Bitcoin Still Trading 40% Under Its ‘Energy Value’: What It Means

The Capriole Investments founder has pointed out how Bitcoin is still at a 40% discount compared to its Energy Value. Here’s what this could mean.

Bitcoin Energy Value Is Situated Around $130,000 Right Now

In a new post on X, Capriole Investments founder Charles Edwards has shared how the Energy Value of Bitcoin is looking today. The “Energy Value” is a model that aims to measure the ‘fair value’ of BTC as a function of the amount of energy used to produce it. The energy being referred to here is, of course, the energy that miners’ machines worldwide consume for their task of BTC mining.

Miners ‘produce’ coins when they add a block to the chain and receive avblock subsidy in return. The rate at which miners do this remains mostly constant, thanks to the existence of a feature known as the Difficulty, but about every four years, the production permanently drops in half during an event called the Halving.

This means that the energy that the miners have to use to produce a token of the cryptocurrency goes up with each such event. Capriole’s formula for the Energy Value accounts for this by dividing the energy input by the supply growth rate of the asset. Additionally, it also includes one more factor: a fiat constant that converts the energy input into US Dollars.

Here’s how the complete formula for the Energy Value (represented by V) looks, as published in a research paper written by Edwards:

With the fair value of Bitcoin being directly connected with the energy that the miners are using in this model, the validators switching to more efficient machines results in a drop in valuation for the asset, since they now use lesser energy to perform the same task as before.

Over the cryptocurrency’s history, however, miners have steadily been increasing their total computing power (known as the Hashrate), so even though they are moving to more power-efficient models, their energy input is only going up as they are simply using a higher number of machines.

Now, here is the chart shared by the analyst that shows where the Bitcoin Energy Value stands right now:

As displayed in the above graph, the Bitcoin Energy Value has risen to around $130,000 recently, which means the cryptocurrency’s spot price is currently trading significantly below this model. In past bull markets, the asset has always seen a reversion to this line and has even gone on to far surpass it.

In the current cycle, Bitcoin has made some touches of this line, but so far, there hasn’t been any sustained break similar to what was observed in the previous bull runs.

This is interesting, considering that it’s already been a year since the last Bitcoin Halving (which happened to be the fourth such event in the coin’s history). As mentioned earlier, these events squeeze the production rate of BTC, making the asset scarcer and the energy input per token higher.

It now remains to be seen whether past pattern would repeat this time as well, with the Energy Value pulling the coin’s price like a magnet.