> bitcoin would need to be banned by a serious amount of governments to have any real effect on energy consumption
What's your reason behind believing that? From what I know , Bitcoin mining fell 50% when China banned it [1]. How would that not be similar if the US + EU just bans it tomorrow?
Temporarily dropped 50%, then the miners moved to new countries and it's almost completely back to its hash rate from before the China ban now (probably has by now, the article below is from Dec 2021).
