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This is about 10% of the total energy usage of bitcoin. So replacing the energy destroyed by bitcoin would cost 40-50 billion.

It would be a very low-hanging, high-payoff way to improve emissions if bitcoin was just banned.

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Taxing it for capital gains is at least something I suppose, but it doesn't seem to have slowed it down.

All taxing capital gains does is slows it down as a currency for every day goods. I’m taking USD loans against it because it’s tax efficient (not because it would be unpractical, what people usually suggest).

What’s the process to decide (1) Energy usage of applications and (2) How to prioritize ban on applications which exceed a certain threshold?

The obvious one would be a carbon tax.

Do you live in a country with a functional democratic government and legal system?

That is the process. You can participate in it.

Bitcoin mining off unused power at a hydro plant, the cheapest way to do it, already doesn’t hurt anything because there isn’t anything better being done with it or better ways to store it.

The vast majority of bitcoin mining is not that, and that problem is much better fixed by upgrading the power grid rather than destroying the energy.

And yet that's far from the majority of where energy for bitcoin mining comes from. It's still mostly fossil fuel sources (miners don't shut down their miners just because their cheapest energy goes away).

By and large, there isn't "unused power" lying around anywhere needing to be used up. There are occasional spikes from high wind, but those are occasional, and miners tend to run 24/7.

> doesn’t hurt anything because there isn’t anything better being done with it or better ways to store it

That's a very strong statement. If you unpack it a little bit, what you are saying is there is absolutely nothing productive ("better") that could be using that energy. I don't know if that's the case. Bitcoin mining might just be the most profitable thing to do, so nothing else was attempted.

I didn’t say anything better could be done with it, just that it isn’t. If we had carbon capture technology or an aluminum plant that would be a better use.

I can’t find a source saying this that isn’t a website exclusively dedicated to crypto news. Do you know of a normal media source for this claim?

There appear to be disagreements about it, but the normal media got their info about how much electricity is used from those same crypto fans in the first place. They've just chosen to not believe the same crypto fans saying it's mostly renewable power.

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