[ekns]

Power consumption is one side of the coin. The net utility is another:

- With sufficient demand-scaling, Bitcoin incentivizes more power generation capacity since it's the buyer of first resort, establishing some floor on electricity price. This makes additional investment into renewables etc. more sustainable. E.g. where I live, there are days of slightly negative prices, and those clearly are not sustainable, so Bitcoin is the perfect way to ensure we get plentiful cheap energy with continuing investments.

- There's a case to be made that there are more and longer wars under fiat currencies since money-printing is a hidden tax that no one votes for, making it possible to fight in wars that exhaust all state resources, whereas under a Bitcoin standard the wars would be few and limited in scope.

Additionally, US Space Force's Jason Lowery argues that Bitcoin is a weapons technology in cyberspace, and the global Bitcoin mining competition is a form of "soft war", and further argues that a constant "soft war" is more efficient way to defend property rights.

The latter two points are not yet all that salient but imo that is the world we're heading towards inevitably. Bitcoin eventually outcompetes other forms of money as a layered technology and leads to this "hyperbitcoinized" world where they hold true.