Will Biden's plan to tax crypto mining reduce emissions? Critics say no
The tax is intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, electricity costs and local environmental pollution, but has not been kindly received by the crypto community. Cryptocurrency miners based in the United States could soon face a tax equal to 30% of the cost of electricity they use if President Joe Biden’s proposed budget for the fiscal year 2024 is approved by Congress, but the proposal has sparked debate about whether it would actually decrease global emissions and energy prices. Cryptocurrency mining is a resource-intensive process that attempts to solve increasingly complex equations in order to create new blocks which can then be validated and added to the blockchain. This process consumes a significant amount of energy, with some estimates placing the global energy consumption of Bitcoin (BTC) mining alone at around 0.59% of the world's energy usage, which is roughly equivalent to the energy usage of Malaysia, according to Worldometer. Biden’s Council of Economic Advis...