> [...] a system that incentivizes increasing energy consumption is not a sustainable solution.

In fact, such a system is the only sustainable solution. Based on the history of human civilisation, your conclusion is false.

The discovery of fire allowed us to make use of fuels that were hitherto locked away: combustible material.

Fire also allowed us to consume that energy to cook food, which "predigested" high protein meat and allowed us to shorten our digestive tract, allowing us to use energy that might have been spent on digestion for other metabolic purposes. The consumption of meat(first raw, later cooked) then led human skull volume to increase massively[2], allowing us to evolve into the smartest species on the planet[3].

The industrial age was another leap in energy consumption which has led to a massive economic flourishing whereby you are better off being a poor person in a developed country in 2021 than being a wealthy person in the middle ages.

We are collectively and individually far wealthier than at any time in human history. The communication infrastructure, computational power, and unlimited free information on almost any topic of value that almost everyone on the planet has access to make us gods in comparison to individuals in the 17th century.

Civilisations advance primarily through their ability to harness more energy and direct it to whatever uses they desire (that is, what the market values). Human time is fundamentally the process and experience of utilising energy. (In order to achieve more, a human has to acquire and expend more energy. An increase in efficiency, by definition means the reacquisition and usage of the time we squander. This is why you achieve far more in work and life if you team up with high-energy individuals.)

Bitcoin is the first technology that links energy production, human time, and perfect scarcity (the 21 million bitcoin tokens, the limited life of an individual human) and allows us to accurately price both energy and human time, and transmit and store their value across time and space, without loss[1].

To the extent that Bitcoin provides a perfect (incorruptible, unforgeable, distributed, permanently audited, secure) economic network, it incentivises humans to harness ever more energy in the pursuit of securing that network as a store of all human value.

Humans cannot evolve by reducing their marginal or aggregate energy consumption.[5] They can only evolve if they innovate to discover and learn to harness ever more powerful and abundant sources of energy and with much more efficiency than they do in the 21st century.[4]

Consider::

> Energy cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system as the first law of thermodynamics clearly states. [Energy can only be transferred or changed from one form to another.] Bitcoin though, can express how much energy that was sacrificed in order to acquire a share of a limited supply. You can of course, also acquire Bitcoins by buying them rather than mining them, but in doing so you also spend energy. You somehow acquired the money you bought the Bitcoin with and that somehow came to be because someone sacrificed time and energy somewhere. Bitcoin lets you express that you see that there’s a connection between value and scarcity by sacrificing effort to be a part of the network.[0]

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[0]: https://medium.com/hackernoon/bitcoin-and-thermodynamics-63f...

[1]: Imagine everything in the world, divided by 21 million: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pDlaOGA2ac

[2]: https://www.livescience.com/23671-eating-meat-made-us-human....

[3]: Prof. Tim Noakes - 'Medical aspects of the low carbohydrate lifestyle'
https://youtu.be/fL5-9ZxamXc?t=268

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

[5]: https://rootsofprogress.org/where-is-my-flying-car

> All else being equal, energy efficiency is great. But there’s no reason to believe that flatlining or declining resource usage is optimal for progress. A large part of progress is harnessing ever-more resources and putting them to productive use. And indeed, we’re going to need lots more energy if we’re ever going to get nanotech manufacturing, regular space travel, and of course flying cars. In fact, a good explanation for technological stagnation is that the only technological revolution of the last 50 years, computing, was the only one that didn’t need more power than could be provided by the technology of the 1970s.