A delivery van is a strange thing to own. You buy it, and from the first mile it starts losing value. You pay for fuel every week in ordinary money, whether or not the week went well. And the only way to cover any of that is to keep hauling.
Bitcoin mining has the same shape, and I think that shape matters more than most of the arguments people have about it.
Start with what mining is. It is how new bitcoin gets made and how payments get finalized. Machines race to solve a puzzle, and the winner is paid in bitcoin. Those machines cost real money, they fall behind newer ones every year, and eventually they are worth scrap. That slow loss of value is called depreciation, and it is a real cost, just spread out. On top of it sits a power bill, which arrives in dollars or pesos or shillings, every month, on time.
So a miner holds a wasting machine, owes money in a currency he cannot print, and gets paid in a currency that moves. Something has to give. What gives is that a good share of what he mines goes back out into the market to cover the bills.
That is my claim. The cost of producing bitcoin is what keeps spreading bitcoin around. Coins do not pile up with the producers, because the producers have rent due on the first.
Set that beside a system where security is paid in kind. In proof of stake, you qualify to help run the network by already holding a lot of the coin, and you are rewarded in more of the same coin. There is no van, no fuel bill and no scrap value, so nothing in the design pushes coins back out.
The strongest case against me is a fair one. Industrial operators with ten year power contracts and direct access to chips have an edge so large that "anyone can join" reads closer to a slogan than a fact. A person with one machine in a garage is helping fund a professional industry, and should know that going in.
What would show me wrong: watch small and home machines as a share of all the machine work on the network across several cycles. If that share keeps falling while the numbers work only at industrial scale, my argument is decoration.
Bitcoin is the one money whose security comes with an electricity bill attached. I keep landing on the idea that the bill is the feature.
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