I’ve long suspected that currencies are really just units of measurement convertible to the joule (or calorie).
1 - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23209924-the-water-knife
How persistent is civilization growth? (2011) https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.5635
Can we predict long-run economic growth? (2012) https://arxiv.org/abs/1211.3102
Modes of growth in dynamic systems (2012) https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2012.0039
Thermodynamics of long-run economic innovation and growth (2013) https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.3554
Long-run evolution of the global economy: 1. Physical basis (2014) https://doi.org/10.1002/2013EF000171
Long-run evolution of the global economy: 2. Hindcasts of innovation and growth (2015) https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-6-673-2015
Global wealth n years after 1801 (2015) https://twitter.com/clumma/status/593890418028253185
See also:
Indeed, sooo much energy is utterly wasted; but there's no getting through to the followers. You can scream and roar, wheedle and persuade, but they won't give up the idea that their sacrifices are necessary for the cosmic wheel to keep turning.
BTC (and other PoW) maxis are the priest class; bag holders are the wealthy funders getting the temples built. Missionaries get rewarded for bringing new acolytes into the fold.
Will the brutal religion survive? Or will it fall to a New Testament upstart?
This is yet another reason that proof-of-work schemes are a disaster for society: they waste its most precious material asset!
There are other options as well. Stored work-product (e.g., banking heat or cold when possible for later use, materials fabrication). Potential-storage mechanisms (batteries, pumped hydro, kinetic, or others). Demand-side rather than supply-side dispatch --- varying activity rather than generation or energy provision to match available capabilities.
There is no way to store natural gas to meet one year's demand.
There is no way to store electric power to meet one year's demand. Not even one month's.
There is no way to store wind or solar power (see above).
Nuclear fuels, of course, can be stockpiled, but you can't demand more power than the nuclear plants that exist can produce, so having 100 years' worth of enriched uranium alone wouldn't help you produce extra power in any particularly hot summer / cold winter. Fuel is not the form in which we want energy when we turn an electric light on!
> Demand-side rather than supply-side dispatch --- varying activity rather than generation or energy provision to match available capabilities.
That's not possible. You've paid too much attention to Holdren.
You cannot make people alternate sleep/wake cycles so that we can have steady base load and no peak load. Or whatever else you have in mind for "varying demand" to match supply, unless that's rolling power outages.
Electric energy cannot be saved in any significant amount, full stop. Excess supply can be sent to ground, but excess demand cannot be met except with power generation using fuels that can be throttled very quickly (and that's essentially only natural gas). That means that electric power supply has to match demand or we must constantly run base power generation at peak demand rates and send excess to ground -- a tremendous waste!
There's no way around this.
Even if we did have batteries that were a) small, b) cheap, c) had enormous capacity, those would essentially be -when charged- coulombic bombs that have to be kept from exploding. Indeed, there are physical limits to electric energy store density where you can trivially get that energy back as power. For example, we've all seen that smartphone batteries are small explosives (recall the Samsung Galaxy fiasco), so now scale that way up and imagine what that would mean.
And of course, all energy conversions involve losses.
Most generally, excess electrical generation can be stored as fuels. The round-trip efficiency is low (~15--20%), but the storage time is proved to multi-hundred-million-year duration.
I've looked into the literature on one variant of this which dates to the early 1960s:
<https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28nqoz/electri...>
Your other assertions are ... similarly flawed. Again, yes, challenges, but not outright impossibilities, and there are a number of other alternatives (flow batteries, molten-salt and other batteries, pumped-hydro, CAES) which you fail to consider at all. Several of those are already implemented at grid scale, others ... are at least technically possible, and may well prove viable.
Synfuels (petroleum analogues), again, though round-trip inefficient are sufficiently energy-dense and long-term storage stable that they might serve for emergency long-term standby capacity. It's useful for other needs (industrial feedstocks and transportation fuels in aviation and marine shipping) so that some supply would likely be necessary regardless. Having standby / idle generation plant would be a capital and maintenance factor, but not impossible. There's well over a century of experience in storing strategic reserves of petroleum in both artificial and naturally-occurring storage facilities.
I'd first encountered the notion of currency-as-energy in Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth (1975). You'll also find it in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. Clarke seems all but certainly to have encountered the idea in the work of his own hero, H.G. Wells, where it is a major theme in The World Set Free (1914).
(That's mentioned elswehere in this thread: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32725668>)
The Nobel-prize laureate chemist Frederick Soddy advanced the notion in his own work in economics.
I've explored that history in a Reddit post some years back: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/24wyty/tracing...>
My own view is that this is attractive and occasionally useful but ultimately something of a mirage. Money is in fact a notional record of claims on production, a social creation (with legal and economic underpinnings). The fact is that money can be transacted for many things. Ultimately, though, those demands must be secondary to the actual productive capability of an economic system, and a fixed peg to anything (gold, silver, Joules, MWh, bushels of wheat (among several original bases, see the shekel), cryptographic hashes/second, whatevs, will run up against reality when the notional value is out of step with the actual available resource. At such times, useful monetary systems must have the capacity to deflate (that is, the currency deflates and prices inflate) to bring the financial and real economies back into balance, as well as to distribute sufficient purchasing power amongst the population. Such inflations are a feature of such systems and a symptom of greater issues rather than a bug or failure of themselves.
Again, my own view, and one not widely shared though elements are beginning to appear in concepts such as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).
The fact of one such conversion is only a subset of the larger whole.
Kraftwerk for power plant, Kraftstoff for fuel. But then you have elektrische Leistung for electrical power.
clarification: those words are 100% exact synonyms. (Native speaker, of American at least.)