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.
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.