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I see how you might think that, but that is not the case. That Bitcoin units (satoshis) take energy to produce does not imply that their worth is because energy was spent. Every good takes energy to produce. The satoshis produced today take orders of magnitude more energy than the bitcoin produced in 2010, yet they are worth the same. If their value was due to the energy/labor spent then we would expect to see satoshis with different value which is not the case.

oldphone 2y ago

It would be strange to think of the USD as reflecting the "energy spent" on producing it, since this would make it simultaneously nearly valueless in one sense (money just mouse click away), and highly valued in another (the electricity, the labor, social capital, education, technical knowledge infrastructure, markets & networks that support the "full faith & credit of the US Treasury" don't come cheap).

The way some people describe it, hashrate and levels of energy expenditure are more a representation of the security, resilience, & technical capacity of BTC network infrastructure: (i.e. network health) than anything else.

The real cost of hashrate (computational & electrical power) needed to run a technically elegant & super efficient market for commodity money, seems like an emergent (or latent) derivative market of some kind - with BTC's difficulty adjustment auto-arbitraging the whole thing through code 🍄🤯

Or not 🤷

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a source familiar with the matter 2y ago 💬 1

But the network is equally secure whether I own 1 satoshi or 100 bitcoins

So if the value of the currency is derived from the security, why is it value proportional to the number of units I own, which are no more or less secure due to their number?

This is the same root problem with fiat/token money. The $100 Federal Reserve Note is not actually 100x as fine a grade of green cotton as the $1 Note. The relative value of different units is arbitrary.

In contrast specie does not suffer from this problem - 1kg of gold is exactly 1,000x as much gold as 1g, and the material itself is what has value.

DRE 2y ago

The value is not solely a reflection of the security of the network. Certainly people value the network and the asset in part because the ledger is secure. As I mentioned earlier, different people value bitcoin for different reasons.