Now let's take this to the extreme: What if you mined cryptocurrency by burning medicine? The more you burn, the richer you are. Clearly that's evil, as it rewards you for destroying the world.
In a perfect world you would mine cryptocurrency by making progress in peace on earth, good will towards man.
But if you can answer this: What useful resource, that's expensive to produce and has an environmental impact, do you want to incentivize destroying in order to further your greed?
Can you think of anything? Is it not by its very nature evil?
But consider even what happened under Imperial rule in India: Locals were rewarded for every dead snake they proved to the British. What happened? Obviously they started breeding snakes!
So now you have MORE snakes! You actually made the problem worse!
I fully agree with the article, but perhaps naively am optimistic about Chia.
I see it as a comparatively ethical alternative to other currencies.