Excellent historical summary! And yes, I thoroughly believe that BTC is a government led creation for the purposes of moving us to not only a digital currency, but also to destroy independent national currencies and transfer humanity to a more centralized global currency model.

Bitcoin itself does not really concern me all that much since I see it as the prototype currency developed by the NSA. I honestly think that the NSA and the broader government think tank that developed it are socially experimenting with it right now. They are also backing other new cryptocurrencies behind the scenes along with other governments around the world. The cryptos market is currently the play den of intelligence agencies and central banks. If you want to know more, you need to have a look at my previous posts on symbolism in the new cryptos. These are not just small crypto geek projects anymore. They are funded and led (and later pumped) by much bigger players behind the scenes - intelligence agencies, governments, crime syndicates, you name it.

For BTC, yes, you could say that its legitimate value is the amount of energy that goes into mining it, but I would say that, just as with any fiat currency, its rather about how much it is perceived to be worth due to its scarcity vs. its demand. I am also not convinced that the use of crypto mining is intended to drive energy costs up and support the energy suppliers if this is what you are implying. Mining is a short term proposition in any case due to the number of coins that can be mined and the new cryptocurrencies are moving to other staking models (or even hashgraph) regardless since mining is clunky as hell and drives horribly wrong incentives with the miners. (This is why we have all these ridiculous BTC hard forks.)

Although I believe in metals backed currencies for the sake of ensuring fraud is not perpetrated on the people, if the value of a non-backed currency goes primarily to the people and not the government or other 3rd parties (e.g. BTC miners, BTC initial creators, etc.) then a non-backed currency model can even be a good thing. The issue you have to face instead is the volatility and price instability. Usually, this is not the case for a commodity backed currency since usually there is stability in prices based upon the value of the backing commodity. However, this also assumes that there is not a hard limit on the commodity, otherwise demand will outstrip supply (i.e. deflation) for a very long time. (This is the current Bitcoin model.)

The Continental used by the original colonies had no backing whatsoever, but was not abused by the colonial government of the time. This meant that the majority of the value went to the people. In fact, if you managed this model correctly, no taxes would need to be paid because the creation of new money would pay for the government and the only cost the citizen would pay is a slight bit of inflation. Instead what we have today is a government that not only inflates the hell out of the currency to no end (tax number one), you have countless taxes on top to steal every last cent from the populace for Deep State wars and black projects. The corruption of the system is at a degree that is almost unfathomable due to the incalculable taxation and hidden electronic government and banking theft via electronic inflation.

(You might like this article as a counter to the BTC energy costs story as well: Did Anyone Do Even a Minimal Check on the Sensationalist Bitcoin Electrical Consumption Story?)

The mined model of Bitcoin has different problems. Bitcoin is deflationary and sucks in money like crazy as people try to make significant returns in lieu of the worthless government cash and other worthless Ponzi-like investments available in the marketplace. Traditionally, this money would go to metals in such an economic environment instead, but the metals market has been eviscerated for ages by paper derivatives. Since governments can't yet apply significant derivatives to Bitcoin, it is taking off like a metal would in such situations, hence Bitcoin being called digital gold. If there were other legitimate investment opportunities and the currencies weren't being inflated ad infinitum, then the cryptos wouldn't be going anywhere right now in my opinion. The investment case wouldn't be there for them.

Sorry, I've basically turned this into a separate post and will turn this into a proper post back on my blog to address what I think is the right longer term solution. I'll leave it that Bitcoin is not the final solution and has not been planned to be. Bitcoin is an experiment to create the first digital money. The real game is starting now after seven years of watching how the populace reacts to it. What comes next is what we need to be truly afraid of.