Elon Muskโs ambitious goals of tackling excess spending and inefficiencies in the US federal government may have been futile, but it might have been the catalyst for his changing tune on Bitcoin.
So, why is @elonmusk finally talking about Bitcoin’s intrinsic connection to physics and energy?
As @DSBatten eloquently explains, Elon has firsthand experience trying to stop excess government spending with @DOGE.
“He’s run that experiment and he knows that it is not possibleโฆ pic.twitter.com/pmLodj8Yf6
โ Gareth Jenkinson (@gazza_jenks) December 1, 2025
The Tesla and SpaceX founder went viral on social media after suggesting that Bitcoin would replace fiat money because of itโs intrinsic connection to physical energy. Musk made the comments in conversation with Indian entrepreneur Nikhil Kamath:
โEnergy is the true currency. Thatโs why I say Bitcoin is based on energy.โ
โYou canโt legislate energy. You canโt just pass a law and suddenly have a lot of energy. Itโs very difficult to generate energy, or especially to harness energy in a useful way to do useful work,โ Musk said.ย
Naturally, the viral clip was shared widely by Bitcoin advocates and industry experts. It is also one of the first times Musk has publicly spoken about Bitcoin in recent years. He went on to to tell Kamath that society could move away from the prevailing fiat money-based system.ย
โWe probably wonโt have money. Weโll just have power generation as the defacto currency,โ Musk said.
DOGE failure pushed Elon back to Bitcoin
Bitcoin mining advocate Daniel Batten told Cointelegraphโs Chain Reaction show that Muskโs futile efforts to assist the Trump administration to address excess government expenditure have inevitably changed his perception on the financial system.ย
Now, this is a show I’ve wanted to do for a while!@DSBatten, Bitcoin misinformation detector and bringer of receipts, joined @gazza_jenks and me to talk @elonmusk‘s wise words, the media’s portrayal of mining, and the slew of Strategy stories.https://t.co/o7Y28Q9yoI
โ Robert Baggs (@rkbaggs) December 1, 2025
โElonโs been on a journey because he started off sincerely believing that it was possible to rein in government spending within a fiat-based economic system. And he had to run that experiment, set up DOGE and have it fail,โ Batten said.
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Batten said that Muskโs efforts to get the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to help address the USโ spiralling debt problem ended up being an experiment that opened his eyes to the reality of fiat monetary policy.
โHe knows that it is not possible to rein in government spending when you have access to infinite money printing, then you have to have something which decouples money from the ability to infinitely print money.โ
Batten added that Muskโs background in physics suggests that heโs now realizing that energy-backed monetary protocols are fundamentally resistant to inflation.
โBecause of his background in physics, heโs clearly gone well, energy, thatโs not something you can print into existence. Thatโs a fundamentally better way to create sound money. So gradually heโs coming toward a conclusion that Bitcoin is it.โ
Bitcoin miningโs perception is finally changing
Batten also weighed in on the changing perception toward the environmental impact of Bitcoin in recent years. Throughout the 2010s, mainstream media constantly portrayed Bitcoinโs energy use as significantly bad for the environment.
These reports and the overarching narrative have largely been debunked thanks to several academic papers and research reports, including Cambridgeโs 2024 Digital Mining Industry Report.
Batten said that European policymakers have been particularly influenced by years of erroneous reports on Bitcoinโs environmental impact.
โTheyโve created policies based on the factually incorrect soundbite that Bitcoin uses a lot of energy per transaction, which it doesnโt, of course.โ
Batten clarified that Bitcoinโs energy use comes directly from mining, not through individual transactions, which he described as โcritically important to understandโ because the network can theoretically process thousands more transactions without needing to expend more energy.
โThe moment you have this per-transaction metric, it suggests something very insidious, which is, itโs unscalable because as you scale more, then energy use is going to go up as well. And a lot of regulators in Europe still believe that,โ Batten said.
For a comprehensive deep-dive into the ins and outs of Bitcoin mining, check out Cointelegraphโs 2025 Bitcoin mining deep dive.
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