly the creation of trusts in the US) that made that tax scheme far less destructive to US (and developed world society as a whole)! The real victims were the newly wealthy who hadn't yet discovered the little tricks for protecting their wealth from the taxman: for example, the Beatles or Astrid Lindgren (the author behind Pippi Longstockings). They lost a few years of income to the state before they figured out how to stop it.
High taxes are a great idea - until you have to pay.
Look at the federal budget including "mandatory" spending. More than half the budget is entitlements to large numbers of people. And it grows faster than the US economy does. That last bit means that no matter how much we increase taxes (assuming that the economy doesn't dive in response to those increased taxes, which it will do in reality), we will run out of tax revenue to fund those programs in a few decades. It is a wealth inequality increase since the great majority of it is a transfer from working age people who tend to be poorer to the elderly and medical industry which tend to be wealthier. But it doesn't fit your "hands of a few" narrative.
I just cited a legitimate reason in my grandparent post - opening up space to humanity.
Consider that you only talk about living well. We spend money on other things than just our living expenses.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Monday December 01, @11:45AM (3 children)
Not sure about that. Wealth inequality has driven conflict for all of human history. The lower the inequality, the less conflict we tend to have. And I'm not advocating for communism panacea here, but actually something like 1960s western tax system that killed, or try to kill, generational wealth.
I personally do not care about Musk at all. I care that this resource is actually wasted in future generations instead of "up-cycled" into the economy. It should not be up to the ultra-rich to dictate their whims to us via political influence like they did during Roman Empire. It ended for same reasons: the rich fucked it up trying to hold onto their wealth and their power. By trying to save their influence and their money, they killed the empire.
It's up to society to decide what mega-projects they want to fund. It's not up to the ultra-wealthy. And having *few* example here, like SpaceX, is not really going to sway my thinking. It's bad for individuals to wield billions of dollars around. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC [wikipedia.org] is perfect example how things are starting to fall apart and now with AI gaslighting next, well, good luck to us all I guess?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 01, @01:30PM (2 children)
Superficially, in this thread, it would appear that way. We have. for example. you and aafcac ranting about an arbitrary threshold of wealth accumulation. The problem with that though is that there is no reason for that threshold or to expect that to be the last we see of the policy. There aren't conflicts because Musk has hundreds of billions in wealth rather than $100 million. And implementing the policy would just create conflict since now we arbitrarily created winners and losers where there weren't before - with the policy set to rachet down even further.
What resource is being wasted? Consider my example. We had NASA wasting public funds - which we can consider to be a resource, right? - for 50 years and then SpaceX showing us how to launch rockets. That wouldn't have happened if we had been ruthlessly restricting Musk's wealth accumulation to $100 million.
Bullshit. Society is not capable of making those decisions. Proxies are. And here, SpaceX has proven to be about an order of magnitude better at funding its megaprojects than NASA is. And for me, the ultra-wealthy are a more than adequate proxy for society megaprojects.
I disagree of course. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act which was overturned in the above Supreme Court ruling was unconstitutional and bad law. It violated two parts of the First Amendment: the right to free speech and the right to petition the government for redress. Consider that the FEC used that law to block Citizens United from advertising their political movie in the 60 days before the November 2004 election. The law was already being heavily abused right out the gate.
And really, what adverse effects are there? My view is that we need campaign financial by businesses to counterweight both the government and the public. It's an informal separation of powers that has worked well for the US.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Wednesday December 03, @01:28PM (1 child)
Policies like this do not create winners and losers. They only limit the size and influence of the so called winners. Your statement is also premature regarding conflicts -- that one is more for historians to make. But let's say, Musk has left the reality-sphere sometime around 2010-2015.
Society elects representatives that then decide who's the decider for what. So yes, proxies decide. What's wrong with that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_SpaceX#Funding [wikipedia.org]
So ... most of the funding of SpaceX is *NASA* directly or via other government launch contracts. It has always been *NASA*. Which makes your statement not quite what you wrote. Putting in 10% of the funds, is not self-funding it. Also, there were others in this race, like Armadillo Aerospace but well...
The problem NASA has with large programs is actually its oversight that decides technical details and forces them onto NASA for political reasons. That is the only reason why outsourcing this part to others like SpaceX is a big win. I'm looking at SLS, Space Shuttle and others.
You see, laws do not exist in vacuums. Most exist to reduce harm, as in the case above. You would notice that it's very common in most of the democratic world to block "free speech", ie. sock puppets, from flooding bullshit and allow some sort of civil debate in a run-up to elections. Yes, it's blocking "free speech". But sometimes blocking certain "free speed" is beneficial, like yelling "bomb" randomly or have politically motivated movie/advert/show/etc. outside of campaign financing caps, is beneficial.
Maybe you have not noticed, but in places like Canada or Germany, there are not so many political advertisements. These places are not flooded with them. There's sanity at election time, or months prior.
If you can have laws that prevent pranksters yelling "bomb" in a theater or whatever, you can have laws that limit campaign advertisements. And blocking a movie for few months because of such laws is tiny price to pay for sanity. But you know, each their own.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 04, @02:20AM
If you have more than $100 million in taxable assets right now, you would be a loser.
They aren't the only way nor should be.
Three things to note. This was a snap shot at a particular time. It doesn't accurately reflect the early development of Falcon 1 (which didn't get a lot of government funding) nor the much later efforts with a large private sector customer base where private sources ended up somewhat larger funding contributors than government sources. It's basically a point of maximal government involvement.
Nor does it distinguish between funding for services rendered and funding for development. The Space Launch System is pure funding for development, not a single service or serious expectation delivered. While most of SpaceX's funding was for launching NASA (and other US government) spacecraft - often cheaper than anyone else in the world.
Finally, NASA spends something like $20 billion a year over a 10 year period. Here, it managed to spend only $300-400 million on the game changing Falcon 9? Imagine if it could have spent the rest of the roughly $200 billion as well!
Or have laws that ban speech I don't like. The field is wide open now that we've found a completely irrelevant loophole!
(Score: 2) by sfm on Tuesday December 02, @06:53PM
Instead of a "Wealth Tax", how about adding progressive pricing for electricity.
The more you use the more each KWh costs. This directly addresses the issue.