The government is the ultimate safeguard for a whole society, where it should be the steward of common-action when individual action can't be trusted on due to a combination of perverse incentives and issues arising from the tragedy of the commons.
Without that you have an anarchic lawless society where individualism can flourish and people can exploit whatever they want without regards for the 2nd, 3rd, n-th order impact that an action might cause unto others, because it's invisible or severely hidden to them. Or that they simply don't care about said impact because their personal reward is worth more to them than the benefit of society as a whole.
I want a government which is humble about its ability to declare an activity valueless to society. It would have been vastly arrogant to declare that cryptocurrency is useless in 2012. In 2022 it is… debatable.
I wouldn't paint everything in black and white. For what concerns the discussed legislation, I think it would be more correct to legislate about goals and leave everybody free on how to achieve them (when needed).
The users and buyers of human sex slaves sponsor the human trafficking industry, and find it worthwhile.
Who is the government to say otherwise?
Oh yeah, that's right, the government SHOULD actually make policies to cut down on negative affects of things that some people want to do. You know, because that's the whole point of government.
The purpose of a state-level policy (state as in government not state as in NY) is to have a state-level agregate effect, not to actually care about each microscopic individual instance.
If you make a policy that in effect Bitcoin is illegal, that will have a population-scale effect.
The fact that you can make an argument that 'it's just computation no different from any other computation' is ignorant of the point and kind of jeuvenile. You didn't say anything they didn't know perfectly well.
> The fact that you can make an argument that 'it's just computation no different from any other computation' is ignorant of the point and kind of jeuvenile.
Why call me juvenile? That's not necessary to make your argument. It's rude too and against the rules.
> Enforcement practicality is a separate issue.
No it's not, enforcement practicality is the only important issue regarding a law. An unenforceable law is useless.
I didn't say it's not an issue, I said it's a separate issue.
The question of if a thing is harmful or should be controlled or declared illegal, and the question of how the implimentation mechanics of controlling a thing might be done, are two completely different questions. If you had no way to physically prevent murders, that does not then follow that therefor murder shouldn't be illegal. Failing to realize that is yet another example of jeuvenile.
Practically every law, policy, regulation, code, etc has some element of arbitrariness, interpretation, and discretion or selective enforcement. This one is no different.
The government should step in when the market can't serve the needs of society, in this case it's cryptocurrency enthusiasts and profiteers not paying for the externalities, causing a detriment to society. A carbon tax scheme aimed directly at cryptocurrency could be another solution, but it sounds like something that would be way more work to enforce.
I would also welcome a global carbon tax levied at the source (on raw fossil fuel) as it would solve a lot of issues but it's just not gonna happen for political reasons.
Given that the global carbon tax is unlikely to happen, we might has well take action against proof of work now since it would still be a net benefit for mankind.
NYC is not the only city in NY state either, there's lots of sprawl in the rest of the state and punishing car driving that way would be political suicide, besides being a harsh and rushed measure to undo the costly blunder that was planning cities around private vehicle usage.
That's discounting a federal carbon tax that would go this deep, because that's certainly not happening.
Because perfect is the enemy of good. A global carbon tax is my dream as well, that won't ever stop me to defend the government trying to tax incredibly wasteful industries as a step towards that. It's not black-and-white.
They hope to find it worthwhile, but are mostly disappointed when their money chasing doesn't pan out. Participation in PoW Blockchain stuff is worthwhile for the black market dealers/buyers, hackers, market manipulators, frauds, miners, and a minority of the speculators with good timing, but the overall utility is awful.
Who is the government to say otherwise?