Thanks for posting, interesting subject.
I think the outcome is much bigger than you’ve outlined though.
Something I’ve never understood is the apparent competition and rivalry which appears between Bitcoin and the other POW cryptos.
Together, they seem a solution. Divided they can’t be, it seems to me.
As you’ve identified in your article, Bitcoin won’t be practical as a means of common value exchange. It won’t enable convenient exchange for everyday things in the street, as currently done with fiat.
Therefore something else has to do.
It could be fiat, somehow converted to a kind compatible with Bitcoin, but that would require the fiat currency of some government or another becoming the single used currency worldwide, and that would require agreement of all people worldwide… and pigs might fly.
So it will likely be a combination of alt-coins, bolted into compatibility with Bitcoin, which meet the criteria of being usable in every day transactions, to practically buy things in the street.
Taking global energy, and the current issues, and connection with that into account, we start to see maybe a solution.
I’ve explained elsewhere, with full mathematical proof, the reason why Bitcoin represents solar energy flow.
Every Satoshi is worth around 10mW of solar energy, when all is said and done.
That energy is free, injected by an external source, a donation to us from the sun.
This is an intrinsic property to Bitcoin, it is not variable by market value, or changes in computation difficulty, it applies equally across all Bitcoin, for all time.
Bitcoin has a standard reference value, in terms of solar sourced power, which is built in.
This is a little like conventional money having not only a gold standard, but it actually comprising gold itself.
In the case of Bitcoin, we are talking about a power standard.
It can’t be dissociated. It is there by nature.
10mW of power is enough to generate a steady trickle of POW tokens.
So every Satoshi may be mapped to a continuous flow of alt-tokens of some kind or another.
Every Satoshi in that way represents a marker, between the ultimate authority which is our sun, and us.
It underwites / justifies the generation of a flow of alt-tokens, up to a consumption of 10mW, in a way that only the sun can do.
Likewise a Bitcoin is a marker of authority to generate a token stream consuming up to 1MW, 1.5 Bitcoin represents 1.5MW, and so on.
The token stream might be a single type, or a number of types combined, up to the total output defined by the amount of Bitcoin.
Those streams need have no maximum tokens limit, as there is no limit to the sunlight they embody, a fixed number of photons, or Joules, per token, they can be generated at the same rate, forever.
21 million Bitcoins represents 21 Giga Watts of solar energy powered tokens, created by the entire amount of solar energy falling on earth, utilised by all of humanity, solar powered.
So every Bitcoin transaction is actually a reconfiguration of the power assigned to any particular purpose.
The state of the Bitcoin ledger at any time represents the current state of the configuration of power distribution.
Each new transaction results in a change to the assigments of power.
Bitcoin is crowd-controlled free solar power and money distribution authority rolled into one.
So frequent transactions will not be needed.
Market needs will indicate the levels of assignment appropriate to individuals, authorities, and causes, with the appropriate Bitcoin transactions being made to assign appropriate levels of solar powered pow token generation capability to each one, depending on what we see needs more or less funds.
We can compare this with something like a piped irrigation system, all is fed from the universal donation source, the sun, and bitcoin is the network of piping, connecting all consumers to the feed from the source.
Where a particular cause, individual, or project requires more funds, the need is advertised in the markets, and the network is reconfigured by various bitcoin holders trading some of their Bitcoin holdings, for a share of the tokens generated by that cause.
The values of those continuously generated tokens, is what we will see fluctuating, relative to the underlying quantity of energy flow.
Anyone with doubts as to whether or not the above might be the truth, only needs to consider one, inarguable fact:
Bitcoin, and all of the other “Trustless” crypto-currency solutions, are designed such that all transactions made with them are donations of a kind.
All transactions are an act of giving, never taking.
Giving can be with or without the receiver’s consent, but the money can never be taken without the giver’s consent.
They are designed for a donation based economy, in contrast to the controlled-scarcity economy that we’ve seen until now.
The only thing which has been missing is the grand source of donation.
Now we see it is the sun.
Btw, on timescales, the capability of redirecting funds generated freely from sunlight towards upgrading the computation capabilities used to compute further coins, is an avalanche effect no-one can predict the outcome of, so it could be 2140 until the last coin worst case, but it seems highly likely it will be much, much sooner.
