"The total energy consumption associated with the entire Bitcoin network exceeds that of countries like Ireland, Bangladesh and Austria" https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2020/12/calculating-clima...
If we consider second-order effects we can come up with a bunch more, including allowing drug sales, human trafficking, allows people to hide their assets and more. But again, seems focused on the limitations of the protocol and clients using it, not second-order effects.
Edit: I'm not saying Bitcoin are in fact causing all those things and I'm myself bullish on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general. I'm only trying to reason why the environment impact was not brought up in the article itself.
What is impossible with Bitcoin, though, is jurisdiction over transfers. Bank/guardian will obey the court, cops can blast your safe to get your gold - but without your wallet key, they can’t do anything.
Whether this is a problem or advantage depends on your point of view; The people of Cyprus, who woke up one morning to discover that any deposits they have above 200KEur were unilaterally borrowed by the government until further notice, or the Americans whose gold was confiscated in the 1930s just before the USD devaluation, might have a different opinion than yours.
Personally, I think it’s a good idea for government to have such a power if and only if a proper system of checks and balances is in place ; and the ones currently available are less than stellar.
For the US, for example, I would rather have confiscation power require 50 state AG mulitisig (or at least, say, 40 of them) - the fiat system, as is, effectively allows one person to drive confiscation.
Also, yours is an argument against any bearer instrument. Consider gold or well hidden cash - if you don’t know where I put it or what the serial numbers are, you can’t confiscate it.
This article gives another point of view: https://www.coindesk.com/what-bloomberg-gets-wrong-about-bit...
Some arguments are a bit far-fetched, I wish there was some overview article taking all these points into account. These kinds of footprint analyses are quite novel anyway and of course don't exist yet for Bitcoin in the most convincing fashion.