Has anyone here actually read the Bitcoin white papers...

Everybody talking about Bitcoin being energy inefficient makes me cringe.

Let me explain.

Bitcoin was intentionally hard coded to scale its energy usage upwards exponentially in direct correlation with its value, this is in order to prevent the person with the most cpu from simply owning most/all of the btc, among other reasons. This was particularly important at it’s inception, but is still very much relevant and utilitarian to this day

It was never intended to be “energy efficient”, in fact, the opposite is very much the case.

In a very loose interpretation, you can think of btc as being backed by electricity and cpu.

If one day people decide that the monetary cost of the energy required to run nodes and facilitate transactions on the blockchain is no longer worth the reward, then Bitcoin becomes worthless.

Until then, Bitcoin does very much so have real intrinsic value, and is “backed” in one sense or another.

edit: semantics