Prices rise because supply has become more expensive. Output weakens because households have less disposable income and firms face higher costs. This is not demand-driven prosperity that central banks can cool gently. It is an adverse supply shock, created in this case by machines consuming electricity to defend the valuation of a speculative asset.

Central banks would then face an exquisite little nightmare. If they raised interest rates to contain inflation, mortgages, business finance, government borrowing and construction would become more expensive. If they tolerated the shock, inflation expectations and wage demands could become embedded.

Governments would attempt to hide the damage through electricity subsidies, price caps and industrial assistance. But costs do not disappear when politicians move them off the bill. They return as higher taxation, greater public debt, losses at state-owned utilities or reduced spending elsewhere. The IMF has warned that suppressing energy-price pass-through can create substantial and sometimes concealed fiscal liabilities.

The international effects would be equally charming.

Energy-exporting states would gain revenue and geopolitical leverage. Energy-importing countries would suffer deteriorating trade balances and falling real income. Their currencies could weaken, making fuel, food, machinery and other imports still more expensive. Under severe energy shocks, the IMF has estimated real-income losses of two to three per cent of GDP for import-dependent economies.

Poor households would be harmed most. Electricity, food, heating and transport consume a larger share of their income. The holders of BTC would receive the capital gain; everyone else would receive the inflation, higher interest rates and reduced public services.

And all of this would occur while AI data centres were expanding at exceptional speed. Data-centre electricity consumption grew by seventeen per cent in 2025, far faster than total global electricity demand. BTC miners would be bidding against AI systems, factories, hospitals and households for the same generation capacity and grid connections.

The claim that a million-dollar BTC represents universal wealth creation is therefore rather comic. The increase enriches existing holders while licensing miners to appropriate an enormous share of the world’s electricity. The gain is private. The energy shock is socialised.

At one million dollars, BTC would not merely be an expensive digital asset. It would become a global macroeconomic event: higher electricity prices, higher food and manufactured-goods prices, weaker productivity, declining real wages, pressure on currencies, larger government deficits, higher interest rates and slower growth.

The holders would call it adoption. Everyone else would call it the electricity bill.