How We Burned Civilization’s Most Valuable Resource to Print Casino Chips
Twenty years from now, the history books will record one of the strangest episodes of mass economic delusion in human civilization: The era when humanity took the single most productive resource it has ever harnessed and burned it to produce a casino chip.
Not a product. Not a service. Not a scientific breakthrough, but a digital token whose value was determined entirely by what the next person was willing to pay for it.
Electricity is the New Economy
Go back far enough in history and currency was always tied to something real. Grain, livestock, land. The value came from the fact that these things were directly useful. You could eat the grain, ride the horse, build on the land.
Then we invented fiat and severed that link.
But here’s what I think is happening: as the entire AI economy relies on electricity, that old link between currency and productive asset is quietly reasserting itself. The difference is the productive asset isn’t grain or fiat anymore. It’s the kilowatt.
China has already figured it out
If electricity is the real currency, then whoever controls the most generation controls the money supply.
China hit their 2030 renewable target of 1,200 gigawatts five years early. In 2024, renewables made up 56% of total installed capacity, and clean energy met 84% of all new demand. Their generation growth now outpaces the rest of the world combined. The State Grid Corporation of China is building Ultra-High-Voltage transmission lines to ship power from solar and wind farms in the western desert to the industrial coast, thousands of kilometers away.
In addition, China has now banned all cryptocurrency mining. From China’s perspective, Bitcoin mining was a rival. It took their most strategic resource and burned it. Every megawatt that used to power mining rigs got redirected to factories, AI training, and grid expansion.
Meanwhile we are wasting ours
Now zoom out and consider what the rest of the world has been doing with its electricity while China executes this strategy.
Bitcoin mining consumes more electricity annually than many entire countries. Warehouses full of machines running meaningless math puzzles, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, producing absolutely zero productive output for society.
If the kilowatt-hour is the 21st-century equivalent of gold, then Bitcoin mining is akin to melting down gold bars to print paper receipts. A token that crashes 70% every few years. A token that has never once behaved as a safe haven when it actually mattered.
The “casino chips” analogy is not exaggeration. Casino chips have no value outside the casino. Bitcoin’s value similarly exists only within its own ecosystem of believers and speculators.
What the History Books Will Say
Future generations will study this era the way we study tulip mania, except tulip mania at least produced flowers.
They will describe a generation that had access to the most transformative resource in human existence and chose to incinerate it to create meme coins. They will note that this happened while one nation, China, was quietly building more electricity generation than anyone else on earth, strategically allocating every kilowatt-hour to industries that now dominate global manufacturing, AI, electric vehicles, and green technology.
The present is electric. The future is even more electric. Every factory, every vehicle, every AI model, every data center, runs on electricity. Electricity is now the foundation of the economy.
And the choice facing every nation is simple: spend your electricity building productive capacity, or burn it producing tokens that do nothing.
China has made its choice. The rest of the world should learn from it.