#8 Bitcoin Is Built on Electricity, Not Belief
Bitcoin Is Not Trust. It’s Physics.
The other night I was having dinner with a good friend, someone brilliant, with experience, who has built real things in the world. Talking about Bitcoin, I asked him what he thought money was. He looked at me with the smile of someone who’s walked that philosophical path and said: “money is trust.” I replied: no. Money is work. And work is energy.
Then he said something that made me pause: “But Bitcoin is also trust. If people stop believing in it, it disappears.” That idea, repeated often, sounds reasonable. But it’s incomplete. And dangerously wrong. Because Bitcoin doesn’t rely on trust, it rests on objective verification.
I told him: you’re not seeing the invisible. You’re not seeing the real work happening underneath, the work that allows Bitcoin to function without permission. And as often happens when something becomes digital, we assume it’s ethereal, unanchored from the physical world. But Bitcoin is deeply tied to reality, in a way no fiat currency ever was.
Because every Bitcoin that exists, every transaction that gets confirmed, every block added to the chain, is the direct result of a concrete amount of energy consumed by a computer solving a costly mathematical problem. That’s mining. It’s intensive computation that requires electricity. There’s no shortcut. You can’t fake it. You either do it, or you don’t.
So I told him this: imagine you have a stone that can only be carved if you consume 100 kWh of electricity. You can’t counterfeit it. You can’t print it from a central bank. You can only create it if you actually spent that energy. That’s Bitcoin. Energy crystallized in time, turned into a scarce digital asset, transparent and programmed so it can’t be duplicated.
That’s not trust. That’s verifiable work. And it’s, in my opinion, the reason why Bitcoin is the most honest form of money we’ve ever had.
When we understand this, a powerful door opens to design personal and corporate financial systems where past work is preserved without dilution, and stored value doesn’t depend on political whims or market narratives.
I don’t hold BTC because I believe people will trust it in the future. I do it because it’s the asset with the highest ratio of real work per unit of information. And because that work is unrepeatable. You can’t go back in time and mine Bitcoin in 2010. It’s like finite land, already partially urbanized. Each new block costs more work. And that, for a monetary system, is pure gold.
But this is only the first layer. Because once you understand that money can be anchored to real energy, not just floating trust, you can build on top of it a system that is antifragile, productive, and alive. You can:
Take loans collateralized in BTC at low rates, to finance operations without selling your monetary base
Design legal structures that protect your BTC as a separate, untouchable, and inheritable asset