Elon Musk stated that the future currency will be measured in watts and tons, rather than dollars. He mentioned this in an interview with his biographer Walter Isaacson on the podcast The Builders. The recording was made in early August and released on October 20. According to Musk, artificial intelligence and robotics will render money and work irrelevant, but he did not predict the complete disappearance of currency. "Currency will be measured in fundamental physical quantities – power, watts and tons, mass and energy... ordinary currency will not matter in the future," he said. The idea is not new for Musk: in June, he wrote on X that mass and energy will replace dollars. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, his fortune is estimated at approximately $920 billion.
Charles Edwards, founder of Capriole Investments and member of the BeInCrypto Market Intelligence Expert Council, responded within hours: in his opinion, energy and price are linked one-to-one, and Bitcoin is already measured in watts. In a 2019 paper, he derives fair value from miners' electricity costs – considering hash rate, equipment efficiency, supply growth, and a fixed constant of dollars per joule. Capriole claims that the price returns to this energy cost over time, and unlike models based on scarcity, it falls to zero if all miners shut down.
At the time of publication, BTC is trading around $83,264, up 2.3% for the day. With an energy cost of $131,057, the gap is approximately 36%; closing it would require a growth of about 57%. Historically, the price went significantly above the line at the peaks of 2013, 2017, and 2021, and below the line at the lows of 2015, 2018, 2020, and 2022. The current cycle broke the pattern: in 2024 and 2025, BTC moved along the line without a speculative premium.
Data from Blockchain com shows that the hash rate – the computational power securing Bitcoin – exceeded 1.1 zettahashes per second in October 2025. Then, under pressure on miners, the figure dropped to 900 exahashes per second, and now it's back above 1 zettahash. Meanwhile, the price almost halved from the October 2025 record before forming a bottom around $60,000 in June. The network's energy remained almost unchanged, while the dollar price did. JPMorgan's estimate of the mining cost at $85,000 is now slightly above the market price.
This material is prepared solely for informational purposes and does not constitute financial advice or a recommendation.