As long as the price of bitcoin is higher than the expense of mining it then PoW is not a waste in economic terms.
But only if the expense of mining it is considered to include externalities. If you include those, then this is perhaps true, but it means we can’t reject the premise “PoW is a massive waste of resources” offhand. To reject that we’d need to further establish that the miners’ surplus is larger than the externalities. And I note that if the miners’ surplus is large, more miners can join, though there are complications in this argument.
Whether it’s taxation or other resource cost, that’s going to happen regardless. Any policy response (by the currency itself, which’ll be a fork, or by governments) is going to be porous. Taxing the underlying problem in a way that’s used to fix/offset the harm seems to be a pretty useful and automatically-scaling mechanism to reduce harm.
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But only if the expense of mining it is considered to include externalities. If you include those, then this is perhaps true, but it means we can’t reject the premise “PoW is a massive waste of resources” offhand. To reject that we’d need to further establish that the miners’ surplus is larger than the externalities. And I note that if the miners’ surplus is large, more miners can join, though there are complications in this argument.
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Pigouvian energy taxation seems like the right answer—let the miners determine how much energy they want to put into Bitcoin.
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Whether it’s taxation or other resource cost, that’s going to happen regardless. Any policy response (by the currency itself, which’ll be a fork, or by governments) is going to be porous. Taxing the underlying problem in a way that’s used to fix/offset the harm seems to be a pretty useful and automatically-scaling mechanism to reduce harm.