CHRISTOPHER SEAN BATT - 

“If AI and robotics become good enough, everyone will have everything they want and money will disappear… Bitcoin will be the currency because it’s made of energy.” – Elon Musk, 2025 

I have no doubt that one day, Elon’s money will disappear. And he won’t have everything he wants. 

But let’s leave the beyond-utopia fantasy alone for a minute. 

Let’s unpack the technical and macro-economic underpinnings of any proof-of-work crypto-currency, with regard to the outlandish statements we hear about energy. 

Energy usage worries surrounding AI and data centers are trending, and it wasn’t too long ago that the propaganda against Bitcoin said the same thing: it is wasteful of electricity.

While I can think of many better uses than AI for scarce energy resources, including water and ohh, I don’t know, feeding ourselves off our own productive farmland, at least data centers consistently produce output for input. Mining intelligence is arguably going to produce some results for the power spent.

However, proof-of-work crypto-currency infrastructure has a very different set of metrics, and a different economic model altogether. What most people don’t understand is that Bitcoin mining is not a one-to-one productive manufacturing process, rather it is competitive and inherently wasteful – most of the algorithmic GPU churning never results in mining a token – only the first to the finish line benefits, claiming the next block that gets added across the distributed system. Everyone else that spent compute resources, electricity, and water goes home with nothing and starts the next race, just hoping to produce some value next time. It’s all just wasted. And the global hash-rate, which is the sum of all compute power across the independent Bitcoin node network, is ever increasing. That means that the amount of resources wasted is increasing, and there is a necessity to constantly increase compute for all participants in the network, with no end in sight.

If the price of Bitcoin keeps increasing, so the argument goes, it’s ‘worth it’ to keep mining, but this does not alter the fundamental wastefulness of the algorithmic reality for Bitcoin. Many other tokens operate on other proof mechanisms to regulate and prevent one party from controlling their blockchain network. But Musk says “It’s Bitcoin”, blessing it as ‘the energy currency’.

His argument in a recent interview was that because Bitcoin converts energy into something storable and portable, it is a commoditized representation of the energy itself. How democratic and a beacon of freedom for everyone? Unfortunately, the energy spent democratically results (when each block is created and tokens are rewarded) in the reward going to one party only, for each block created. It’s just like political campaign contributions for numerous candidates resulting in only one elected seat held. The rest of the contributions for the losing candidates are wasted, or at best, curry some favor in the future, or toward capitalistic business interests. All politicians are business people, after all.

Therefore it is intellectually dishonest to claim that a token is an efficient and sustainable store of energy. Turning fuel into electricity is productive. Turning electricity into heat or light, or manufacturing goods from oil or other natural resources, is productive.

Would you say that charging a battery, then draining it again, mostly into thin air, is productive? The battery is not a producer of energy, just a storage device.

So is Bitcoin in another class from a dumb battery that leaks all day long? As long as we speculate on its ‘inherent value’, and follow the cult logic that scarcity creates a sustainable and abundant future where “everyone has everything they want”, according to Musk, we will ride up just another fintech bubble.

Scarcity doesn’t deliver abundance, except to the 1%. Surely, many retail and institutional investors have made a killing being early adopters, leveraging ‘sure growth’ on margin and on digital paper. But you only realize real gains when you sell. The top-regarded members of the Bitcoin cult are called ‘Diamond Hands’, but ‘Sparkle Hands’ would be appropriate too. Those people are praised for holding tokens, never selling, and making theoretically unlimited ‘value’. Again, never realizing their gains. It’s like becoming a billionaire one night in a dream, but realizing that no method of waking up the next morning can translate those dollars into your actual bank account or social status. But we can keep dreaming, Mr. Musk.

Michael Saylor of Strategy (formerly Microstrategy), the Bitcoin Treasury Company, has in similar manner, concocted a highly successful scheme (for now) that claims to turn debt and endless future yield obligations into ‘exponential value’.

These hallucinations convince someone that debt turned into a software token is a productive activity, harnessing humankind’s technological supremacy. This delusion is not limited to a few grifters or big banks we could single out – average people eat up the narratives (presumptuously and euphemistically re-labeled as ‘theses’).

A thesis is, by definition, unproven. It is argued and critiqued by PhD candidates and institutions of higher learning. I would argue getting a degree is (still!) a more legitimate storage of energy in an embossed and gilded piece of paper, a means by which a person can earn higher levels of income from an economy that needs their expertise, which is scarce. Abundance, though, tends to flow from those who find resources scarce, to the person controlling or leveraging skilled-labor value for themselves, as a direct result of that scarcity.

So, what would a different model for a digital currency provide, if it were not propped up by belief, debt, and speculative bubbles? I don’t just mean a CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) which turns a fiat (sovereign) currency everybody accepts into a digital utility for storage and portability in the digital multinational economic environment.

I mean a completely different model – one that must be priced on assets (liquid NAV), rather than debt.

A treasury must hold liquid assets that were earned by productive activity, not derivative paper or CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations), nor phony Fed paper instruments printed out of thin air.

Is that heretical to say in 2025? Sure it is. But treasury companies have as many methods of ‘representing’ value as there are cards in a Maverick deck. The question is which ones will stand structural disaster, scrutiny, and the shifting of sentiment and narratives – when the ‘real world’ comes knocking at the door, as it inevitably does.

An ideal token might also be backed by multiple currencies and precious metals, to be a truly fair and deterministic hedge for balancing purchasing power across diverse geographies in contracts between product/service suppliers right across the supply chain, to the end consumer.

One token to end them all would not be denominated in a particular currency, would not be an speculative investment opportunity, and would realize profit for the trustworthy (and fully audited) operator, without being beholden to investors for yield, and eventually everything needs to be paid back to whence it came in the first place.

‘See where the chips eventually fall’ or ‘hope for a bailout’ are not sound fiscal policies for a company, let alone a country! They are not part of the universe of fiduciary duty, if such a thing still exists. It’s funny, is it not, that educating people and warning them of the financial system that has been pulled over their eyes, must be disclaimed as ‘not financial advice’, for fear of being accused of ‘advising’ about how money works. It’s heresy again…

I don’t see any such disclaimers on the cultist forward-looking prognostications of Elon Musk, tech bros, or political leaders with conflicts of interest, frankly.

So follow us, and let’s get the heresy party fully underway before the midnight hour arrives.

We will soon announce a vital project called ‘Treasury: Earth” that establishes an equal-opportunity digital token and treasury model that is no competition to any meme coin, utility token, or digital energy storage house of hards – and it’s definitely not financial advice.

It’s just a consensual and distributed way to turn this sinking ship around and maybe achieve hydroplaning by simply going back to first economic principles, and ignoring the noise and chaff being fired all around us, to distract us perpetually from noticing where the buck stops.

– Chris ;-)