> Me; it's far superior to anything outside of a mouse.
I used to love the track point - it felt so efficient to have my pointing device right on the home row of the keyboard.
Eventually I realised it was the cause of some pretty bad RSI (or something) in my index finger. Now I have to remove the plastic cap to stop myself from using it.
> There is if we add on a tax for the negative externalities, we need to consider both positive and negative externalities to get the tax right.
There are few positive externalities directly associated with the act of burning oil, except some associated with global heating.
There may be positive and negative externalities from the things people choose to do with the power generated. Companies are generally better at internalising positive effects than negative ones, for obvious reasons. If my chemical plant produces hot water as a waste product, I can sell that to the plant next door or to a district heating system. Competent business try not to leave value on the table, and try not to pay costs that they don't have to. But where they can be identified, sure, subsidise away. Just not crypto mining.
> So there must be a large positive externality here somewhere
Not necessarily. There is/was a large positive asset: ie. a huge store of chemical energy underground. It has allowed us to do incredible things. If the cost of it included the negative impacts of burning it, the market would use less of it, smarter, more efficiently, towards the most valuable outcomes, and in better balance with the harms.
>who do you think is bearing the cost of these negative externalities right now? ...would they not be better off if we got them access to fossil fuel
I'm not a climate scientist and I'm not qualified to re-litigate the scientific consensus, which is that global heating is dangerous. Some will be more affected than others by increased incidence of extreme weather, water wars, mass migration, cost of flood defences etc. But ultimately it is a "tragedy of the commons": few of us are innocent, most of us are impacted or at risk in some way. It isn't even in the interests of those of us with economic power to stop polluting, because the cost of each of our individual actions is externalised. If I take a flight, I get the full benefit, but experience only one eight billionth of the total harm. That's why it needs a systemic fix.
>That is the informal definition of an externality right there.
You pay a grocer who pays a farmer who pays a fertiliser manufacturer who buys some natural gas. You wanting to eat has a reasonably direct impact on demand for fossil fuels, and therefore prices and profits. The oil company doesn't capture all the value, partly because they're not doing all the work, and partly because of competition.
If the oil companies went away tomorrow, the price of oil would skyrocket, because people want to eat, and new oil companies would form to meet the demand. There is no need for subsidy.
Positive externalities are things like "I financed construction of a road for my own commercial reasons, but other people can use it for free". Or "I wanted to renovate the rundown building I live in, but doing so made my neighbour happy too".
But to come back to the point, finally. The argument is that we know crypto mining has negative externalities (crypto miners don't have to reimburse people negatively impacted by climate change). The article argues that permissionless blockchains are doomed, ultimately, to fail anyway. So they will destroy value, by pointlessly wasting fuel AND by harming the climate (which doesn't factor into a miner's decision-making because it's an externality).
There surely are positive externalities, but the very useful things we burn fossil fuels for are reflected in the price - cheap or no. Those primary reasons for burning fuel will have all sorts of externalities, positive and negative. And one would expect similar externalities from the work done by renewable energy.
If your position is simply that we are fortunate our planet was/is abundant in fossil fuels, I don't disagree (ideally there wouldn't have been enough to completely wreck the climate we depend on, but...). But the issue is whether we should trust the market in respect to cryptocurrency mining specifically. The history of human civilisation seems a bit beyond the scope.
>Libertarianism's attraction is based on ignoring externalities, and cryptocurrencies are no exception.
The economy as currently regulated doesn't correctly price in externalities such as the ongoing cost of global heating generated by burning fossil fuels.
>we keep having articles saying that bitcoin transactions are a waste of energy, and everyone ignoring that the block reward halves every few years until it drops to zero, so it not built with the incentives to use this much energy forever.
Bitcoin transactions aren't a waste of energy, a high bitcoin valuation is an incentive to "waste" energy (commit resources to mining).
The block rewards will drop over time, but they're denominated in BTC, so it's hard to predict what the incentive to mine will be.
It will be a long time before block rewards reach zero.
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