Was thinking the same thing... There's no evidence I can see to suggest the parent is not also against other forms of excessive energy consumption.

There's a hidden subjective value judgment built into the word "excessive" that's doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. These "regulation" comments tend to have a high likelihood of boiling down "I want the government to stop things I don't like", where environmental concerns (crypto) or data collection (adtech) is a mere pretense grounded in incomplete information at best, emotion at worst.

Personally speaking I find it just as irritating of a pattern here that knee-jerk calls for "regulation" (i.e. bring in the coercive power of the state) or outright banning are so often floated as a/the solution to every problem. When legal coercion is suggested, it is entirely proper to bring up the existence of the dragons that lay down that road.

I want the government to look seriously at things that are using the energy footprint of a mid-sized country simply to spin up a new financial instrument. Particularly when there appear to be equivalent things that don't.

If cryptocurrencies didn't have the energy footprint, I would find them pretty uninteresting and/or ridiculous for various reasons, but ultimately it wouldn't bother me that people do what they do with them. When they start adding seriously to the global energy load in a time of climate crisis that makes them pretty offensive.

it's not simply a "new financial instrument", it's a whole ecossystem

I don't know whether you're referring to me or some of the other replies, but I am definitely against most forms of excessive energy consumption if they can be avoided.