yet another case of not reading and understanding the original paper or econ more generally. Energy, labor, ingenuity, and resources are used to pull gold from the ground. After which it serves as a reusable proof of work. Is gold leaky?
Bitcoin mining is not comparable to gold mining because the purpose of bitcoin mining is to secure the network's transactions, the fact that bitcoin mining produces bitcoin is merely a side-effect of this. If gold mining ceases to exist, or if a single company dominates the world's gold mines, that doesn't prevent people from moving gold ingots around. It doesn't allow the gold mining monopoly to double spend. But this is true of bitcoin. So it's unwise to make such a comparison.
The cost of mining gold and silver is obviously not the same.
Since silver is often the byproduct of mining gold, the energy price should be pretty close, I'd think...
Crypto-bros reinventing the (train-wreck of) labour theory of value is my favorite genre of HN comments.