[Glavnokoman]

"The government making a value judgement about what type of commercial activity is worthwhile is extremely risky" Bullshit. That's what government is for. It already forbids commercial activities as robbery, stealing, fraud etc. If they put crypto into the same basket I wouldn't cry much.

[roenxi]

> ...robbery, stealing, fraud...

Those aren't commercial activities. One of the parties doesn't agree to the deal, so they are violations of property rights.

The justification for forbidding them isn't that the government has concerns about the transaction (the robber probably needs the goods more than the person they are robbing, on a needs basis most robberies might be justifiable for all I know). The problem is the involuntary nature of a robbery. That isn't a factor here.

[tshaddox]

But you don’t justify a ban on robbery because of the energy usage of getaway cars, right?

[Koffiepoeder]

This is kind of a false equivalence [0], the carbon footprint of the getaway cars would be much smaller.

Generally problems are only handled* when they come up. In this case the carbon footprint of crypto is already a problem, so therefore it is now being handled. Getaway car carbon footprint on the other hand is not a problem as of now, so therefore this is not a correct parallel to draw.

* you could argue that we should have foresight, but unfortunately this is very hard to pull of. Most policy making is thus reactive, not proactive.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence