Wouldn’t smaller tokens need comparatively lower resources though?

'Need' doesn't really come in to it, Bitcoin doesn't need that much power. But from a raw value perspective, Bitcoin has something that the other cryptos do not have - a massive network of computing power. That means bitcoins and other crypto currencies can't be simply swapped for each other. Bitcoin is different, for now.

I've heard this argument, but there's no utility value whatsoever to that power, or the energy consumed to run the hashes (in that the energy and hashing power is spent on the mining task and therefore unavailable for other uses).

The argument is essentially that the computing and hashing power has intrinsic value for other use cases it could be reapplied to if not doing this. It could, but that value would accrue to the person selling the energy and/or the hardware, not whoever held the token at that time.

> but there's no utility value whatsoever to that power

If you think about it, what you actually mean is that you don't recognise the utility, not that there isn't utility there. If we do a classic comparison with gold, pretty much nobody gets any utility out of the gold, and yet a tonne of gold still has very high intrinsic value because it has just enough utility to some rare people.

> It could, but that value would accrue to the person selling the energy and/or the hardware, not whoever held the token at that time.

That isn't how anything else works. Little of the value of the economy accrues to the people who mine coal or oil, but they provide most of the raw grunt to make all of everything work.

The economy doesn't have to directly link creation of value to who gets rewarded.

This is not the case.

I wasn’t comparing anything to gold (or whatever other asset). The energy expended is cited as a reason for the value of the token, but the utility of that energy, even if it were a near infinite amount, is still zero, because it’s already been expended. It’s a fully sunk cost.

The magic that people try to conjure by saying the cost of mining means it’s valuable is provably not true. That energy isn’t stored as value in the token, it’s gone.

To use your analogy - I’m not saying the value accrues to the miner of the coal/gold/whatever. It accrues to the owner. The asset in this case is not the token, it’s the energy.

The re-deployment of that energy to other use cases is not a transaction between the purchaser of the energy and the owner of the token, it’s a transaction between the purchaser and the energy company. In dollars.