White House proposes a 30 percent tax on electricity used for crypto mining

[The Morning After]( Now available on your smart speaker and wherever you get your podcasts [Apple Podcasts]( | [Spotify]( | [Google Podcasts]( It's Thursday, May 04, 2023. The Biden administration wants to impose a 30 percent tax, called the [Digital Asset Mining Energy or DAME excise tax]( on the electricity used for cryptocurrency mining. It explained it wants to tax crypto-mining companies because they aren't paying for the "full cost they impose on others," including environmental pollution and high energy prices. Does mining crypto-currency use that much power? Yes. In April, The New York Times published a report detailing the energy used by the 34 large-scale Bitcoin miners in the US. Just those 34 operations together use the same amount of electricity as three million households. If the proposal becomes law, the government will impose the excise tax in phases. It would start by adding a 10 percent tax on miners' electricity use in the first year, 20 percent in the second, and 30 percent from the third year onwards. – Mat Smith The Morning After isn’t just a[newsletter]( – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by[subscribing right here](. The biggest stories you might have missed [AMD's Ryzen 7040U chips promise speedier graphics for thin-and-light laptops]( [New ‘Double Dragon’ game trailer promises nostalgic beat-em-up thrills]( ['Fortnite' lands on Amazon Luna]( [Google rolls out support for passkeys across its services]( [Watch the first trailer for ‘Dune: Part Two’]( Chalamet catches a ride on a sandworm. [[TMA] Warner Bros.]( The first trailer for Dune: Part Two is here, and if you were a fan of Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of the first half of Frank Herbert's seminal sci-fi novel, let's say Part Two looks more of the same. 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