Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Crypto Mining Electricity Excise Tax Should Target AI Instead

news.bloombergtax.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 30 posts

Re: Crypto Mining Electricity Excise Tax Should Target AI Instead

#21

Post by rvz »

nullsmack wrote: post #17

AI is actually useful unlike fake money cryptocurrency bs. But I agree, cryptocurrency fans shouldn't be taxed. They should be arrested. Their counterfeiting equipment should be ground to dust and they should be locked up.

Deep Learning (DL) is just as great at wasting tons of electricity and gallons of water [0]. Crypto at least has found an alternative and less wasteful methods than proof-of-work that is viable for them to migrate and switch to.

Unlike the field of Deep Learning, which after decades still has not found any viable alternatives to their methods of training, fine-tuning and inferencing operations and continues to waste insurmountable amounts of resources.

The worse part is the outputs after training from such black box AI models; including hallucinations, lack of transparent explainability and a 'high accuracy' of being confidently wrong.

There is nothing 'useful' for a hallucinating glorified unchecked bullshit generator, or a vision system getting confused over a single pixel.

[0] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training...

Re: Crypto Mining Electricity Excise Tax Should Target AI Instead

#22

Post by trompetenaccoun »

Foreignborn wrote: post #14
trompetenaccoun wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a great buzzword, but what does that actually mean? Carbon is an element that's all around us, we're made of carbon too. So what exactly are you going to tax and for what purpose? Try to use as precise language as possible. Basically you could just tax all consumption (including especially imports from places like China) and be done with it if the goal is to reduce emissions. We all know that's unlikely to happe…

I think you're being bit disingenuous, but I understand why you might be skeptical about carbon taxes. Unlike those scams, this is one of the more simple and straightforward policy recommendations. A carbon tax essentially charges a fee on greenhouse gas emissions, aiming to account for their environmental impact—an externality not usually priced into the cost of fossil fuels. The concept of a carbon tax has been con…

>A carbon tax essentially charges a fee on greenhouse gas emissions, aiming to account for their environmental impact

Your own link disagrees with that, it describes it as a tax that, depending on the country:

- "applied to fuel, coal, and natural gas"

- "mainly covers the use of fuels"

- "covered natural gas, petroleum, and other mineral fuels, except biofuel"

- "a tax on fossil fuels, petroleum products, natural gas, and coal"

The user who proposed this as a solution above has the same misunderstanding. What they described when I asked about the details sounds like simply another tax on fuel, on top of the already existing tax. It's not a "carbon" tax at all, it's a fuel tax.

Re: Crypto Mining Electricity Excise Tax Should Target AI Instead

#23

Post by rvz »

senttoschool wrote: post #2

Such a "smh" opinion. AI is useful. The vast majority of crypto are just scams and unregistered securities. Crypto mining is wasteful. Are you going to tax whenever people who use the neural engine inside the iPhone? Makes no sense to tax AI energy use.

> AI is useful. The vast majority of crypto are just scams and unregistered securities. Crypto mining is wasteful.

Cars are also useful but the majority of them (Petrol and Diesel) are extremely wasteful. The difference is however is that there are greener alternatives (Electric). Crypto has also proven to have greener alternatives and a major proof-of-work blockchain moved to a greener alternative method proof-of-stake, showing it is entirely possible.

AI (Deep Learning) has no known greener alternatives, and always requires more compute, data centers, GPUs, FPGAs ASICs, to scale further and the result is more resources is wasted [0][1], for hallucinating chatbots and vision systems that need to be fine-tuned again and at worse retrained.

It makes perfect sense to tax it as after more than a decade, Deep Learning still has no viable green alternative methods to reduce its training, inference and fine-tuning operations.

[0] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training...

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-data-centre-water...

Re: Crypto Mining Electricity Excise Tax Should Target AI Instead

#24

Post by helen___keller »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #19
helen___keller wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop trying to pick a fight. I gave reasonably specific information of what I mean by carbon tax in my previous post: > To be specific, taxing [use of and/or extraction of] fossil fuels.

And I asked what about other emission sources, you're now evading the question. Concrete as an example for something that's not a "fuel" and yet its production is responsible for a significant portion of C02 emissions. Why would you just ignore this, the carbon debate in the general public is clearly not based on rationality and understanding, such a "carbon tax" would be a complete misnomer. https://www.bbc.com/news…

Your original reply to my post asked for specifics of what a carbon tax is. I replied: a tax on either the sourcing or consumption of fossil fuels.

I can see now that you were actually looking for me to justify a carbon tax from a policy perspective, not define it. I am not interesting in doing so, hence “evading the question”

Re: Crypto Mining Electricity Excise Tax Should Target AI Instead

#25

Post by DerekL »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #19
helen___keller wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop trying to pick a fight. I gave reasonably specific information of what I mean by carbon tax in my previous post: > To be specific, taxing [use of and/or extraction of] fossil fuels.

And I asked what about other emission sources, you're now evading the question. Concrete as an example for something that's not a "fuel" and yet its production is responsible for a significant portion of C02 emissions. Why would you just ignore this, the carbon debate in the general public is clearly not based on rationality and understanding, such a "carbon tax" would be a complete misnomer. https://www.bbc.com/news…

* CO2, not C02. (Oh, not zero.)

Re: Crypto Mining Electricity Excise Tax Should Target AI Instead

#26

Post by trompetenaccoun »

helen___keller wrote: post #24
trompetenaccoun wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I asked what about other emission sources, you're now evading the question. Concrete as an example for something that's not a "fuel" and yet its production is responsible for a significant portion of C02 emissions. Why would you just ignore this, the carbon debate in the general public is clearly not based on rationality and understanding, such a "carbon tax" would be a complete misnomer. https://www.bbc.com/news…

Your original reply to my post asked for specifics of what a carbon tax is. I replied: a tax on either the sourcing or consumption of fossil fuels. I can see now that you were actually looking for me to justify a carbon tax from a policy perspective, not define it. I am not interesting in doing so, hence “evading the question”

Why do you call it a "carbon tax" when what you actually mean is a fossil fuel tax which specifically excludes other emission sources?

You've not explained that part at all. It's like saying "I want a wealth tax" and then when someone asks how it actually works you tell them you tax expensive cars. That's not a wealth tax but a luxury vehicle tax.

Re: Crypto Mining Electricity Excise Tax Should Target AI Instead

#28

Post by wmf »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #12
helen___keller wrote: post #5

> If the goal is to offset climate change, there are cheaper, higher-value targets. Two good places to start: Tax the electricity usage of data centers and artificial intelligence. No, the best goal for this is to tax carbon. Obviously a crypto tax is as much about politics as it is about climate change. Most people loathe crypto after the last 2 bubbles and your average news-savvy person can roughly describe why bit…

It's a great buzzword, but what does that actually mean? Carbon is an element that's all around us, we're made of carbon too. So what exactly are you going to tax and for what purpose? Try to use as precise language as possible. Basically you could just tax all consumption (including especially imports from places like China) and be done with it if the goal is to reduce emissions. We all know that's unlikely to happe…

Yes, of course concrete, cow burps, and imports should be included in a carbon tax. Yes, this indirectly taxes all consumption but in a way that encourages efficiency. You can redistribute the proceeds in various ways to make it less regressive.

In this thread you're attacking people because they left out a few details. This isn't a good discussion style.

Re: Crypto Mining Electricity Excise Tax Should Target AI Instead

#29

Post by DrNosferatu »

rvz wrote: post #23
senttoschool wrote: post #2

Such a "smh" opinion. AI is useful. The vast majority of crypto are just scams and unregistered securities. Crypto mining is wasteful. Are you going to tax whenever people who use the neural engine inside the iPhone? Makes no sense to tax AI energy use.

> AI is useful. The vast majority of crypto are just scams and unregistered securities. Crypto mining is wasteful. Cars are also useful but the majority of them (Petrol and Diesel) are extremely wasteful. The difference is however is that there are greener alternatives (Electric). Crypto has also proven to have greener alternatives and a major proof-of-work blockchain moved to a greener alternative method proof-of-st…

It seems I have hit a nerve! :D

AI in general, and LLMs in particular, will change Society to a scale only comparable to what the Word Wide Web has done since the 90s - hopefully for far more good than bad.

Crypto is basically penny stocks - or actually, in good truth - a glorified pyramid scheme.

It is sad that Hacker News allows and normalizes this self-interested promotion of it, disguised as "opinion".

Indeed: tell us that you don't stand to personally gain monetarily if crypto rizes, user "rvz" ;)

(some goes for the author of the bloomberg piece)

Re: Crypto Mining Electricity Excise Tax Should Target AI Instead

#30

Post by rvz »

DrNosferatu wrote: post #29
rvz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is useful. The vast majority of crypto are just scams and unregistered securities. Crypto mining is wasteful. Cars are also useful but the majority of them (Petrol and Diesel) are extremely wasteful. The difference is however is that there are greener alternatives (Electric). Crypto has also proven to have greener alternatives and a major proof-of-work blockchain moved to a greener alternative method proof-of-st…

It seems I have hit a nerve! :D AI in general, and LLMs in particular, will change Society to a scale only comparable to what the Word Wide Web has done since the 90s - hopefully for far more good than bad. Crypto is basically penny stocks - or actually, in good truth - a glorified pyramid scheme. It is sad that Hacker News allows and normalizes this self-interested promotion of it, disguised as "opinion". Indeed: te…

> It seems I have hit a nerve! :D

Hit what exactly? You have failed to refute any of my points.

> AI in general, and LLMs in particular, will change Society to a scale only comparable to what the Word Wide Web has done since the 90s.

I don't think you would trust a black-box 'AI' in any high risk activity such as medical, financial, legal advice and especially transportation which there is a lack of a human driver or pilot, end-to-end to hold accountable once something goes wrong. Hence it will be totally regulated and licensed.

Not only techies like you wish to accelerate everyone further into a dystopia no-one asked for, but to even recklessly risk deploying untrustworthy AI models unchecked which can easily hallucinate and confuse themselves over a single pixel or any adversarial input. Making them unsuitable for anything serious, unless they are strictly regulated for that purpose.

Regardless, my environmental argument still stands unchallenged. Crypto has alternative greener methods to proof-of-work right now, and former PoW blockchains like Ethereum have shown that it is possible to significantly reduce its emissions by 99% by moving to a greener consensus method. [0][1] AI (Deep Learning, LLMs, CNNs, etc) however still does NOT have any viable greener alternative methods of training, inference and fine-tuning available and continues to waste tons of electricity and water. [2]

> Crypto is basically penny stocks - or actually, in good truth - a glorified pyramid scheme.

How on earth is a centralized stable-coin like USDC a pyramid scheme? The prime use-case is near-instant low-fee world-wide international payments which is verified publicly on-chain to discourage fraud which once it happens it is immediately traceable, which is why companies like Moneygram [3], Stripe [4], etc have their own crypto offerings under regulattions.

> It is sad that Hacker News allows and normalizes this self-interested promotion of it, disguised as "opinion".

Speak for your self. Since both of you have ZERO sources to your comments. Thus your comment can be simply dismissed.

> Indeed: tell us that you don't stand to personally gain monetarily if crypto rizes, user "rvz" ;)

Not after you learn to spell 'rise' before you comment next time instead of embarrassing yourself.

[0] https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain...

[1] https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption

[2] https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/ai-chatgpt-water-usage-envir...

[3] https://stellar.org/moneygram

[4] https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto

Post reply on HN