At ten million dollars a coin, Bitcoin would no longer be merely expensive. It would become an industrial appetite wearing the evening dress of an investment.

The first distinction is the one most enthusiasts carefully avoid: Bitcoin’s price does not mechanically determine its electricity consumption. Miner revenue does. Miners compete for the block subsidy and transaction fees; when those rewards become more valuable, additional machines remain profitable until electricity, equipment, financing and operating costs have consumed much of the prize. Improvements in mining efficiency do not abolish this tendency. They merely permit more computation to compete for the same reward.

In 2030, after the expected 2028 halving, the block subsidy would be 1.5625 Bitcoin. At roughly 144 blocks a day, miners would receive about 82,125 newly issued Bitcoin each year. At ten million dollars each, that is approximately $821 billion in annual subsidy revenue before a single transaction fee is counted. Bitcoin’s issuance schedule follows the programmed halving of the subsidy approximately every 210,000 blocks.

Now make a restrained economic assumption: miners eventually spend between 30 and 50 per cent of their revenue on electricity, at an average delivered industrial price between $50 and $100 per megawatt-hour. That produces an estimated 2030 electricity demand of approximately 2,460 to 8,210 terawatt-hours a year.

The midpoint—40 per cent of revenue spent at $70 per megawatt-hour—is about 4,700 terawatt-hours.

The US Energy Information Administration’s reference projection places total world electricity generation in 2030 at roughly 31,739 terawatt-hours. Bitcoin mining would therefore absorb about 8 to 26 per cent of projected global electricity generation, with the central estimate close to 15 per cent.

Fifteen per cent of the world’s electricity would not be found beneath a sofa cushion.

It is equivalent to a continuous load of roughly 536 gigawatts: hundreds of large power stations operating without interruption. If supplied entirely by nuclear generation at a 90 per cent capacity factor, it would require nearly 600 gigawatts of reactor capacity. If supplied by wind and solar averaging a 35 per cent capacity factor, it would require more than 1.5 terawatts of nameplate generation before allowing for storage, transmission losses, seasonal variation, reserve margins or curtailment.

Even at the implausibly neat capital cost of $1 million per megawatt, the absolute minimum generation bill would exceed half a trillion dollars. Once realistic capacity factors, grids, transformers, storage, fuel infrastructure, redundancy and financing are included, the requirement moves into the trillions.

That money must come from somewhere. Capital lent to mining power projects is capital unavailable for factories, housing, public transport, water systems, grid decarbonisation and the electrification of ordinary industry. The electricity system would not simply become larger. Its investment programme would be diverted toward an artificial contest for a fixed digital reward.

Suppose, merely to illustrate the fuel consequences, that half of the central 2030 requirement were supplied by natural gas and half by coal. Gas generation of roughly 2,350 terawatt-hours would require on the order of 480 billion cubic metres of gas, depending on plant efficiency. That is roughly one-tenth of current global gas demand. The coal half could require approximately 900 million tonnes of coal—again, around one-tenth of present annual world coal demand. Global coal demand was about 8.85 billion tonnes in 2025, while global gas demand had already reached record levels.

The exact fuel mix would vary. The economic effect would not.

Mining companies would bid for long-term power contracts, gas pipelines, generating capacity, substations, transformers, land and grid connections. At first they would use surplus or curtailed electricity, because everyone prefers to begin a banquet with leftovers. At thousands of terawatt-hours, however, the leftovers would soon be exhausted. Mining would cease to be a buyer of otherwise wasted power and become a competitor for power that households and productive industries require.

In competitive electricity markets, this additional demand would raise wholesale prices and congestion charges. In regulated systems, utilities would recover the costs through tariffs, public subsidies or taxation. Where governments imposed household price caps, the cost would reappear as public debt, industrial surcharges, shortages or deteriorating grid reliability. The citizen would pay whether the invoice arrived from the electricity company, the tax authority or the supermarket.

Aluminium would be among the first victims. Primary aluminium smelting is extraordinarily electricity-intensive, and electricity constitutes a major part of production cost. Smelters cannot casually compete with a speculative industry whose revenue has been multiplied by an exchange price. They close, relocate or demand subsidies. Aluminium then becomes more expensive; so do aircraft, vehicles, cables, cans, buildings, power lines and consumer electronics.

Steel, copper refining, cement, glass, chemicals, fertiliser, refrigeration and data processing would face the same contest. Natural-gas prices would affect electricity, heating and fertiliser simultaneously. Coal prices would affect power and metals. Transformer shortages would delay housing and industrial connections. Copper and aluminium demand would rise not merely because miners consume electricity, but because supplying them requires another layer of grids and generation.

Thus the inflation would not remain in the electricity bill. It would travel through the economy disguised as everything else.

By 2040, the arithmetic changes because the subsidy continues to halve. Before the expected 2040 halving, the reward would be 0.390625 Bitcoin per block; afterwards, 0.1953125. At ten million dollars per coin, annual subsidy revenue would therefore fall to roughly $205 billion before the halving and $103 billion after it, excluding fees.

Under the same assumptions, 2040 mining electricity consumption would lie broadly between about 308 and 2,050 terawatt-hours. A central estimate would be roughly 1,170 terawatt-hours before the halving and 590 terawatt-hours afterwards.

Against the EIA’s projected 2040 world generation of approximately 36,744 terawatt-hours, that is about 0.8 to 5.6 per cent of global supply, with central estimates of roughly 3.2 per cent before the halving and 1.6 per cent afterwards.

So, paradoxically, a sustained ten-million-dollar Bitcoin could impose a larger subsidy-driven electricity burden in 2030 than in 2040. The halvings reduce newly issued Bitcoin. But that conclusion depends upon transaction fees not replacing the subsidy. If miners are instead paid enormous fees, those fees become additional mining revenue, and the energy burden rises again.

At ten million dollars per coin, Bitcoin’s maximum headline valuation would be approximately $210 trillion. Yet market capitalisation is not money placed into Bitcoin. It is the marginal trading price multiplied by the outstanding supply. One cannot honestly say that $210 trillion has physically left the rest of the economy.

The real danger is subtler and more material.

A price of ten million dollars would create hundreds of billions of dollars in annual claims upon electricity and machinery. It would inflate collateral values, redistribute wealth toward existing holders, encourage leverage, attract sovereign speculation and direct real investment toward defending a ledger rather than producing goods. If the asset were widely pledged against loans, a later collapse in its price could transmit losses through banks, funds, companies and governments.

And this sacrifice would not even require Bitcoin to function as ordinary money.

Bitcoin was proposed as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, allowing online payments without a financial institution. But proof-of-work expenditure is not proportionate to the number of useful purchases made. A network used mainly for speculation and occasional settlement can consume immense amounts of electricity because miners are paid for winning blocks, not for demonstrating that society received an equivalent quantity of useful commerce.

The absurdity is therefore complete. A payment system need not process the world’s payments to compete for the world’s power.

Would ten-million-dollar Bitcoin automatically collapse every economy? No. Economies do not collapse merely because a number appears on an exchange. Market capitalisation is not physical consumption, mining expansion is constrained by hardware and regulation, and governments can prohibit or ration access to grids.

But if miners were permitted to expand toward the economic equilibrium implied by a ten-million-dollar price, the 2030 burden would be large enough to destabilise electricity markets, obstruct industrial expansion, raise fuel demand, intensify commodity inflation and force governments to choose between miners, manufacturers and households. Energy-importing countries would face worsening trade balances. Poorer states would suffer shortages. Energy-intensive industry would migrate toward subsidised jurisdictions. Governments would socialise grid costs while private miners collected the reward.

Civilisation can survive many follies. What it cannot do cheaply is grant a speculative token a claim on perhaps one-seventh of its electricity while continuing to pretend that electricity has no alternative use.

The final irony is exquisitely modern: Bitcoin would be praised as incorruptible money precisely while it corrupted the price of every real thing money is meant to buy.