Mutualism resolved the issue of establishing a sound and functional unit of account, based on energy, over 150 years ago. Mutualism was, in fact, among the earliest schools of modern thought to challenge metallism (Aristotle, millenia before, and many others in between, had already pointed out the problems of metallism), a challenge the ruling class took and formed into Keynesianism. And mutualism has always been connected, even if implictly, to thermodynamics, owing to its foundations in the labor theory of value. The original formulations of thermoeconomics, such as by Podolinksy, despite his Marxist shortcomings, were essentially derived from the labor theory of value, the original modern explicators of which were the classical liberals (Smith, Ricardo) and pre-Marxist socialists (Ricardian socialists, Proudhon), thermoeconomics being a natural and inevitable deduction therefrom. And early thinkers like Soddy, who also pioneered the field, came to similar conclusions as the mutualists regarding the nature of usury.
The solution for a sound and functional unit of account is tying and maintaining the unit of account on a 1-to-1 ratio with its basis, which should be free from monopolization and acknowledged as a product of socially-demanded caloric energy. This means that any commodity, warehouse receipt, letter of credit, goodwill, store of power, etc., which has a market demand, should be able to be used as the basis of money, and understood as having its value from thermodynamic/thermoeconomic energy inputs (labor being primary, its source being purpose use of caloric energy toward social ends). This is practicable and has been done, but it comes up against the interests of the ruling class (corporate capitalists) and ruling ethnic groups (historically, Jews), which are often overlapping demographics who control the state. As beneficiaries of it, rulers are interested in maintaining an economy based upon usury (interest, rent, profit) and tribute (taxes). And they manipulate culture to this end, which has shaken the anthropological, interpersonal, and sociological foundations required for a sound and funtional unit of account to become ontologically realizable.
Under mutualist analysis, all thermoeconomic stocks are stocks of labor value, because there are only three factors of production (land, labor, capital), and
Economic labor is caloric energy used for civil and socially-in-demand purposes. This means that even energy stores such as oil, sunlight, wind, hydro, lifted weight, machines that can do work, computational programs, etc. are products of labor, or derive their value therefrom. Thermopolitical and thermocriminal stocks-- produced by conquest, taxation, theft, fraud and such aggressions-- are deductions from thermoeconomic stocks, because takings from civil society. And thermopolitical stocks, especially, cause distortions in the thermoeconomic stocks of civil society, or the pricing thereof. Between the two poles of theremoeconomic wages to labor and thermopolitical taxes to the state, there is a realm of thermopolitical economics, which includes interest to lenders, rent to landlords, and profit to employers, which appear to be voluntary in form, but which are taxes in substance. Even the voluntarily-exchanged yields of land and the premium of capital must be reduced to labor value. Thus, all thermoeconomic value is labor value, because ecological, political, and criminal value falls outside of the realm of economics, and capital and land values can be reduced to labor for extraction and manufacturing (etc.).
Importantly, while useful work is a sound basis for money, waste is not a sound basis of money. When I hear the idea that cryptocurrencies derive their value from “mining” (nothing at all) and other such non-renewable activities that do jobs that can be performed with as much qualified value by a living, human organism (a system of syntropy that imposes negentropy upon its environment, while also contributing some entropy to it) operating only on caloric energy with a piece of paper for a ledger, I am hearing a thermoeconomic nightmare! The implicit result of such a system is to increase the heat sink at an increasingly high rate. Technocrats believe that these costs can be offset by exponential gains from enabled innovation, but futurism of this sort is not a scientific pursuit and has no basis in common sense reality.
The issue with establishing a money supply free from state interference-- at least one that does not simply replace the nation-state with the corporate state--, which appears to be the exoteric goal of cryptocurrencies, is not an economic matter any longer, but rests upon the general ignorance, degenerated conscience, and inadequate ideas of the multitude, being a political cultural affair. The economics are resolved, and have been for over a century. Thus, mutualists tend to scoff at the snake oil of cryptocurrencies. The problem is that economies (properly-speaking, not including the concept of “biological markets”) are functions of civil society and civil society is preoccupied with a cultural war that has degenerated its moral and ethical perspectives and uncoupled its thinking from objectivity and its pursuits from benevolence. This allows us to come to irrational and unconscientious conclusions-- such as that wasting energy can be used as a basis for money-- and to ignore working solutions-- such as mutual credit banking-- for over a century.
There are reasons such conclusions are jumped to, aside from the fact that the bankers do not finance a public face for true mutualism. The other reasons stem largely from rhetorical plays on the idea that commodities derive their value from their scarcity and that this scarcity is owed to the amount of energy put into a given commodity. These reasons are true as hedonics and utilities of value, but do not function as conveyers of the actual basis or physical content of value, which is applied, purposive labor, potential (goodwill) or actual (goods and services rendered) caloric energy, found to be in-demand by others who have purchasing power by the same means.
Labor is the substance of value, while hedonics and utility are considerations toward the qualities and uses of the substance, contributing to value considerations only in relation to that substance. It is common to consider the value as being owed instead to the qualities, but this is not the economic, but the geo-ecological, value. Say that there are two items. One is made of iron, and the other is iron plated with gold. The gold adds hedonic value, because it adds to beauty and prestige, and the prestige may have a social utility. But the acquisition of the gold required labor, no matter how minimal it may have been. To acquire a replacement for that gold would require, on average and within a reasonable timespan, a similar amount of labor as the original extraction. Thus, the value of the gold, even when hedonics and utility are considered, is reducible to the labor required to extract the gold from nature.
Economically, labor is not just any effort put toward a given end, but effort that performs a social function by supplying civil demand. This does not include activities of political economy, such as governing (not to be confused for administrating), which does take effort, but which is not socially-demanded because involuntary and coercive. So the value in labor, which is the basis of all economic (including thermoeconomic) value, is not that it takes caloric energy or that this caloric energy-use is hard to induce in others, but that the labor is purposive in such a way that it satisfies the ends desired by others. These ends are actually the reduction of caloric energy-use otherwise put toward uninteresting pursuits, because uninteresting application of labor is something that people are naturally adverse to doing. In other words, we value the labor of others, the source of all value, for its investment potential in reducing the amount of menial labor that must be performed overall, or, more importantly, that can be performed toward a greater reduction of demand for our labor, freeing us to do other things. Thus, labor has created capital to assist it in its production, so as to enable leisure and redirected efforts (but this capital is just stored labor).
“Mining” for cryptocurrency does not appear to perform a task that cannot otherwise be generally performed without it (facilitating a means of exchange, keeping accounts) or to reduce the costs of performing common tasks. As such, it does not appear to be a purposive use of energy, or at least not having a long-term, conscientious purposiveness that can be sustainably reached. It also takes a whole lot of energy, which would be absurd to claim is used to the ends of reducing energy-demand. "Mining" (nothing at all), as I have understood it, basically amounts to getting a bookkeeping consensus among computers across the world, performing the job of a clerk, but in each ledger. This is theoretically a very good thing, because it establishes ironclad accountability and assurance. But it does not seem to be necessary or something that is in-demand by conscientious working people. And a clerk runs on renewable, caloric energy that requires no combustion technologies (but that is currently supported by them, nonetheless) while performing the task sufficiently, without raising accounting/transaction costs. An argument against a clerk is that “mining” (for nothing at all) somehow avoids the stickiness of prices issue, by updating things immediately. But this is really only a concern for speculators, and even without blockchain, the stock markets have been updated in matters of seconds or minutes for decades anyway, and the internet allows updates to be seen fairly immediately. The sticky prices issue, so far as it remains, is primarily a concern of three overlapping sets of people: 1) people who do not work for a living, and spend money that is extracted from the labor of others, and so which is free for speculating with, 2) people who follow trends rather than exercising their own market agency (and thereby directing demand), and 3) people who have been duped into believing popular conversation or economic bubbles must always result from legitimacy, rather than from disequilibriums found to be monetarily-favorable by a small set of speculators who perform no socially in-demand function, but who enable money market fluctuations so as to predate upon others, a form of economic vampirism.
It is true that digital cryptocurrency has a market demand. This has been compared to other bubbles such as the TY beanie baby craze, where Boomers were led to obsess over a certain brand of plush toy. All such bubbles rely on external forcing, and can as such be categorized as artificial rather than natural. Ecological systems do not degenerate on their own, they require external forcing to cause a disturbance, and this disturbance can be a deficiency of something or an excess of something, thereby creating a trophic collapse. Economic bubble bursts are just collapses within the socially-constructed trophic arrangements of humans. In the case of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, this artificial bubble was subsidized by the original items placed on the market in acceptance of the otherwise valueless tokens (an excess, because the tokens corresponded to no actual economic value and covered no actual costs of the original contributors), which established a velocity in the currency despite an absence of basis in its value (which typically comes from attachment to a real basis, even if that basis is something abstract like GDP). This is, in effect, a coupon from the ultra-rich, and bait for a trap. This provided its creators not with thermoeconomic value, which was lost, but with thermopolitical economic or thermocriminal economic value, which was gained in the bubble-creation that allowed speculation to take place. Such a coupon may circulate, and speculation may lead to gains within the circulation, but its circulation is irrational for the long-term and cannot be sustained. Thus, a business cycle takes place, involving booms and busts, bulls and bears. We know a priori that this does not happen in a currency which maintains a money supply equal to the value of the basis it represents. But it is also a short-term benefit to those who can predict and speculate upon the uncivil consequences, though a short-term benefit that is a relative gain for an absolute loss.
This all said, energy is a commodity like any other, and there are legitimate reasons to look to thermoeconomic energy stocks as an exceptionally strong basis for currency. Thomas Greco is focusing his efforts right now on a “Solar Dollar.” I believe an exceptionally strong stock of energy would be found in concentrated iron that is lifted by solar-powered stirling engines upon a derrick as a means of mechanical energy storage, and slow-released for the direct powering of revised line shafts or some equivalent in the home or workshop and its walls. However, trying to establish spent stocks, rather than stores of stock, as a basis of currency, is a natural absurdity, and, as such, is dependent upon some kind of conspiracy to apply external forcing onto the thermoeconomic system to establish what could only be called anti-demand , because having the form of demand while serving the ends of energy-depletion that depletes thermoeconomic and thermoeconological stocks and places them into a thermopolitical, thermopolitical economic, or thermocriminal economic heat sink.