It is bad regardless what fuel you use. Bitcoin uses a proof-of-waste system which scales to any amount of resources available. If some day we had nearly limitless energy from fusion reactors and ran the economy on Bitcoin, there would be a race to strip mine the planet to build more reactors whose output would be wasted to capture the same fixed slice of the mining pie.

If this conclusion sounds absurd we should reconsider the premise that Bitcoin deserves any kind of place in our society.

> Armored bank vehicles are bad for the environment too.

A negligible part of the traffic on the road are bank vehicles, and they don't carry a large part of global wealth. Dollars can be efficiently transferred over the internet now, because the banking system, however slow and fossilised, actually has incentive to reduce waste, unlike Bitcoin.

Fossil fuel plant reactivated and expanded solely to run transaction validation for cryptocurrencies.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkby7z/a-fossil-fuel-power-p...