> You have the freedom to do a lot of things. You can go and play in traffic if you really want. Everyone else has the freedom to call you an idiot and shout at you for how stupid and inconsiderate you're being.

You can't go and play in traffic - that's jaywalking and it's illegal

> We actually do. Authoritarian regimes do it at the drop of a hat, but even free democracies ban activities they view as purely destructive.

When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. But using the banhammer for things you don't like is never good is the long run, because it creates an incentive for other people to use it against think you like but they don't.

> It's important to remember, people need energy to heat their homes and not die, and we're not going to pretend that's an equally useful application of energy as bitcoin mining

And people need food, which is why we have food banks.

In the end, heat is just heat. Unless you also legislate you can't heat your home above 80, let's not pretend heating is not wasteful. Then the next thing will be legislating you need good insulation, then you forbid to use oil like recently in Quebec or gas like recently in New York.

The only people really hurted by this are people who have different preferences (I like heat, so I'd like my house to be 80) and people who're poor (they can't buy electricity, but they can buy an oil furnace to warn their bedroom).

This is bad, but a lot of people fail to realize this, and commit the fallacy of composition by projecting their set of preferences or characteristics (ex: having the money to buy electricity, or living in a country where they can trust the central bank)