Free

"The best things in life are free
But you can give them to the birds and bees
I want money
That's what I want"



Malthus was wrong.  Scarcity is not the problem.  Ingenuity and efficiency may be near term challenges, but this problem is not irreconcilable.  Someone just needs to foot the bill, now or later.

So if energy is free, yet is the ability to do work multiplied by time, we have a conundrum.  Something that defines value is actually worthless.  Energy is like the marketing-fueled De Beers diamond monopoly, except that sham is ending now too. 

Whiskey.  Tango.  Foxtrot.

Well, energy is not actually free.  It take some work to convert it to useful form.  Power you want at one time is often more cheaply available at another time.  Integrate that function over a day, week, month and year and energy pricing materializes.

Maybe another paradox can solve this one. 

Consider cryptocurrencies.  Bitcoin is pretty disastrous when you consider we're shoving work into a meaningless construct inherently expensive from an energy perspective.  Unless, we were to mine it where energy is free or experiences negative pricing (e.g., Norway where they get paid to pump their hydro assets in reverse when the wind blows too hard across the channel).

If all new monetary stores of value were generated by efficiently producing kWh, MWh and TWh where needed most, we would have a global fiat currency based on the Watt Standard.

How do we get there?

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