And let me put it to you like this - when you turn on your power, what do you do with it? Well, you use it. You heat your home with it. You cook with it. You turn on your lights with it. What’s the difference if you make money with it? You’re using that energy. It’s really quite simple - in my example, you’re simply using unusable energy, and converting it into money, which you can use to do work.
Money, any money, even cryptocurrency, simply does not do what you think it does.
If you want stuff then invest in that specific stuff — you should only be investing in or building a financial network when that in particular is what you need, not when you want something else like “electricity” or “food” — and if you’re really going to call out the $10 as a serious number, at that level food is a higher priority than any of the equipment you’d need to take part in even a low-cost digital payments and micro-financing system like M-Pesa (it’s not just banks that do loans!), you certainly shouldn’t be considering paying for random hardware to be installed in a different continent (which is implicit in your scenario)
If everyone does what you do, then you get one of two effects depending on which unwritten assumption you prefer:
1) if the conversion rate from joules of sunlight to number of bitcoin remains constant, then (first 1 then 1 million) people have more bitcoin than they did before, but the immediate actual production of electricity in your local area is exactly the same as it was before any of you scenario happened, and therefore the local market price for electricity goes up because that’s how supply and demand works
2) if the supply of bitcoin continues to follow the existing rules, then going from one person to one million people has exactly zero impact on the supply of bitcoin, so instead of 1 BTC/unit of time/person, you get… 1 BTC/unit of time/million people (and likewise for your $ investment, 1 BTC/unit of time/$ becomes 1 BTC/unit of time/million $); in this case you still don’t have any more power being produced locally, but nobody notices the local price per unit of electricity changing because the BTC itself is too dilute to do anything
> Now, with all this money, you build a renewable geothermal power plant under your house. Boom, passive energy generation.
If money is the limiting factor, you can apply for a loan to install a renewable power source. As a bonus, you get the money sooner and therefore the power sooner. Economically speaking, this is in fact such a great idea that at least one solar company announced free-at-the-point-of-installation PV systems funded by their potential future earnings.