If that's how you interpret my view then I'm think you've misunderstood it.

The energy required to produce it is irrelevant other than serving as a proxy for scarcity in the implementation of a monetary archetype. Remember that these are synthetic monetary assets. They're not like precious metals or rare minerals who's monetary use is incidental to their existence.

Any synthesised archetype has to be faithfully implemented in terms of the properties its trying to inherit from its real world counterpart, otherwise it simply becomes useless and is cast aside. In

In that respect there are essentially 2:

1. contractural money (that's backed by a counterparty bond)
2. commodity money (that is backed by a scarcity value representing the amount of financial effort needed to acquire it from nature)

That's it !

There is no "make these tokens and somebody will buy them" money. Or worse even "the cheaper this money is to produce the more valuable it will be". So i think you've missed the point about mining. The "energy" isn't there to secure the network or even to generate the coins. It's role is to mediate competition for the supply without recourse to counterparties or intermediaries. As such it is able to faithfully inherit the monetary properties of commodity money. This is what leads to its ability to store capital because the scarcity can be measured in financial units independently of the market traded price - again another important inheritance of commodity money such as metals or minerals.

So if you throw out mining and ALSO don't capitalise the tokens in some other way such as through bonds or massive utility, what have you got left ? Nothing. An emperor's clothes scenario where the market simply devalues you on a chronic basis. The "rewards" in that case more closely represent a cake that gets sliced ever more thinly without gaining any size or weight.