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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

trying to wrap my head around how this would be enforced.

what if 51% of your server duties are handling API requests for your SAAS or some bullshit product, and 49% is crypto? is your electric bill crypto related or is that just something you do with idle power?

or you start a company that builds battery storage to accumulate energy off-peak for some admirable "green purposes" - meanwhile another company (that you own) is a customer of this and uses power from that storage facility "free of charge" since it is a humble research project.

so many ways to loophole this.

power is power, if you are paying for it you should be able to use it how you please. considering marijuana is federally illegal, shouldn't power for grow operations be treated the same way? it's a slippery slope.

if they want to disincentivize crypto they need to do something about the tragic state of the us dollar.

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If I was the tax man, I'd tell you to stop trying to evade taxes by mixing your traffic together, and charge you on the whole lot

You're treating the law like a set of programmable rules, where in fact it is not. If you operate a "partial" crypto operation like you said, the IRS will ask you to open your books and show them how you account for your power usage.

I see this time and time again, but public officials aren't idiots. The IRS aren't idiots. Broad, non-specific laws are enforceable. Eventually the burden will be on you to prove you're not doing anything illegal. Fun fact: the vast majority of people who would make arguments like this are hiding an illegal crypto operation.

My first thought was running a "district heating system" by moving the generated heat somewhere useful and "selling" it at a loss. Watt for watt, it's almost as efficient as resistive heating, but is probably not located near people would want piped heat.

> power is power, if you are paying for it you should be able to use it how you please

different users have different rates in most regions depending on their demands. Some users even can get paid to use power, when the grid frequency goes too high.

Diesel is diesel, if you're paying for it you should be able to use it as you please...

(don't look up what red diesel is if you don't want your bubble popped)

The red diesel argument fuels mine. We need to move away from taxing fuel to generate road revenue and do that in a use tax especially now that EV’s are taking over. This is a current debate right now.

It's enforced when you yourself declare how much electricity your mining operation used, because you want to expense that cost to avoid paying unnecessary income taxes. This isn't about personal activity, and frankly this reflex to argue against regulation of commercial entities as if they're aimed at individuals is odd. If you do your own individual-scale cryptocurrency mining and spend the resulting coins for your own personal uses, nobody is going to come knocking or really even care post facto - because it's obviously quite unenforceable at an individual level. What this really affects is industrial scale operations that report profits as fully system legible financial income.

Definitely charge an extra tax if you're using Ruby...

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