It's useful to know that BTC has major externalities because it allows us to make a rational choice. We could make different choices about all the things you listed, too. Or not! But you seem to be actually arguing for willful blindness, here.
Can you point out where in the paper the authors leap to "let's regulate" as you put it? There seems to be one small section about regulation, but it doesn't exactly advocate for it: it describes how their pricing research could be used in regulation. It describes challenges in regulating. But it responsibly avoids making moral/policy claims.
> However, the ability to locate, and re-locate, cryptomining almost anywhere (e.g., following the cheapest, under-regulated electricity source) and fund mining camps from anywhere with complete or near anonymity create significant challenges to implementing effective regulation
It's helpful for authors to point out how they think their work fits into the broader scheme of things. They correctly identify that a high cost to benefit ratio might make people interested in regulating it; they also correctly identify that practical concerns make that difficult. There is no advocacy there.
Even if there were, it wouldn't be inappropriate to say "hey, there's a downside to this; we recommend trying to fix that."
No Im actually not. You said that. Pointing out that you can cherry pick and micro-analyze anything.
Your playground rhetoric isn't helpful.
So what are you saying?
So it shouldn't be surprising that crypto mining is added to the list.
Any and all heavy users of energy are contributing to climate change in some way, and the cost/benefit analysis for some are more justifiable than others. Food production is energy-hungry, but without it, people die. Nobody would die if crypto mining ended tomorrow. Thanks to government standards, idle electronics are better now than they were, and will continue to improve in the future. Big homes with A/C is a largely American problem without anything to really address it yet, but there has been a lot of attention focused on the issue already.
In general a bad thing is bad whether there are worse things or not. Crypto mining is a big drain on energy resources with very little benefit, or with benefit to very few people, and it doesn't have to the biggest drain, or benefit the fewest number of people the least for that to be true.
0. https://www.nrdc.org/stories/keep-your-devices-wasting-energ...
1. https://www.ajc.com/news/local/are-air-conditioners-slowly-k...
2. https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/7/25/8881364/greta-th...
3. https://phys.org/news/2017-11-impact-climate-china-substanti...
It makes no sense, in the current situation, to discuss 10000 small energy consumers and appropriate pollution tax for all of them. We need to fix the damn energy production first.