Like I said, the both use some amount of power. You consider one acceptable but the other not to be. So if Bitcoin used only as much power as gaming then it would be perfectly fine? Hence the punchline to the old joke. What's the acceptable amount of power use for something to judge whether or not it should be banned?
Maybe some think the argument is ridiculous and would never come to bite them in the butt, and yet there were stories like this being thrown around this past year:
https://nichegamer.com/high-end-gam...gy-bill-limits-sales-on-high-performance-pcs/.
Not sucking down the power of several countries would be a start. It's not even comparable to other payment processors or databases. Again, I'm not calling for it to be banned, I'm saying
it's wholly unreasonable and stupid.
Again, gaming is massive (last I heard, 2/3rds of American households) and gaming Pcs
do things. They
play games, and the hardware doubles for, yknow, being a PC.
Bitcoin sucks
ten times as much power all so it can
choke on seven transactions a second.
Also, your article is wrong and actually helps my point. The regulations target idle power consumption. It's primarily aimed at office PCs and monitors that sit at idle most of the day, and there's big exceptions for load. Here's a
still-somewhat-scaremongering PCWorld article that explains and
a JayzTwoCents video if you prefer youtube.
This may surprise you, but
I'm in favor of regulations like this. Gaming PCs get more efficient every year, but even with more efficient ASICs, Bitcoin just doesn't scale.
I'm sure the same kind of arguments were made about any new technology or idea by someone. Television, rock and roll, video games etc. have all been seen as devils, destructive, or something that ought to be banned. It's entirely possible that in another thirty years none of the currently existing digital currencies are widely popular or even still around, but I don't see the idea itself going away. I highly doubt it will replace existing institutions and systems as some crypto evangelists believe, but that doesn't mean it's useless either.
Here's the thing, those new techs like television? They were quickly in use. I think it took late 1920s TVs into the 1930s to be commercially available, especially impressive considering how much faster tech is adopted now compared to 100 years ago. Hell, unless I'm mistake lasers were developed as a tech that was developed for the sake of it as opposed to having an immediate use, but was quickly put to use in industry and then within something like fifteen years was being used to scan barcodes in stores.
Crypto? Fifteen years in and people are still reaching for the most niche of use-cases for this massive black hole. Decentralized, trustless and immutable transactions just aren't useful in the real-world.