In practice, it's not very secure because the difficulty mechanism ensures that hash power always centralizes. Any widespread commodity miner will automatically defeat itself -- that's why all of those early ASIC startups fizzled out. As soon as they shipped something, their value proposition was nullified.

Add to this that the payout mechanics strongly incentivize pooled mining, even for people with powerful miners, and the "guarantees" get that much flimsier. A small handful of men ultimately control the Bitcoin network because they have authority over 50%+ of the hash power, and they've all been in the same room on multiple occasions. It's no different than the small handful of men who control the Fed / other major financial institutions in our fiat systems.

Bitcoin was an excellent thought experiment, but it's no wonder that Satoshi wants nothing to do with what it has become.

What do you think of the way things like ZCash and Monero solve that problem? They use hashing algorithms that are more or less immune to ASICS. This is especially true in the case of Monero which just tweaked their PoW algo in order to set monero ASICS back. Stopping ASICs promotes the average person mining on their gaming rig or things like that.

Also "A small handful of men ultimately control the Bitcoin network because they have authority over 50%+ of the hash power"

I think that's a bit hyperbolic. A small handful of men control where the hashing power currently is. However, that can change very quickly. If you don't like what a pool is trying to use your hashing power for, leave that pool.

energy into money. We always wanted a universal energy based currency -- it is bitcoin.

I think that would be more like SolarCoin: https://solarcoin.org/

I thought that was energy production.