The US Government bans a lot of things which are deleterious to society. Online gambling among them.

The purpose is not to eliminate Cryptocurrencies, but to reduce the price of Bitcoin and other PoW coins such that mining (which is a misallocation of our civilization's energy and advanced manufactured goods) becomes significantly less rewarding.

Ethereum at least has a Governing body which is moving it to PoS. Bitcoin does not. Government regulation is the only answer.

Maybe if there was a little less regulation in the first place, things like bitcoin wouldn't have as much appeal as they do.

This is old rhetoric. Sidestepping the government no longer has anything to do with Bitcoin appeal. At this point, it's purely speculation and money laundering, all subversiveness potential has been evacuated for good.

I realize many people don't care about credit cards spying on them, but I do value cryptocurrencies offering alternatives. From what I understand the Apple Credit Card was somewhat of a similar attempt (Goldman Sachs isn't allowed to sell the information). I'm not saying that the benefits outweigh the costs, but it does seem that they allow for more than money laundering, and speculation.

Taxing the hell out of it would work. What company would want to pay 90% of their cryptocurrency in taxes? and if you can't pay your taxes in cryptocurrency, and instead have to convert it to cash, that'll drive the price down pretty quick and make everybody scatter.

edit: to head off the downvote brigade, I'm not advocating for this. Only pointing out that "banning" doesn't necessarily mean outlawing its use, but can also include making it unfavourable to use.