> I think this is generally false as a premise depending on your definition of “money”.

Banks, exchanges (BTC or stock), and markets in the US all use dollars. So dollars it is.

"Value" can be represented by "money", but also by widgets, hay bales, labor, corporate stock, etc. AMD stock has "value" but is not "money".

> I don’t understand why you’re comparing the “value” of a stock or bitcoin with the “amount” of dollars

Dollars are transferred, but never created (unless you're the Fed). You "make money" by creating, or holding something of value and selling it. But you are not actually printing dollars -- really you're exchanging dollars for value.

Money doesn't have to be dollars it could be the North Korean Won, the Iraqi Dinar, Russian Rubles, etc, but it helps to have a stable currency to measure value. You could, yes, pay in Gold if you so desired.

> “Burning energy” is not removing value, it’s providing value by means of strengthening a proof of work blockchain. Whether that’s worth something to you is irrelevant to it being valuable to others.

That's where the disagreement is, right? I'll get to this in a minute.

> Bitcoin is not unlimited.

Today it is limited. It may change in the future. But more to the point, the original 21 million BTC came from thin air in the first place. There's only an "artificial" limitation in that people agree there will only be 21 million, and not a physical limitation.

People can't just code more coal or copper out of thin air.

So now the question is, how do you measure value?

> Even if you subjectively don’t believe Bitcoin is worth the value that’s spent to maintain its infrastructure, other people do and that’s reflected in the current economy.

Therein lies the problem.

All for-profit corporations want cash inflows that are greater than cash outflows. Corporations create things of value that other people or corporations want.

Profits must be objective, not subjective. "Value" can be subjective, sure, but profits must be objective.

So where do we find objective value in BTC? What about BTC drives economic efficiency?

Visa provides a bunch of services to merchants and customers. Yes they take a percentage of the transaction, but corporations realize the fee has value, since they don't have to do billing, fraud management in the VISA system, reconciliation, dealing with multiple banks, bad checks, etc etc etc. Those things have a direct measurable impact to a business, because they're cash outflows.

When we look at BTC we see money exchanging hands for BTC plus some money going to miners.

But what's more interesting is when money doesn't exchange hands, but when BTC is just transferred (like a gift). In that value must be extracted out of BTC in order to confirm the transaction because this needs to be converted to dollars to pay the electric bills.

Today most corporations that supported BTC have shut off BTC as a means of payment. The barriers of entry are high, and pricing BTC to the value of your goods and services is a hard issue since BTC fluctuates. That makes BTC hard to trust.

> but that energy just happens to be the price needed to pay for a decentralized proof of work blockchain.

No argument there, but I fail to see what huge advantage it has for businesses and the economy over Visa, say. The economic advantage for criminals OTOH is easy to see -- it just has to be less expensive than traditional money laundering.

But if crime is like 1% of all BTC use, and using it to pay for services is like 4% (numbers are pulled out of my ass to make the point) of BTC, then 95% of the perceived value of BTC right now is for speculation. E.g. Elon Musk isn't buying $1bn dollars worth of goods on BTC or Dogecoin.

The only way to make money on BTC then would be to create more demand for BTC. And that's certainly what it looks like from my viewpoint.

But in the end, if it's only purpose is speculation, well then we're burning a lot of real world resources for it -- hence "burning value".