[Cryptography] One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week

[Jonas Acres]

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: [Cryptography] One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week
> Local Time: November 14, 2017 12:46 PM
> UTC Time: November 14, 2017 8:46 PM
> From: samgeneric at gmail.com
> To: Arnold Reinhold <agr at me.com>
> Cryptography List <cryptography at metzdowd.com>, Christian Huitema <huitema at huitema.net>
>
> Bitcoin scales to the lowest marginal cost of energy in the world. If you believe that it burns too much energy, you ought to be advocating for high taxes on bitcoin mining. If the price of burning bitcoins is 9 cents instead of 3, then Bitcoin will require 3x less energy for the same security

If a "mining tax" could be successfully imposed, that seems like it could undermine the credibility of a blockchain. For instance, if a government could impose a tax to make mining very expensive for everyone and then run their own tax-exempt pools or give exemptions to third parties who do as they're told, it seems to me they could effectively control >50% of the hash rate very cheaply.
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