[Spivak]

(Not saying I agree with the article) But that doesn't change how you do the calculus. Every good or service has some positive value to people roughly measured by price people are willing to pay for it and negative value measured roughly by the total value of the resources needed to produce. In most businesses or as an individual this is all you care about. But in addition goods and services can also have positive and negative externalities. Universal trash collection has the positive externality of reducing disease. And basically every consumer good has a negative externality of producing (some) trash.

As a whole people we should include these externalities in the value prop of services despite the fact that businesses and individuals don't because it's a cost we collectively pay.

Trash is my biggest pet-peeve example of this. As an individual I have very little power to control the amount of trash I produce because goods I buy come with so much stupid packaging that I can't give back or recycle and there is no incentive for the people in the position to affect change to do anything about it because they don't bear the cost.

In a similar fashion carbon taxes help to capture the negative externalities of energy use. And if the article is true then collecting that tax would make it so that bitcoin mining is (right now) unprofitable. This is to be expected since such a collection would be sudden increase in the cost of mining when the market has pushed margins thin. The market would adjust, transaction fees would go up, and miners would find non-carbon producing energy sources and we'd probably reach a new equilibrium that is profitable for everyone involved again.