I argue it does exist, and bitcoinium is bitcoinium. You're just missing a property of bitcoinium which is the electricity that went into it must have no other use, and that the use must be cryptographically verifiable in a decentralised way, and behave like a statistical poisson process (people around the world trying to do it and on average one mining a block of coins every 10mins).
...
Its a bit more than a Joule though. Its a time-adjusted Joule that you can cryptographically prove and that has no side-uses. That really is bitcoinium and that has amazing implications.
I like this metaphor and the idea that the value of a bitcoin can be defined by the energy "put inside" in order to secure the network.
It raises an interesting question about the economic consequences of merged mining as a way to secure sidechains.
Merged-mining allows to claim the rewards of several chains with the same level of consumed energy. But as stated in a previous post: "the electricity that went into [bitcoinium] must have no other use" which means that the value injected by a miner into the whole system (bitcoin + MM sidechains) stays the same if it finds a solution for a single chain or for several chains.
Therefore, it raises the interesting point about how sidechains reward the miners:
- they create new sidecoins => there is less bitcoinium in each coin (bitcoin or sidecoins)
- they use fees or demurrage (but don't create new coins) => we have the same quantity of bitcoinium in each coin, whatever the number of MM sidechains.
In the former, there's an inflation controlled by the miners which decide to merge-mine (or not) new sidechains. In a sense, it doesn't seem different from current situation with bitcoin & altchains. In the latter, we keep the deflationary model of bitcoin.
Did I miss something ?