Second, I was super interested in Bitcoin around 2010-2011. Doing a little bit of small scale mining myself. I've since become very negative on Bitcoin for a few reasons. 1. Insatiable energy needs, and the environmental impact of that. 2. It's a solution looking for a problem, and not a good solution at that 3. It's a world filled with charlatans and get rich quicker. Pump and dump.
Overall I think you're exactly right, it's like the Tobacco companies telling us cigarettes are good for you. It's motivated reasoning, or just straight up propaganda, and green washing.
And before they published this, I was already seeing people use this exact line of motivated reasoning, that mining encourages green energy development, to justify it. So now I think Square, Jack, and Elon just gave that story more credibility.
Here are two takedowns of the Square argument, sorry both are paywalls, but googling the headline got me to both: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-22/what-musk...
https://www.ft.com/content/0448b44d-1d78-48f8-8ca8-6edae7976...