PSA: BITCOIN IS ENERGY-BACKED DIGITAL SOUND MONEY

“It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”

—Henry Ford

Over a century ago, Henry Ford proposed replacing gold with an energy-backed currency—a radical monetary reform that prefigured bitcoin in form and function.

“Under the energy currency system, the standard would be a certain amount of energy exerted for one hour...to connect currency with energy.”

Often dismissed as utopian, Ford’s proposal aimed to anchor money to energy—a real, measurable input tied to society’s productive capacity and resistant to manipulation.

From the front page of the New York Tribune:

“Ford Would Replace Gold With Energy Currency and Stop Wars” [1921]

“The essential evil of gold in its relation to war is the fact that it can be controlled. Break the control and you stop war.”

An energy standard would democratize money. It would reflect effort, not power. Creation, not control.

Bitcoin answers that vision, notably without the need for centralized control or oversight.

Proof-of-Work turns energy into monetary units. Miners convert electricity into hash power to secure a global ledger. The cost to produce each bitcoin is real. The system rewards efficiency, not proximity to issuance.

Bitcoin achieves three things Ford wanted but couldn’t yet build:

➤ A money grounded in thermodynamic cost
➤ A neutral issuance process, open to all
➤ A system resistant to political capture

Fiat money is cheap to produce and easy to abuse. Bitcoin is expensive to create and impossible to counterfeit.

Ford's vision failed in his time—there was no infrastructure, no network, no cryptographic tools. But the economic insight was sound:

Monetary trust must be earned through work.

The system Ford imagined now exists.

It’s running in the open.

And no one can turn it off.