Feel free to like or dislike cryptocurrency mining (I too believe it to be a waste of energy -- but that's not the point), but it's likely not going away. So you want the "green" efforts to be as cheap and efficient as possible, if you want to outcompete the less eco friendly alternatives.
The reality is that there are only a handful of energy providers in Iceland capable of providing the energy at this scale, Landsvirkjun being the largest (by far).
These companies are either government owned or very sensitive to political realities, and will stop selling energy to mining centers if the pressure becomes strong enough.
I don't see how that fixes things at the global level (aside from them leaving Iceland and relocating somewhere else, of course).
Now they might at least be paying taxes and generating some jobs.
If it wasn't used for mining, where would the excess power go?
Don’t the miners pay tax in your country?
Following you argument, whether you like it or not, people will commit homicide. Let’s regulate it!
How much banker do you need per transaction? With modern banking, most everything uses as few humans as possible (if not simply because they're slow).
> When compared to the enormous inefficiency of the global banking system, the energy consumed per transaction for crypto comes out far, far ahead.
Do you happen to have any sources for this? I wasn't able to find much after a quick google search.
If we had more automation and fewer banking jobs, beef consumption would go down because the former bankers would vanish into thin air?
Visa: 3.1 billion cards; $8.9 trillion in transactions in 2016; 65,000 transactions per second capacity.
Bitcoin is a very sad joke compared to just Visa. The global banking system is a marvel of efficiency by comparison.
Bitcoin is consuming as much electricity as the Czech Republic or Switzerland and half as much as the Netherlands.
Dollar for dollar, the global banking system is using less than 1% of the electricity that Bitcoin is.
Banking provides a number of services and employs a bunch of other peoples. Sending money from a to be is just one of the things it does.