[TeMPOraL]

Exactly. And PoW systems have built-in dampening ("difficulty") that make sure you need to burn even more energy as the system gets used, just to stay where you are.

I sometimes joke that Bitcoin is the closest we've came towards defining trust as a physical quantity - with the unit being watts. You can get a good approximation of the lower bound of the energy costs of trust by just comparing it with a trustful system that is regular economy. In other words, that is how much energy is saved by not pursuing trustless systems. Trust is a very powerful optimization trick.