/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>25556215
>POW does not mean real backing since the energy is wasted in the transaction (mining) and not stored in the token.

This "stored energy input" or "Energy equivalent value" perspective focused on by Steve St.Angelo is a great additional lens through which one can view PMs or any other commodity. In early Republican Rome the monetary system was based on bronze as opposed to Silver like in the Greek world, and their standard currency was big bronze "Asses" (Aes Rude, then Aes Signatum then Aes Grave) which represented a store of the human and material energy input plus a store of the metal's practical value, as bronze was and is useful for the crafting of all manner of objects.

Prior to industrialization it required a great deal of human labor to mine and refine metals making them effective stores of value, but in the coal and petroleum-subsidized modern era fossil fuels and machinery have been used to greatly magnify human productivity. Unfortunately, such condensed energy sources aren't unlimited and the quality or yield of fossil energy has been decreasing as the world is requiring ever more to support our unsustainable lifestyle, inefficient infrastructures and consumption curves. If and when the exponential growth and energy consumption curve necessary to keep the global fiat Ponzi scheme chugging along flattens or starts going down because of real or logistical scarcity, our industrial and postindustrial illusion will crumble and concentrated fossil energy sources will become much more expensive. When that occurs, the "stored energy value" inputs inherent to refined metals, especially eminently useful metals like Silver, will moonshot the value of existing bullion due to the skyrocketing cost of producing new metal and sustaining the necessary infrastructures for their production.
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