People would also start bitcoin mining at home etc.

No. There are too many things to do with electricity: it will be needed for cooling, carbon dioxide removal, hydrogen production etc. And if it would be free, people would start producing their water from the air, producing hydrogen at home and selling it etc. For these reasons, electricity will remain scarce.

We're probably dead in 2100, but if we're not we're either in a cycle of civilizational collapse and recovery or we're able to convert electricity into happy lives and in neither case are we going to give away electricity for free.

@MartinRandall Interesting argument. Would you endorse that, conditional on at least 7 billion humans being alive in 2100, we are more likely than not to have over 70 billion humans alive?

For reference, here's our world in data with the UN model.

@BoltonBailey I'm too clueless about 2100, particularly within that conditional, to endorse either side of that claim. We could end up converting electricity to non-human lives, or to richer trans-human lives.

However, I've realized that I don't fully understand the resolution criteria. If I pay for electricity based on peak usage (GW), rather than per unit (GWh), is that "unmetered"? What if I can buy "unlimited electricity" for typical domestic usage, but there's an acceptable use policy or the like that prevents me from using it to simulate universes?

@PS resolution questions are to you, not Bolton.

@MartinRandall Yeah to me what makes this pretty funny is the "private household" stipulation. Even assuming our glorious transhuman future arrives, for some definitions of "house", it's hard to imagine what appliances you could add to it that would take up enough power that anyone would be worried about it.

@BoltonBailey I should probably think about this more from a societal than a technological lens though. For example another possibility is that everyone has their own solar-power roof and a long-term huge capacity battery and no one pays an energy company for power simply because people value their independence.

@BoltonBailey I'm going to need a lot of air conditioning to cool down my universe simulator.

@MartinRandall But do you keep your universe simulator in your house, or do you keep it in the jointly-owned server farm down the street where the air conditioners can keep the temperature at a point optimal for computation rather than optimal for human life?

@MartinRandall A fee based on peak usage or acceptable use would mean "yes"; this is very much like a fee for a certain peak speed and acceptable use in the broadband example today.