We've ignored the issue for decades and fully embraced ACs, huge cars, big TVs, high-end gaming PCs, cheap products from China, air travel and the excessive eating of meat.
Even in these times of peak awareness, the typical consumer continues to add more electrical devices to their homes, install jacuzzis in their garden and get ever bigger cars.
Nobody is outraged about any of this behavior. We deserve these toys and justify them.
Bitcoin simply stands out as an easy scapegoat. It's not that people actually care about sustainability, they simply see something they don't understand or need, hence let's ban it. Compare it to the outrage regarding very large trucks, and people calling for a ban.
The trouble is, there's only a few of such trucks, so it does nothing. It would be much more fruitful to ban or heavily tax big TVs, as there's many more of them. And just like that, nobody's interested in sustainability anymore. Not when it personally hurts. So it's all optics, not outcomes.
I see no value in high-end gaming PCs and think they should be banned. They have no meaningful societal value to justify their energy use. You see no value in Bitcoin and think it should be banned.
Neither of us has the moral high ground. We're all a bunch of hypocrites that hand pick whatever we consider of personal value, and to disregard anything else that others may consider of value.
Silicon brains are the spice of civilization. The only limit on who much e-waste we produce is how fast we can churn them out.
We do new things, and figure out how to manage the fallout for the successful things after the fact.
There is clearly is no strong consensus that bitcoin is bad, since it's worth over a trillion dollars. In fact, people are jumping into bitcoin because they believe the existing financial system is bad and on the verge of collapse.
We'll see.
Price is not consensus of goodness, and it's not value. You wouldn't believe what the market cap of heroin is. Market cap is the most recent trade price multiplied by supply. The price is overwhelmingly determined by USDT trading, not USD trading. According to Google Trends fewer people care now than in much of recent memory.
And further, they're quite mistaken about the impending doom. Just as the man with the megaphone yelling about the rapture has been wrong for decades too.
I guess what I'm saying is, it's time for an e-waste tax and a carbon tax.
[edit] You know, when the Cuyahoga River caught fire, the official response wasn't "well folks we should probably just keep dumping stuff into the river until we find a new process, nothing to worry about, just wear these brominated swim trunks when you go for a dip to avoid burns" -- it was to create the EPA and tell companies to immediately cease and desist until they found a better way forward.