I posted a comment on Lisa's recent LinkedIn post that applies here as well:
I hope you money people consider carefully when relating money to energy. I know it's a popular paradigm that energy is a reliable basis for currency, but energy costs will drop very significantly over the next two decades. What will this do to the crypto mining industry? Will it turn it into the next Tulip Mania? Fortunes will be made, and fortunes will be lost.
I really liked the term energy density (i.e. as energy use per person, I first saw it in the 70's) as a qualifier for the quality of human life: Energy density + Cost = SOL (Standard of Living).
I love the SOL way of thinking about things and I absolutely agree - as energy density goes up so too does standard of living, and the inverse is true as well. The proliferation of low energy density generation sources is coupling with sky rocketing energy costs to really cause people to suffer around the world right now.
In terms of the relationship between energy and currencies, what I mean when I say energy-backed money is simply a monetary technology where creation of the units and the state of the global ledger both require real ENERGY in the thermodynamic sense to create or modify. It’s not that I want to peg the value of the dollar to the value of a MWh, it’s more that I want the ability to create more currency units or alter global balances to have a real-world cost. This is something we lack in todays credit based fiat system and it’s a level of discipline imposed by bitcoins proof-of-work consensus algorithm.
Also I’m flattered but I’m not a money guy, just a career army guy that’s not become obsessed with energy and it’s relation to everything, including money. Excited to learn from folks in the energy space tho as I get up to speed!
I posted a comment on Lisa's recent LinkedIn post that applies here as well:
I hope you money people consider carefully when relating money to energy. I know it's a popular paradigm that energy is a reliable basis for currency, but energy costs will drop very significantly over the next two decades. What will this do to the crypto mining industry? Will it turn it into the next Tulip Mania? Fortunes will be made, and fortunes will be lost.
I really liked the term energy density (i.e. as energy use per person, I first saw it in the 70's) as a qualifier for the quality of human life: Energy density + Cost = SOL (Standard of Living).
I love the SOL way of thinking about things and I absolutely agree - as energy density goes up so too does standard of living, and the inverse is true as well. The proliferation of low energy density generation sources is coupling with sky rocketing energy costs to really cause people to suffer around the world right now.
In terms of the relationship between energy and currencies, what I mean when I say energy-backed money is simply a monetary technology where creation of the units and the state of the global ledger both require real ENERGY in the thermodynamic sense to create or modify. It’s not that I want to peg the value of the dollar to the value of a MWh, it’s more that I want the ability to create more currency units or alter global balances to have a real-world cost. This is something we lack in todays credit based fiat system and it’s a level of discipline imposed by bitcoins proof-of-work consensus algorithm.
Also I’m flattered but I’m not a money guy, just a career army guy that’s not become obsessed with energy and it’s relation to everything, including money. Excited to learn from folks in the energy space tho as I get up to speed!