Interesting points you covered, thanks for posting. I just came across reversible hydrogen fuel cell technology recently and realised the system implications of it. They are huge.
It fits within the scenario of the Bitcoin Kardashev Hinge like a piece of jigsaw, to form an atomic subsystem comprising three key elements; solar farm, supplying power to a proof-of-work token generating datacenter, backed up by a reversible hydrogen fuel cell based power backup.
That kind of power backup is already commercially available via companies like "Plug Power", so it is reasonably mature technology, though modelling it is tricky (My usual bag is a Model Based Systems Engineer).
What we get, when we put those three things together, works like a human made tree, that I have referred to as a "The Money-fuel tree", in recent articles.
It can be grown from a minimal initial installation seed, producing the essentials needed by humanity, with everything needed for its own growth and maintenance, and even replication, entirely from sunlight, with no pollution.
That looks to me like what we've been needing, to enable us to move up to the top tier of energy clients, receiving energy direct from sunlight, alongside the natural trees of Earth.
So we no longer need to compete with all other life on Earth, to extract our energy from other things on Earth, after they received it first.
From an additional perspective to the one you mentioned, hydrogen appears to have some very special qualities specific to life, energy, and creation.
When we extract energy secondhand from any other recipients receving it first from the sun, other than by things we created ourselves, there is always an environmental cost, in the form of some kind of pollution.
In other words, there is always an unacceptable price to pay, for "stealing" our energy from another recipient in nature, that received it first from the sun.
Isn't it interesting, that hydrogen fuel, which practically replaces fossil fuels in function, which we can make ourselves, from nothing more than sunlight, and the apparatus that we create ourselves to collect it, burns with no pollution whatsoever? Not even a trace? Isn't that incredible?
Anyway the main system benefit appears to me as follows:
The Austrian Economics requirement that all money issued should be balanced with produce, is satisfied, both physically, and in markets, since any power not consumed and converted to currency in the datacenter is instead converted to hydrogen fuel. Thus the solar power is shared between the loads of pow token production, and hydrogen fuel production.
This is important, as until those two were put together, it was very difficult to definitively value or verify one or the other in isolation, but together we can quickly calibrate intrinsic values of both fuel and tokens, against one another.
That potentially answers the question of how to put a live flowing, limitless energy standard on live flowing endless money, as we have to, now that money has started to move away from any capital standard, like gold, as it once was.
The money of the future (the immediate future!) has to be expressed in terms of the Joules flowing in solar energy, rather than the Joules trapped in capital, like gold, or yieldable from oil.
That means the physical end of most value in capital, controversially.
With that, we will move from rewarding work done, to rewarding work in progress, which is a much more valuable and creative outcome than we’ve seen previously, it seems to me.
