Even clothes dryer seem to be using less energy than Bitcoin. If you run the dryer for an hour each week, you're at 12-15kWh per month, which is 1-2% of your average household energy usage in the US, Canada or the EU. Now households at most around a third of the electricity in cold countries with a decent amount of electric heating for which dryers are much less, but let's run with it. That still sets the upper bound to 0.6%, which incidentally is the same as bitcoin.
If we're going to start legislating how we're all allowed to use energy that civilization has made available, who gets to decide what's allowed?
Numbers I've seen suggest that global PC gaming alone (excluding consoles) currently uses about as much electricity as bitcoin. Should we ban that too since playing cards are readily available and use almost no energy? Maybe we can make a concession and only allow low powered handheld consoles?
If bitcoin mining actually becomes problematic, then by all means we can definitely ban it or add some sin taxes to it, and we probably will in a lot of jurisdictions. I'm actually kind of eager for that to happen, because it will force miners to actually become novel/stranded energy ventures. They'll be the capital drive that builds out energy sources that not enough humans live around to justify tapping and/or we can't economically justifying building without expensive transmission infrastructure. And once it's built out and paid off, it may be a lot easier to justify investing in building out long distance transmission infrastructure so the rest of civilization can also tap into these sources.
We already legislate different pricing for different applications. Household electricity has a different price than industrial usage. A 1000x price of electricity for certain applications is just a small extension of what we currently have.
it's called "we the people" or democracy if you will. We as a society decide that cryptocurrency aren't worth destroying the world over, and that's about it.
If bitcoin mining uses co2 producing power (because the economics supports it), is that the fault of bitcoin or the government for not sufficiently taxing the negative externalities of that means of production?
Unless we believe that Bitcoin has some use, its power consumption would be problematic even if it weren't so monstrously large. And vanishingly few people believe Bitcoin has any value beyond a get rich quick scheme.
There is no market in the world where you are going to decrease consumption by increasing the demand. That's just not how economics works.
It's curious how much agitation there is concerning the energy consumption of PoW. I don't see nearly as many articles calling for restricting AWS & co. Coincidentally Bitcoin is the base layer of a decentralized finance world completely out of the control of traditional elites and banks.
It's also a new finance world completely under the control of an even smaller elite of devs and mining pool owners (see the hard fork of Ethereum that happened a long time ago, and the upcoming fork of Ethereum that will move it to PoS; sure, Ethereum isn't Bitcoin, but there is nothing fundamentally different to prevent Bitcoin taking a similar step whenever the devs and miners decide).
What Bitcoin definitely is not is a new currency where the people have any kind of control. It is actively opposed to that goal, and takes away even the slight chance of a benevolent leader that exists with central bank controlled currencies.
