‘Bread’ vs Bitcoin: Where’s the beef?
Mining for cryptocurrency produces no real goods
Money was a tangible thing you held in your hand when I was growing up. Money in hand symbolized the ability to buy food such as bread. We even sometimes called it that, as in “I don’t even have enough bread to get a movie ticket.”
My concept of money expanded in 1983 when I studied French abroad during my junior year of college. Leaving behind the greenbacks of US bills, I encountered more colorful currencies in France and, later that trip, Italy and Greece.
My shoestring budget had me thinking daily about money, such as how I would spend the roughly $1 a day I allowed myself for luxury items.
In those pre-smartphone days, I fell into the habit of thinking about money exchanges in terms of how many loaves of local bread the new currency could buy. It made sense to me to judge a currency by its ability to provide nourishment on a budget.
A loaf of bread in Medieval France often came as part of the pay for a day’s work, as Michael Pollan noted in his 2013 book Cooked. As he explained, before the invention of the roller mill after 1870, a much healthier version of bread made up about half of the typical European’s nutrition.
Bread represented the ability to stay alive for another day. Money made it easier to trade beyond bartering by symbolizing productivity.
Photo by Michel Sabarense on Unsplash
Where’s the beef?
Even when transferred electronically, money represented effort—known to physicists as work, and to economists and biologists as productivity.
The biological form of productivity comes closest to practical reality. Nature’s productivity is measured by the “greening” of the landscape, for instance. Nature uses the energy of the sun to combine carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates.
Greening reflects the production of these carbs, including those found in wheat. Nature’s production lines clearly lead to more food for humans and other animals.
As for human productivity, perhaps the easiest place to start is produce. Producing fruits and vegetables requires a certain amount of land, water and energy.
Beyond the required sunshine, additional energy input can come from a human with a shovel, an ox pulling a plow or a gasoline-powered tractor. The end result is tangible food.
Similarly, ranchers invest in cows to turn nature’s productivity into dairy products and beef.
Even timber plantations work with nature to produce construction materials.
Other, less-direct productive efforts may include writing a news story, taking a coffee order, crunching numbers to balance a spreadsheet or building a home.
Adding energy beyond human elbow grease can boost productivity. For instance, farmers who invest in tractors powered with the stored energy of oil and gas can produce additional crops. They can exchange the increased productivity—the produce—for money to buy more seed or fix a leaking roof.
Given the extra productivity it can yield, it’s no wonder we often describe energy in terms of power, as in “horse power” or “electrical power.”
So that’s the monetary system we’ve had until recent years. That is, until cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, entered the scene.
The virtual reality behind the mining of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency marks a shift where the resulting money no longer stands for productivity.
Mining Bitcoin produces nothing beyond virtual money, yet uses:
real land for resource-intensive data centers;
real plant productivity stored in the lumber to build data centers;
real water to cool the heat-generating computers filling the data centers;
real copper and other mined materials; and
real energy to power it all.
Currently, as noted in a Mother Jones article, the United States’ 34 largest Bitcoin mines combined use a third more electricity than the entire city of Los Angeles.
And don’t forget mining the copper needed for computers, wiring and energy production also usurps land and water, as does energy production. What’s more, renewable energy typically uses more copper than conventional energy.
Even AI—which I similarly oppose because of the massive energy and resource needs of computing centers—manages to do some productive work. That’s why it’s been displacing human workers.
Virtual money: A Ponzi scheme?
I’m not alone in pointing out cryptocurrency represents a usurping of productivity with no overall gain in goods and services. JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is among those calling Bitcoin a “decentralized Ponzi scheme” in this 2024 interview because it lacks intrinsic value.
He’s more circumspect these days, noting in Fortune this week that past comments on Bitcoin have led to death threats against him.
The scheme—really, the scam—developed by Charles Ponzi, raised money from new investors to reward earlier investors, thus giving the false impression of return on an investment where none existed.
Initially, those returns help generate additional investors. At some point, though, it becomes impossible to retain the mirage of value.
Similarly, Bitcoin’s value depends on others believing it has value. I know a couple of people who bought Bitcoin, either full or partial, early on for $1,000 or less. Now a single coin has a market price of more than $100,000. This inflation can pay off big for early investors, but it doesn’t reflect any real-world improvements in productivity.
A November/December 2025 article in Mother Jones by Russ Choma shared the best explanation I’ve seen so far on how investors “mine” Bitcoin:
When it was established, its anonymous creator designed it to be a finite resource that would slowly be distributed through “mining.” By solving complex mathematical problems that validate other bitcoin transactions, new bitcoins can be unlocked and claimed—a process that once was simple and easy, but, by design, has become increasingly difficult.
Once doable on a home computer, claiming Bitcoin through computation now requires industrial-scale effort and megawatts of electricity.
Wasting energy on Trumps’ Bitcoin
Enter American Bitcoin. Eric Trump serves as its chief strategy officer, and he and his brother, Don Jr., own substantial stakes in this company, as Choma’s article described. (The next few paragraphs summarize his article.) In May, it became public by merging with Gryphon Digital Mining, which is 98 percent owned by American Bitcoin.
In late May, the Trump brothers took the stage at the annual Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas to remind attendees their father was “behind this industry 100 percent!”
Behind the scenes, they hyped their company, making much of the fact that they’d secured 200 megawatts of nearby wind energy for their Texas-based Vega Data Center, a 162,000-square-foot building that alone sprawls across nearly four acres.
Those windmills had been powering thousands of Texan homes with low-cost energy. But now, their output will go exclusively to the data center owned by the Trumps and a few others—even as their father’s policies clawed back federal funding for wind energy projects and added layers of red tape for wind and solar power. Lawsuits challenging these actions continue.
How convenient for the Trump brothers that they locked in their “certified 100 percent renewable” wind-energy contract just as their father’s rampage against this low-cost and renewable form of energy attempts to derail the industry.
Real energy, imaginary product
A computer solving complex mathematical problems does qualify as work by the standards of physics, because it uses energy to do something. But solving those equations does not contribute to the worldly total of goods and services. So, it’s clear mining Bitcoin yields no tangible forms of productivity.
Instead of producing goods and services, Bitcoin miners are merely using up energy and materials —including land, water, wood and copper—that might have been put to good use, or left for nature’s purposes.
The analog world is filled with humans who need real food, actual water, and a place to rest their heads at night. We need clothes, toiletries, blankets and baby food.
Bitcoin brings us no closer to feeding and sheltering humanity.
In hindsight, we’ll someday acknowledge we knew this system of cryptocurrency, untethered to true productivity, couldn’t hold for long. Once people stop believing that Bitcoin has any real value, its value will plummet.
Seen through the prism of nature-based reality, Bitcoin is the equivalent of empty calories. It’s a nothing burger.
Eco-Logic by Melanie Lenart, Ph.D., is free to the public, so feel free to share posts. Support is appreciated, in the form of subscriptions, hearts and shares. Thanks!
Despite not being rooted in tangible productivity, Bitcoin can still wield real-world influence. Next week, I’ll highlight how cryptocurrency paired with ill-conceived tax breaks has devastated Puerto Rico, a Caribbean island of mostly Spanish-speaking American citizens.
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