It's the retailers of the GPUs I think should be regulated by the government not ban mining. When there is demand for GPUs normally the retailers will also be selling them for higher prices.
I think it's very hard to regulate retailers realistically. If they will want to sell to miners, they will find a way.
While I agree that the vast majority of altcoins are not generating anything useful at all and are either scams, bad projects and a waste of resources at the same time we need to wonder if this is actually illegal? And the answer is no, a greater demand for computer parts is without a doubt going to inconvenience a lot of people but since this is not illegal in itself I do not see the point to try to regulate this.
Also government intervention is not my preferred method to solve anything as governments have the tendency to completely distort markets by giving preference to their friends and other powerful actors, so I think it is better to let the market fix itself, whether this comes from a decrease in the demand as people realize they are investing in hardware that will not give them the profits they are looking for, or because the supply increases or both since this will not last forever.
Governments have power to make things illegal.
It can take many years for the market to fix itself. Nvidia and AMD didn't believe that the mining boom of 2017 could be repeated (and you can't blame them), so they didn't increase their production capacities. They are still not betting on their mining products.
Or take Chia coin for example. Came out of nowhere, screwed up the whole SSD market, countless read/write cycles were wasted and nothing productive was achieved.
Anyway letting governments to dictate what should we do in terms of personal computational power that we did to mine cryptocurrencies is a hell of a dystopian.
All the mainstream fields of economy are quite heavily regulated even in western world that is often viewed as the part of the world with the most freedom. So sooner or later when crypto will join mainstream, the government will regulate it. They will never care what people do on their computers, they will simply tell exchanges and other services which coins are acceptable and which are not. Of course you could still use any blacklisted coin, but such coins will have no popularity without access to legal markets.
