Speaking economically, I have read that the price of bitcoin tends towards the price of mining a block times the number of bitcoin mined per block. It's a quot

Speaking economically, I have read that the price of bitcoin tends towards the price of mining a block times the number of bitcoin mined per block. It's a quote from satoshi apparently (1). Although he does say "in the absence of a market to establish a price". Conversely, if it weren't worth so much, less people would be competing to mine bitcoin, the difficulty would be much lower and the energy used would be less. Not a very useful observation to make though as it doesn't help the problem off high energy usage. Using hard drive space instead should use less energy at the expense of using more chip fabs and more silicon. (1) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=404164.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=404164.0