Money must be anchored to the physical world. That anchor is energy.
If a monetary unit can be created without cost, without energy expenditure, it has no physical basis. Even a perfectly cryptographic, trustless system that enforces scarcity without work would still be ungrounded. It would be a symbol without substrate.
What money represents is an exchangeable good that required effort to bring into usefulness. Effort implies time. Time implies energy. Value begins there.
Bitcoin’s proof-of-work is not incidental. It is the bridge between the abstract and the physical. Energy was expended. Humans chose to expend it. Will was embedded into existence. Like artisanry, that work is indelible.
Without the work, Bitcoin would lose its relation to the real world. With it, Bitcoin becomes an intangible good that can nonetheless carry real value. Existence of bitcoin testifies that someone sacrificed something irrecoverable: time, proven by energy burned.
Scarcity amplifies this. Cryptography preserves it. Ownership is not just possession of bits, but possession of the proof that work was done, will was exercised, and value was brought into being.