Musk has recently expressed a core viewpoint repeatedly in two contexts: energy is currency. One context is on X where he calls BTC "based on energy, non-falsifiable"; the other is in a long interview with Nikhil Kamath where he directly says "Energy is the true currency…Bitcoin is based on energy…in the future, power generation capacity may be used as factual currency".
Below, I will "translate this viewpoint into tradable logic" from the perspective of cryptocurrency traders.
What problem does Musk want to solve?
What he wants to solve is: where is the anchor of the currency's "non-falsifiability".
Fiat currency: can be "inflated/financed" to promote a major strategy (in the context of 10/14, he refers to "AI arms race + currency devaluation"), so he said "fiat can be counterfeited, but energy cannot be counterfeited".
BTC (PoW): Binding issuance and security costs to real electricity and computing power expenditures, thus pushing the threshold of "forgery" back to the physical world.
Trader's perspective: He is reinforcing the narrative of BTC: BTC ≈ "accounting unit under physical constraints", not "accounting unit under political constraints".
Two time scales: short to medium-term narrative vs long-term disruptive narrative
Short to medium term (more important, more tradable)
The link of "AI arms race—government capital expenditure—currency depreciation" on 10/14 essentially is:
More "printed money" chasing more scarce "energy/hard assets/dilution-resistant assets"
Thus he classifies BTC as an "energy anchor asset".
Long-term (more philosophical, but will shape the next generation of narratives)
In Nikhil Kamath's interview, he imagines the future as "AI + robots making work optional, money as a labor distribution database becoming unnecessary", and frames "civilizational progress" within the Kardashev scale (energy utilization level).
Trader's perspective: The most scarce thing in the future is not "paper money", but electricity, computing power, manufacturing ability—money may degenerate into a "quota/permission system" for these resources.
But be careful: energy ≠ value, BTC is also not "1 BTC = X kWh"
Musk's expression is very captivating, but there needs to be subtraction in pricing:
Energy is a "cost anchor/safety anchor", not value itself. The "energy cost" of BTC is more like: providing a threshold that cannot be arbitrarily lowered for system security and issuance.
Market prices are still determined by: demand, risk preference, liquidity, regulatory expectations, narrative competition. Energy provides at most a "hard constraint noise".
So I would suggest understanding it as:
PoW couples "currency credibility" with "energy scarcity", rather than binding "currency value" to "energy units" one-to-one.
How to use this perspective to create a cryptocurrency observation framework
BTC: Focus on the "energy—security—cash flow" triangle
View BTC as a "machine that converts electricity into security":
Computing power/difficulty/miner income structure (the change in the proportion of fees is especially critical)
Electricity prices/electricity grid fluctuations (determine miner marginal costs and potential selling pressure)
The structural squeeze of AI data center expansion on electricity (will strengthen the macro narrative of "electricity scarcity")
Next wave of narrative spillover: Upgrading from "electricity" to "computing power/manufacturing power"
Musk sees AI as the engine driving the "devaluation of money", which will shift market attention from "energy" to the chain of "energy→computing power→services". Thus, what is more likely to emerge in cryptocurrency is:
Verifiable supply of computing power/bandwidth/storage (DePIN/distributed infrastructure narrative)
Proof-of-Useful-Work (explaining energy consumption as "useful output", more friendly to ESG and institutional narratives)
RWAization of energy/electricity certificates (but the difficulty is always in measurement, auditing, delivery, not on-chain)
Core conclusion
Musk says "energy = currency", the true meaning for cryptocurrency is not "electricity directly pricing everything", but: as AI pushes the world towards a "resource-constrained" era, systems like BTC that anchor currency credibility to physical costs will become more like "underlying assets", while competition among other chains will gradually evolve into "who can convert energy into more auditable computing power and services".
