Sure, the miners pay for the electricity, but everyone pays the price of having more climate change.

What are the main causes of climate change? And who gets to decide what is an appropriate use of power vs a bad use of power?

If the power I use comes from renewables is that cool?

Somehow I live in a different reality where my actions have consequences and I think about them. In that reality, free markets are just a tool. To be used when appropriate.

In the reality I live in money rules everything. I have goods I want to buy, I have money. I exchange money for goods. I am alergic to people that get on their high horses about what I am allowed to spend my money on.

Bitcoin doesn't fall in the category of goods though. It's a service. If it stops operating, any "coins" it had allocated are just bits in the wind.

Now you may say you should be free to spend money on the horrendous energy bill of those miners, so that they allocate some coins to you. If there were no externalities, I'd agree. But since there are, I will argue against doing it. And we won't bridge that divide here I guess.

Free markets only work up to a point. Once you start having hidden costs that don't enter the equation, like climate change or excessive consumer prices due to supply not catching up with demand, is when other control mechanisms are needed.

That's fine.

If the proposal is to reexamine and change the way our society works in order to avoid the tragedy of the commons that's great.

If the proposal is to arbitrarily ban something we don't like or understand that's a problem.

How about the amount of power a datacenter uses? What about all this "AI" - the hardware used for training the models is very power hungry?

Yes, sure, we can look at things on a case-by-case basis. It’s pretty easy to look at something like bitcoin and see that inefficiency is the purpose rather than the byproduct, and then make regulations about that.