This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 16, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Entrepreneurial politicians have seized upon the energy demands of Bitcoin miners for special scrutiny as imposing higher costs on consumers.

But a better question might be, are there special disfavored consumers of electricity who shouldn't even be able to access the grid or

face extra hurdles for those purchases.

It is Travis Fisher and Nick Anthony comment.

When we talk about Bitcoin Mining, a part of the conversation is, look at how much energy

gets consumed by these Bitcoin mining operations and that has led some entrepreneurial

politicians let's say to seize upon that to seek greater regulation, greater authority over, you know,

Travis, correct me if I'm wrong, but who gets to consume energy?

Well, I thought this was the United States of America,

where you get to consume anything you buy fairly on an open market.

But I think what's setting up here is a situation of electricity shortage.

So it's really hard to build new supply, both on the power plant side, on the

transmission side, all of it.

So when there's new demand, and there is now, and this is both on the data center side where they're doing more than just Bitcoin mining this is AI this is everything and then you layer on top of that a I would say modest amount of cryptocurrency mining, then everybody's in this food fight of who gets to use the power in this supply constrained environment.

You get into this rationing posture and then people start saying things like well we know

electricity is affected with the public interest because that's what the laws have

been saying for a hundred years so we have to look at consumption through a public interest lens and does

Bitcoin pass the public interest test and a lot of people are saying what's it good

for we don't I don't care about this stuff I don't want it why don't we just

ban it and we're actually seeing that in some provinces in Canada

...