Yes, shut down the coal plants today, but you'll be cancelling more than Bitcoin PoW. So what are you really mad about? Bitcoin or Coal?
For goodness sakes, if these activists win at cancelling Bitcoin, all they've accomplished is extending the lifetime of coal-fired power generation. Yay?
What I am doing is pushing back on your original argument, which was that China has nuclear plants and we have lots of uranium, so it's fine to waste enormous amounts of energy mining Bitcoin.
My position is this: Today we have nuclear plants and coal plants, and we waste energy mining Bitcoin. It is a strictly better world where we have the same number of nuclear plants and fewer coal plants, and use the exact same amount of energy minus the amount that we spend on Bitcoin.
I strongly suspect that the incremental energy load of mining Bitcoin is coming from coal plants, not nuclear plants. (If anyone has hard data, I would welcome it.) If my suspicion is correct, then claiming that China has nuclear plants is irrelevant, since they aren't producing the electricity that's being spent mining Bitcoin.
Are you sealioning?
Currently, POW "currencies" burn real coal, divert energy from production applications like metal smelting, monopolize cheap renewables on-site (like Niagara falls) due to the way the markets reward BTC, which, in my opinion, is ridiculous. 60k for a slice of Ponzi pie?
Cognitive dissonance due to vested interests.
DO YOU OWN POW CRYPTO-"CURRENCIES"? - put that in your full disclaimer, please. It colors your output.