Maybe so, but at least mining is actually necessary to get gold out of the ground. Whereas running a distributed database and gambling can both be had for much less.
All of bitcoin could be run on a home PC from 2005. It can do about three transactions a second. And it is burning 0.5% of the electricity of the entire planet to do so.
This is basically a crime against humanity at this point.
Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency
Genocide is not the only crime against humanity, yet it is still illegal. Go figure.