This whole discussion centers around the concept of energy backed money, which is just commodity backed money. You said that "its [energy] inflation naturally t

This whole discussion centers around the concept of energy backed money, which is just commodity backed money. You said that "its [energy] inflation naturally tracks the real world". Notahacker is pointing out that it doesn't. So if we're not pegging money to a kJ (or whatever), then we're no longer talking about energy backed money. > I do think that someone with twice the available energy is, to a first approximation, twice as well off, and that reducing the amount of energy it takes to do whatever you want to do also makes you better off, since both of these make you able to do more of the things you want to do (or have more of the things you want to have). Yes, but we're talking about currency here. I get what you're saying: that the increases in efficiency reduce the "value" of your energy holdings, but it also increases the amount you can accomplish with the same energy. That is not a zero sum in a broader economic sense though, because the cost of different goods vary disproportionately with the cost of energy. Once again, you're stuck with a currency with a supply that fluctuates out of sync with other major economic factors. You'd be better off backing your currency with an index of commodities from multiple sectors, but then you're making currencies in to something they don't need to be. As I said in my original post, if you want to buy assets of a specific kind, go buy them! Currency is a form of short term accounting, and that's a good thing. Long term, you want currency at work in the form of exchange buying and selling things. You really only want people holding as much currency as they need to operate a means of production. Stagnant currency is stagnant means. It's the very definition of an economic slow down. > It's true that there is an enormous amount of things we can do now that fall below a cost floor such that we can have however much we want, but in general I'm far more concerned with lowering costs and increasing options than with figuring out what the "value" of something is. Is a Kindle download as "valuable" as a physical book? I'm not sure that that has any objective answer. Is the cost of production lower (either in pounds or dollars or energy)? Enormously so. And that makes us all richer in comparison. That is efficiency. It's a significant driver of economies. Everyone wants that. What's unclear is how a move from the USD to something commodity backed would benefit efficiency.