Europe must ban Bitcoin mining to hit the 1.5C Paris climate goal, says Sweden
I oppose carbon taxes (I don&#x27;t want to get into that here); I also think bitcoin is stupid. But I see this kind of headline as an argument for a carbon tax. Trying to ban specific things is a silly political game of whack-a-mole - creating an exhaustive list of &quot;bad&quot; things is impossible and also overreach into telling people what to do. The better way (and I realize this is beating a dead horse) is to have the price reflect the externalities. Let people mine bitcoin or idle their car or whatever other thing they want, just make sure the cost they pay to do it properly reflects the all-in cost of the activity, and try to do it in a way that the poor are not disproportionately disadvantaged (whoops, that&#x27;s a big part of my opposition).