Well put. Furthermore, humanities demand for energy is capped by its capacity to economically convert energy into useful work (e.g. through the production of du

Well put. Furthermore, humanities demand for energy is capped by its capacity to economically convert energy into useful work (e.g. through the production of durable goods, commodities, transportation services, etc). The Bitcoin network effectively gives us a new category of useful work and uncaps our demand for energy by decoupling it from the physical economy. Thus Bitcoin presents us with a viable pathway to becoming a Kardashev level 1 society by removing this bound. Energy will become abundant, the real price of energy will decrease due to the action of this scale-out and the innovations that entails, and the real price of bitcoin will march upward in accordance with the stock-to-flow model. Thinking of energy as priced against bitcoin and remembering how the network difficulty adjustment operates should help to elucidate how these two price actions can occur simultaneously for those of you scratching your head on that one. The feature you pointed out about mining being the most direct conversion between energy and value is an important one for people to grok in order to "get bitcoin". I would argue that energy itself is the only thing in the universe with intrinsic value. The intrinsic value of energy transcends constructs of human society. For instance, consider the animal kingdom and the flow of energy through the food web. By intimately linking the value of the bitcoin to the aggregate joules of energy flowing into the network, Satoshi delivered the most important financial innovation in the history of mankind; a digitally transactable surrogate for the intrinsic value embodied within energy.