Bitcoin is terrible technology and stupidly wasteful, but there are new blockchain networks coming along that are about a million times more efficient, so use those instead.
If you are referring to PoS (both stake and space), they make fundamentally different tradeoffs as opposed to PoW. It's intellectually dishonest to claim either is "more efficient".
How does that affect the whole ransomware, regulation etc side of things?
How's bitcoin stupidly wasteful?
It's a race towards spending ever greater amounts of energy to mine blocks.