The tragedy of modern economics is not that it misunderstands money. The tragedy is that it forgot biology. Capital was never wealth. It was never accumulation. It was never stockpiles of resources waiting to be deployed. Capital was always the speed at which life turns possibility into reality. Cells understood this first. We forgot.

When critics attack Bitcoin's energy consumption, they're measuring the wrong thing. Bitcoin's ~150 TWh annually makes falsification expensive and creates a verified record. But what about the energy civilization spends maintaining information systems where falsification is cheap and verification is optional? Consider the computational infrastructure we're actually powering: Financial systems running high-frequency trading, derivative pricing, and credit scoring - massive server farms maintaining abstractions verified against other abstractions (contracts, regulations, accounting standards) rather than physical reality. Advertising networks optimizing for engagement rather than accuracy - enormous computational resources keeping human attention locked in profitable loops of unverified claims and manufactured desires. Social media platforms where false information propagates faster than truth because the energy cost of verification exceeds the energy cost of sharing. Billions of watts maintaining networks where misinformation spreads at the speed of outrage. Bureaucratic databases - governmental and corporate systems maintaining consensus structures whose update frequency is catastrophically mismatched to the pace of real-world change they're supposed to track. The comparison reveals something fundamental: Bitcoin's energy makes lies expensive. Most of our civilization's computational infrastructure makes lies cheap. We've built an information economy where the metabolic cost of maintaining beautiful, coherent falsehoods is considered normal, while the energy cost of making truth verifiable is treated as wasteful. The question isn't whether verification costs energy. It's whether we're spending that energy making information reliable or making delusion sustainable.

We all know what a Consensus Constraint feels like. It feels like a Phobia. It feels like a limiting belief. It is a rule written in our past that limits our future freedom. Civilization has these phobias, too. We call them Institutions or Dogma. To heal the world, we must do exactly what a therapist does for a patient: go back to the source code, verify the truth, and rewrite the Consensus.