Bitcoin petroleo digital
While critics claim Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, companies and governments are turning energy, idle capital, and technological innovation into unprecedented opportunities. Bitcoin is still revealing its disruptive potential—much like oil before the industrial age.
In recent days, the debate around Bitcoin has returned to center stage. The British broker Hargreaves Lansdown stated that the cryptocurrency “has no intrinsic value,” reinforcing that it does not consider it suitable for long-term client plans.
This stance is not new. For more than a decade, the “Bitcoin Obituaries” page—maintained by 99Bitcoins—has compiled headlines and analyses declaring the asset dead; to date, there are 477 such “obituaries” across different price cycles. Interestingly, in August 2025 the index marked a milestone: for the first time, Bitcoin went over a year without a new “obituary,” despite volatility and recurring criticism.
Meanwhile, Brazil has begun attracting mining projects thanks to structural surpluses of renewable power. Beyond private initiatives (such as Renova Energia in Bahia), Eletrobras announced a pilot mining project with an investment of roughly R$ 90 million to study consumption, integration, and potential revenue generation—an experimental yet symbolic move.
The apparent contradiction helps frame the central question: is Bitcoin mere speculation, or does it create measurable economic value?
It’s common to compare Bitcoin to gold, the classic “store of value.” Gold preserves wealth but rarely generates income on its own. Bitcoin, by contrast, can generate revenue when used to capture energy that would otherwise go to waste.
How does that work? In wind or solar farms, there are times when production is high and the grid cannot absorb it—the energy would simply be stranded. In oil fields, some associated gas is burned off in a flare because there’s no takeaway capacity. In such cases, miners can locate computers near the source and turn that “excess” energy into money. In some regions, those same computers also help the power grid: they shut down during peak hours—when the system needs relief—and receive discounts or credits for that service (so-called demand response programs).
To look more closely at “value,” it helps to revisit economic classics. Adam Smith emphasized utility and scarcity; John Maynard Keynes highlighted liquidity and confidence; John Stuart Mill analyzed allocation under constraints. Among contemporary economists, even Nobel laureates like Robert C. Merton show that measuring risk and return in innovative contexts is inherently complex. This range of perspectives helps explain why the “intrinsic value” of Bitcoin remains controversial.
The oil analogy is helpful. Before the industrial era, oil had limited uses; it became “black gold” once engines and industry began consuming it at scale. Something similar is happening with Bitcoin: when surplus energy exists in certain places—because there’s no transmission, no buyer at that time, or it would otherwise be flared—operators can turn that wasted energy into local revenue by running mining computers.
There are concrete examples. Equinor tested using gas that would otherwise be flared to generate electricity and mine Bitcoin, reducing waste at U.S. fields. ExxonMobil also evaluated a pilot in the Bakken (North Dakota), using gas that lacked pipeline transport—Bloomberg reported the company was studying expansion to other countries. Shell doesn’t mine, but it supplies dielectric immersion fluids (an efficient way to cool machines) and has sponsored industry conferences; those fluids are built for high-performance data centers—which, among other applications, include mining.
The economic mechanism is straightforward. Think of mining as a price floor: where low-cost surplus energy exists, mining can be the best local monetization option—especially if physical takeaway (lines/transmission) is costly or nonexistent. In markets such as Texas, miners also act as controllable loads: they switch off when the system needs it, earn demand credits, and help stabilize the grid. Publicly listed firms report competitive power costs at certain sites, and sector reports indicate that the cash cost per BTC among listed miners sat in the tens of thousands of dollars after the 2024 halving—varying with efficiency, energy price, and scale.
You can call this “surplus-supply optimization” (a descriptive label, not industry jargon). In energy-market language we’re talking about energy arbitrage, monetizing stranded/excess energy, and flare mitigation through near-source computing—an arrangement already documented by infrastructure players and industry studies.
Like oil, Bitcoin also sparks disputes and competing interests. When a large share of mining clusters in a few places, those regions gain influence while others lose voice. Governments set divergent rules—some encourage, others restrict—and everyone competes for scarce inputs: cheap power, space for data centers, and grid interconnections. That produces local and international tensions.
Price matters, too. Because it swings widely, capital-intensive projects (buying machines, building facilities, signing multi-year power contracts) become riskier. And then there’s the environmental question. Serious discussion requires clear numbers: how much of the power used is clean, how much CO₂ is emitted to generate that electricity, how much “surplus” energy mining captures instead of being discarded, and how much these operations assist the grid by shutting down during peak hours. Without such data, the debate becomes guesswork.
The risks are clear: volatility, regulatory uncertainty, custody concentration, and technology vectors. But “risk” here is a production variable, not an accidental bug—what Ulrich Beck described as modernity’s fuel: progress and danger move together. Distinguishing operators who understand surplus monetization, price/halving cycles, and load management from those who merely speculate is, in the end, the core of the thesis.
More than fifteen years after its birth, the discussion about Bitcoin’s “value” continues. The useful question isn’t “does it have value,” but how, where, and when it creates value. We already see this happening in concrete ways: when it turns surplus energy into local revenue; when it helps the grid by being a load that can shut off at peak times; when it reduces costs with better cooling techniques; and when countries or regions with abundant, inexpensive clean power can attract investment and convert that surplus into new money flowing into the economy.
All of this is happening in the open, right now. We’re still at the start of the learning curve—just as oil was in its early days—and the trend is for new uses to emerge as technology, infrastructure, and rules advance.
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