A moral conclusion is baked into the formulation of the issue, that Bitcoin "wastes" energy, but it can be applied to almost anything: gold mining "wastes" ener

A moral conclusion is baked into the formulation of the issue, that Bitcoin "wastes" energy, but it can be applied to almost anything: gold mining "wastes" energy, circulating hard currency "wastes" energy, social media "wastes" energy, any waste at all wastes energy To my mind "Bitcoin is a problem" is a reductionist take on the larger environmental issue of reducing emissions, and it shortcuts the larger philosophical issue of whether and how we decide whether some particular use of energy is wrong or right Perhaps a solution would be to make electricity for bitcoin mining alone more expensive, or by the same token, mandate subsidies for "good" uses, like food and medical production. Or would doing this cause unintended consequences worse than the original "problem" of Bitcoin? But to my mind Bitcoin being a "waste" or bad is not yet established just by citing its admittedly massive scale of energy use