Appreciate the discourse. 🖖🍻
It is my understanding that Bitcoin's are, and always will be, a free market good. As with all free market goods cost of production cannot be higher than the expected return on the investment necessary to make the good or production wouldn't happen. On the other side cost of production cannot be much lower than open market prices they would expect to receive for them or people will focus on making more Bitcoin through mining, raising the hashrate which raises the difficulty and thus the cost of mining until they reach equilibrium again. This is ensured to occur thanks to the difficulty adjustment, as the difficulty increases with the hashrate then only the most efficient miners will remain profitable and stay mining. Less efficient ones either die off or are forced to increase their efficiency to stay profitable.
Remember that there is no other buyer of excess energy, we will create abundant excess energy and as the value of the coins rises our drive to mine will rise with it. The halving regularly reduces the payment for that effort and increases the value of all coins compared to electricity.
Think about it like this, 1 Bitcoin costs roughly 3 minutes worth of all the energy of the entire network to create today. The amount of energy input is going up and so does the total value held by that energy. In 8 years of 15% annual growth the total amount of energy will likely be 3x what it is today, and the amount of Bitcoin given in exchange will reduce to only 0.78125 (7.8125 BTC at that point if the 10 to 1 split I am suggesting occurs across the entire network). That means that 1 Bitcoin would represent about 12.5 minutes of the total energy input of the network. If you held 1 Bitcoin from today, you would see it grow from being worth 3 minutes of the energy given to today's network, to 12.5 minutes of the energy input by a network 3 times the size it is today. That's 12+ times the value.
These effects are self reinforcing. I don't see anyway for them to be stopped, and it brings abundance to everyone faster than anyone expects.
