Every durable money has been a claim on energy: grain, gold, oil, proof of work. Institutional DeFi does not break that link, it hides it.
The claim I want to defend is simple and unfashionable: every money that lasted was, underneath the accounting, a claim on energy. Grain was calories. Gold was extraction effort. The dollar spent fifty years attached to hydrocarbons. Bitcoin made the link explicit enough to be measured in terawatt-hours. And the tokenized instruments now arriving on public ledgers look like the first money in history with no energy behind it, right up to the moment you ask what the data centers and validators run on. I need to be honest about the status of this thesis. It is not mainstream economics. Mainstream economics abandoned cost-of-production theories of value in the 1870s and has never wanted them back. What I am defending is narrower than a theory of value: not that energy determines prices, but that monetary systems which endure tend to have a physical cost of production somewhere in them, and…