Very perplexing behavior from Musk, I must say. Bitcoin's energy consumption has been front-and-center for a few years now and even more so when the bull market got hot. How does Musk decide to throw $1.5 billion worth of Tesla's cash into BTC without acknowledging this? I was expecting a little bit more due-diligence from him, but he's been absolutely consumed by crypto markets in general.
Cus he's not that bright. Isn't this the elephant in the room that no one wants to consider? Why do we have to start with the assumption that Musk is a genius, then work back from that?
The dude thought covid would go away last May.
He thinks it's easier to make Mars habitable than it is to keep the Earth habitable.
He's thought that full self driving was 6 months away for literally 4 years now.
And he didn't really understand what Bitcoin was when he sank 1.5 billion into it.
And denying covid kept workers in his factory, against the law.
I think there needs to be some rule in discussion that as soon as you start arguing over if someone is dumb or evil, you have to stop. It's impossible to figure out which (or what mix) it actually is.
If you've done what Elon Musk has done, you're definitely not dumb.
That's what I hate about people telling Trump is dumb. If you've done what he has done, he's definitely not dumb.
Funny thing is that although I never liked Paris Hilton, I was pretty sure she was not that dumb (turned out she wasn't).
The same story when I look at my Facebook feed. Plenty of smart people have all kinds of different views on Covid and vaccination. And all of them call the 'other group' dumb.
Seems like political viewpoints have nothing to do with being smarter than someone else.
If you started your adult life with the same help from Daddy that Trump had - and did nothing, literally besides putting all of that money into an index fund - you’d be richer than Trump is today. They did the math.
So what exactly are Trump’s accomplishments? It’s not like the dude started off selling hot dogs. He made a lot of shitty investments, lost a lot of money, and is one of the few people on this planet capable of bankrupting a casino. In Vegas.
Yes he’s famous, of course, but his “look at me I’m a successful billionaire” image is all smoke and mirrors.
Tesla would have been dead if he had not brought the Fremont factory back online. I give him credit for this, as I think ignoring the “rules” was one of the smartest business moves ever made in 2020.
Wow, people here really hate statistics. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1... ; if you're aged under 34 (as are the majority of tech workers), in the USA you're almost ten times more likely to die from "other acccidental fatalities" (0.0032) than covid if you catch it (0.004). Note that to assess risk the covid IFR there should be multiplied by the chance of catching it, to make it more comparable with the other columns, so if the chance of catching covid is less than 50%, then overall you're also more likely to die in a traffic accident.
>Traffic accidents decrease, other accidental fatalities decreases, the number of people who catch covid decrease in a lockdown.
What's the point of being alive if you can't live life? Fine if you choose that for yourself, but you're a monster if you'd dare to assume you have the right to confine everybody else to such a miserable existence.
Marx has a great quote along those lines:
"The human body is mortal by nature. Hence illnesses are inevitable. Why does a man only go to the doctor when he is ill, and not when he is well? Because not only the illness, but even the doctor is an evil. Under constant medical tutelage, life would be regarded as an evil and the human body as an object for treatment by medical institutions. Is not death more desirable than life that is a mere preventive measure against death? Does not life involve also free movement? What is any illness except life that is hampered in its freedom? A perpetual physician would be an illness in which one would not even have the prospect of dying, but only of living. Let life die; death must not live. Has not the spirit more right than the body?"
The risk of Covid has never been the individualized risk. It's the collective risk of what happens when hospitals and ICUs reach capacity when too many people catch Covid at once. For example, what is happening in India.
This was widely known in the US on the first week of March in 2020.
When hospitals reach capacity, people in their 40s and 50s become much more likely to die from Covid. Lots of preventable loss of life is going to occur, from Covid and from everything else that can't be attended to because the hospitals are full.
The point of lockdowns is not to reduce the individual risk. It's to reduce the collective risk of getting hit by a runaway train that completely overwhelms our health systems.
What is happening in India? The death rate per capita there is still way less than in the US or UK. How come the death rate in Florida is less than that in California and New York, in spite of no lockdowns and an older population in Florida?
There's no statistical evidence that countries with stricter lockdowns had a lower death rate than those without.
I think it's well understood that deaths in India are massively underreported.
California and New York both came close to having their health care systems overwhelmed in certain counties, Florida did not. That's exactly my point.
> There's no statistical evidence that countries with stricter lockdowns had a lower death rate than those without.
Honestly, you would expect it to be the other way around. Lockdowns are a last-resort tool to prevent healthcare systems from being overwhelmed. You would expect areas that implement lockdowns to be either denser (thus, hypothetically having less warning time between rising case counts and hospital saturation) or, more likely, to have an existing large scale Covid problem that they need to get under control.
Lockdowns are correlated with bad Covid outcomes because lockdowns are implemented in places that are liable to, or are already having, bad Covid problems.
Death rate per capita I think is a misleading way to look at it. If covid wipes half of my say 10 ppl family and half of someone else’s say 4 ppl family, I lose 5 ppl and they lose 2 ppl. Per capita rate is fine for statisticians after the fact. But during the pandemic you can’t tell me we lost same ppl per capita. Obviously I lost much more (hypothetically)
Restricting religion and regulating a factory are pretty different. The first runs directly afoul of the constitution, while the second is clearly within the purview of regulators and public health officials.
I was thinking of Jacobson v Massachusetts in my original comment, which upheld state and local governments' broad authority in public health.
It makes me so sad that it's impossible to have a polite conversation these days without clinical paranoids popping in at every juncture to say, "COVID is a hoax! Public health officials are frauds! Medicine is meaningless!"
> He's just not playing the obvious game you think he's playing.
I think I would agree with that.
Take note of that last part of his tweet[0]:
> Tesla will not be selling any Bitcoin and we intend to use it for transactions as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy. We are also looking at other cryptocurrencies that use <1% of Bitcoin’s energy/transaction.
Here he posed a problem that is now on people's mind. Soon he will offer a solution and people will go nuts about it. He often does that kind of thing.
>Musk bought BTC, single-handedly pumped the price of BTC, and then sold at a huge profit.
Doesn't this have legal ramifications when done in the stock market? If it is shady for that market, why is it acceptable in other markets? Oh, right, they're not regulated.
Cryptocurrency is almost completely unregulated, so no there are not likely to be ramifications. It's anarchy and just about anything goes. Buyer beware.
Also I didn't get the sense that Musk single-handedly pumped BTC. He jumped on the bandwagon about mid-way through the current pump. I am still foggy on what kicked off the current bull run.
The SEC doesn’t consider Bitcoin a security, so it can’t be securities fraud. Also there usually must be lies (or intentional omissions) involved to prosecute these things, and I don’t think either of those apply here.
Telling people that you bought a certain stock isn't illegal wtf. Have you watched CNBC or Bloomberg? They have hedge fund operators come in and praise or criticize stocks that they have bought or sold short.
lead in your hamburger is illegal in both libertarian legal frameworks and non-libertarian legal frameworks.
liberty: intentionally or intentionally harming people is illegal. If you or your company poison someone, you are held responsible for the harm you caused.
non-liberty: a specific regulation about the level of acceptable lead in meat. limited liability shields the owners from being held responsible.
1. Tell someone you own a security
2. They get excited and buy it
3. You sell it when it goes up
You can't just classify this set of actions as a pump and dump. You have to do something that is considered a scam, such as grossly misrepresenting the security with the intention of making a profit at the cost of uneducated investors. As far as I can tell, Elon never claimed Bitcoin is environmentally friendly, nor did he make other false claims about Bitcoin's functionalities or capabilities.
Pump and dump arguably isn't immoral. It's just using herd mentality, if it wasn't illegal people might actually try to think before they buy and sell.
Realistically we won't know until the Q2 financials are out.
Note the wording "*will not* be selling any Bitcoin" not "*has not* sold any Bitcoin". There were major dumps a couple minutes before Elon's announcement. It should be no surprise if Tesla front-run Elon's announcement, knowing that it would affect the price.
They'll keep a trivial amount on the financials, but I suspect the majority was off the books.
They will also use this an excuse to realize revenue in what will appear to be a very lean quarter. I mean they can't exactly sell to "test liquidity" again.
From their Q1 disclosure,
Tesla made $272 Million from 'Proceeds from sales of digital assets' [1]. From the same disclosure, Tesla still holds $1,331 Million (~$1.3 Billion) of digital assets. As this is from their Q1 disclosure, they may have sold more since March 31st.
Yep, plus one to this. A lot of people are quick to either rationalize his behavior as either awesome or stupid, but I think Musk is really a misunderstood mogul who's intention is to turn a profit, not deliver on his ridiculous worldview.
I certainly won’t argue that Musk is stupid, but trust me, his Mars marketing has never won SpaceX a launch contract, and if anything it probably hurt them in the early days. This business was long dominated by stodgy defense giants, and it has seen a lot of wild-eyed idealists with big dreams and a little too much money come and go. Government and commercial launch contracts have never been awarded on the basis of idealistic excitement, and the conventional wisdom used to be that the SpaceX mentality just didn’t work in this Very Serious and Difficult Field.
In recruiting, on the other hand, the Mars marketing has helped them a lot.
While I really dislike some of his behavior, this goal post moving to try to deny Musk credit for what he's accomplished annoys me.
Before Musk we had no economical reusable launch systems, economical space flight was sci-fi, and in the 2000s there were many people who thought modern civilization must inevitably grind to a halt as we deplete oil because oil is absolutely irreplaceable for modern transport.
SpaceX built the first economical to operate reusable space hardware at any scale, and Tesla validated the market for EVs. Even if Tesla fails, without them I highly doubt the EV revolution would be happening. Traditional car companies would never have cannibalized their ICE sales with EVs without a hard kick in the ass to do so.
> and in the 2000s there were many people who thought modern civilization must inevitably grind to a halt as we deplete oil because oil is absolutely irreplaceable for modern transport
Lol, what an exaggeration. I don't think anyone argued seriously that we would have to stop using cars at all. The conversation was always about renewable energy.
Yes, those comments are right up there with the 'what have the Romans done for us' list.
Like him or hate him, no point denying Musk his achievements, which are more than many of us here will manage in our lifetimes and Musk appears to be far from finished. His biggest enemy at this point is himself, that unstable streak is a real worry. But here's to hoping that he will notch up a longer list of achievements.
EVs would have happened without Tesla. The "kick in the ass" is the same thing that has driven all other emissions improvements: government regulation.
They would have dragged their feet as much as possible to keep ICE alive. Too much car culture inertia and sunk cost. Being shown up is more powerful and motivating than regulations.
Yeah he has definitely helped push (and unwilling and petrol addicted) civilization a lot more towards EVs despite what the denialists want to have us think. However he's neither a messiah like the Muskavites would have us believe nor is he an evil mustache twiddling villain like the other side would have you believe.
Isn't this just the same thing idiots did for Trump though? Look at whatever Trump does, and then find a reason in retrospect why actually that was a smart move.
SpaceX wins contracts because they are able to send payloads into space, nothing to do with marketing, and sending payloads into space isn't even that hard - they basically beat out Nasa who weren't allowed to compete and Boeing who can't send a plane to 30,000ft without fucking it up.
Tesla sells lots of cars because they're electric and Apple made battery technology cheap.
BTC has been running up and down far longer than Musk has been involved and it'll continue after he's gone.
If they are so easy, why isn't everyone doing it?
Why can't Bezo put payloads into space with a billion every year invested?
Why can't every other car manufacture seem to put together an electric car with the same range?
I don't want to buy a Tesla, I'd rather something with physical knobs, but there's nothing that quite hits the mark yet.
> Why can't Bezo put payloads into space with a billion every year invested?
Because he was busy changing the face of consumer retail, the internet, and other huge aspects of society up to a few months ago. Give it a couple of years and you'll see Blue Origin eat SpaceX's cake.
> Why can't every other car manufacture seem to put together an electric car with the same range?
Mostly because other car manufacturers are very serious about not lying about things that are easily demonstrable like range. There's a reason Teslas are the only EV that no one can get the advertised range from, but all the other EVs crush their advertised ranges. Your question is "why doesn't every other car manufacturer lie psychopathically to the consumer?".
And other companies aren’t willing to sacrifice what Tesla is for range. It’s not like an egg is the best shape for an SUV and other companies just haven’t figured it out yet.
Trump never actually accomplished anything unless you count ugly casinos that go bankrupt and a golf resort. There is nothing redeeming there to outweigh the bad stuff. There's just bad stuff.
If becoming billionaire and being elected president of the USA is "not accomplishing anything", then I'll start hoping I won't accomplish anything in my life.
Please do not attempt to rewrite history. The electric vehicle has a long and storied history, and the modern revival was well underway in the 90s and 00s. Tesla Roadster was the first (I think?) highway-legal EV.
I mean you will see people here on this forum argue that bitcoin mostly uses up peak energy and unused capacity and such bullshit nonsense - it's frankly not that hard to spin a narrative that could sound plausable.
But then when you see people firing up coal plants in your back yard just to mine BTC (as opposed to China) reality suddenly kicks in and it's hard to spin bullshit arround that. Regulators are really dropping the ball on crypto - corporate entities should not be allowed to fuel this shit.
Figurative, it's easy to ignore when those power plants get started in third world countries, when it's NY it's suddenly much harder to ignore the reality.
On the contrary. It's not that he's not bright, it's that is is a brilliant conman.
Re self-driving: Tesla's boom in the past ~1.5 years coincided with his laughable claims about self-driving and robo-taxis.
And re bitcoin: the guy literally tweeted two words "buy doge" and sparked a pump-and-dump bubble. Then he went on SNL, didn't plug doge enough, and it tanked instantly. Then a couple hours ago he tweeted more doge stuff and it started rallying again.
He's single handedly accelerated the adoption of electric cars by 10 years while advancing literal rocket science to the point where launches will be done 10x cheaper.
For those of us who measure by outcomes, he's a genius.
Fun reminder, Musk did not start Tesla and bought his way into the company. His involvement should not be understated, but it's had years of management shuffles and changes of direction.
Yes but he still stayed in there when everything was going to shit and got enough investors to keep the company alive and now the company is doing quite well.
Tesla employs almost 80k workers, and SpaceX employs almost 10k. Elon might have had the idea, but it's the employees that made it possible and a reality.
Traditional car companies and traditional aerospace employ far more people, and those people are not dumb. Leadership matters.
I do agree that it isn't "single-handedly," but when I hear Elon speak he definitely does shout out to the team. I haven't heard him take 100% credit for these things.
>accelerated the adoption of electric cars by 10 years
Did it really ? Tesla rode on the advances of battery tech driven by mobile devices, there were other EV efforts arround the time Tesla came up. I agree they recognised it early on and made it fasionable + they had this narrative driven market valuation which pressured other automotive execs to invest in the EV narrative. But 10 years is way too much - battery tech advancements were bound to bring us to this point even without Tesla R&D (I think they only started using their advancements recently, before that it was just stock batteries ?), and there was enough money in batteries from other markets to drive advancement without the EV push.
Not denying Tesla played a big positive role in this, but certainly not 10 years IMO.
Like I said - this shouldn't be attributed to Tesla as much as it can be attributed to battery advances. Tesla capitalised on it first and in the best way (with a luxury/aspiration car) and that's worth something for sure - but it's not like it made a breaktrough that would take others 10 years to figure out.
In fact "affordable" Teslas (model S) came after competition like Leaf which was a best seling electric car up until recently.
Sure, if you don't count the Chrysler TEVan, the Ford Ranger EV, the honda ev plus, the Toyota RAV4 EV...
also, if you ask me, a super expensive sports car should still count as a "gimmick". I give Tesla credit for reigniting excitement about EVs, but lets not oversell their achievement.
If you mention Tesla to literally anyone, they know about the cars. The product, and the marketing of it, have definitely brought EV's into the mainstream. Before that, very few consumers knew anything about EVs, maybe with the exception of the GM EV1. Now electric cars are a common sight on the road.
Back in the Tesla Roadster days it was basically something fans of supercars and a few geeks knew about.
Nisan Leaf was way more recognisable than a Tesla for a while.
And also things like Prius really prooved the point that electricity can be used to power cars.
Not knocking on Tesla, they have a great brand and helped spark interest and speed up demand for EVs. But saying they advanced the adoption of EVs by 10 years is ridiculous.
Honestly while I agree, I do think that Tesla did advance the adoption, purely by forcing it into the market so boldly with the model S. Other manufacturers were receiving government bailouts and messing around with smaller displacement city cars around 2010-2011, and brands like Karma started popping up along side Tesla and made a bit of disruptive noise to the big players.
I honestly don't think we'd have seen the same level of EV adoption by now if not for Tesla. But then I don't really know how to quantify it for arguments sake.
Two of the best-selling electrical cars today either came out before Tesla had a mass-market car (Nissan Leaf, launched around the same time as an electric car) or are based on a platform that did (Renault Zoe; came out about the same time as the Model S, but its less successful sibling came out before the Model S).
Single handedly? I'll say the same as when people described Steve as a genius, he is an accomplished marketing machine but genius is reserved for the like of Einstein and Feynman. Do you think SpaceX and Tesla were Musk's idea? Or were they the recommendation of the MBAs hired to research subsidized industries with significant barrier to entry? It is not that he isn't successful but he is no genius, he just has the money to overcome, what otherwise would be, impossible hurdles. I am glad he's beating bezos to the punch though, it takes a special kind of business to make Walmart look like the good guys. I think Tesla is a horrible car, exactly the wrong vehicle to address the climate crisis but it seems we are addicted to the car and consider public transit some kind of badge of shame. EVs, specifically autonomous EVs should be targeted at the last mile, IMHO. I'm not trying to be contrary, I dislike musk because I think he's dishonest and a narcissist.
I hate this "capitalist-worship" for lack of a better term. He "single-handedly" did nothing, he merely supplied the capital and the coordination for a team of ~hundreds of thousands of people to build rockets and EVs.
This isn't an attack on your collectivist worldview, it's an objective observation. It's simply a matter of fact that if there was no Elon Musk, reusable rockets would have been delayed two decades at a bare minimum. The same goes for transforming EVs from clunky sideshows to "S3XY" vehicles. Hence, he single-handedly made these changes happen.
There is no way to say that with certainty. SpaceX is far from the only rocket company and while yes, they have had great success, their success only makes it harder for other rocket companies to stand out and succeed. What if another company was just a a year or two behind SpaceX but got their funding shit on when SpaceX launched their rocket?
SpaceX is standing on the shoulders of giants, if SpaceX didn't exist, the science and people wouldn't just disappear.
I don't think anyone is saying that without SpaceX science and people wouldn't exist.
But, SpaceX and Tesla for sure accelerated the EVs market and reusable rockets. I don't think anyone could've created this level of buzz around their companies. Main thing being that most of the general public now knows about Tesla and SpaceX and the awareness around EVs and reusable rockets. Now, I'm not saying Musk is some godsend or something, but he definitely played big role in creating this buzz around space travel and EVs.
> their success only makes it harder for other rocket companies to stand out and succeed.
Of course it does. That's one of the main points of one's success and it is true for every single field in existence. By that logic, no one should succeed because that would make it difficult for others?
I strongly disagree with that one.
SpaceX is saving the US government heaps of money. Sure you could argue about spending on things in the first place. Assuming though we are talking about who to award to contracts to though they have saved heaps on just giving the extra work to ULA/ Boeing and other traditional aerospace companies. They have also created a competitor that will drive down prices on all space contracts.
What an idiotic thing to say. This is just pure 'I don't like this person so I'm gone shit on everything he does' syndrome.
Rich people buy rich people things, yes, and it matter if its a gas car or an electric. And it matter if the battery industry was transformed by that. And it matters that the image of electric cars was transformed. It matters that the largest fast charging network in the world was financed by this.
SpaceX proved that they could make things the government already does massively cheaper. Literally read any report from NASA or GAO. NASA own evaluation showed that the 300M SpaceX spend on the initial Falcon 9 would have cost 3 billion if done by the government.
Since SpaceX join the race military launches have come down in price by sometimes multiple 100 million $. ULA even outside of the 300M$+ launch prices, received an extra 900M every year.
Literally everything the government is buying from SpaceX could literally not be done cheaper by any other government, foreign or domestic or company foreign or domestic.
When SpaceX got started the commercial launch market was basically 0% US launchers, SpaceX alone changed that to depending on you calculate 50-90% of the commercial market now.
There is seriously not a single argument you can make about SpaceX other then simply arguing the government should be doing spaceflight at all. Everything we know about government internals suggest that both NASA and DoD are beyond happy with SpaceX.
3x more expensive (0.44B vs 1.2B) for NASA to do it. Slide #3 states NASA did not perform a detailed analysis of the estimates, but NASA concluded the number of employees, layers of management, and infrastructure were the key differences. And slide 6 almost sounds like NASA is saying "NASA shouldn't do this." Makes sense. They should use their budget and more comprehensiive oversight for zanier stuff, IMHO. Speaking of oversight, I also doubt SpaceX will be grilled anywhere near as severely as NASA when a death does occur, Elon has been upfront that this is risky stuff.
I'm with you on everything except the Bitcoin bit. I think he knew exactly that (a) it's a highly speculative asset, and (b) he has enough rabid fans and general publicity to move the market in exactly the ways that he benefits from.
If his proclamation knocks, say, half the value off Bitcoin, and it stays there, that wasn't a very clever pump and dump, because they kinda skipped the 'dump' part.
I'll say again, it makes no sense for Elon Musk to do a cheap pump and dump. He's worth over $100 billion. The hundreds of millions he might make from a pump and dump are literally a rounding error to him
This is really no different from any other "engineering visionary" executive, everywhere.
These types have a solid understanding of what's technically possible by the laws of physics, but wholly underestimate the feasibility of a complete implementation.
It's an open discussion whether these types are "bad" or "good". I tend to believe that hyper-optimists have a role in this world that drives progress forward. Teddy's Roosevelt's "Man in the arena", if you will.
No comment on how smart or stupid Elon is (he is somehow effective), but I'm with you on all of those things except "He thinks it's easier to make Mars habitable than it is to keep the Earth habitable":
The concept of having humans on another planetary body makes a lot of sense as a backup-plan for humanity. The Drake equation be damned - in case we're actually alone, we have a pretty strong moral requirement to make sure that (human) life survives.
The point is that whatever you would need to make Mars habitable could _directly apply_ to keeping Earth habitable at orders of magnitude less difficulty.
Imagine trying to build up population centers at the bottom of the ocean in order to have a backup plan for some nuclear winter on the surface. You could just build your hermetically-sealed, closed-system things on the ground! They'd work just as well (absent, I guess, the getting nuked part). Mars is that, plus you gotta actually get over there to send resources for the first couple hundred years.
> The concept of having humans on another planetary body makes a lot of sense as backup-plan for humanity.
Sorry, but it's like planning your workout routine in a burning building.
The climate emergency is building right now, this instant. Cosmic threats like asteroids happen on the order of millions of years apart.
We need to stabilize the planet, now, in this generation, immediately, or we will doom a million species and most of humanity.
Once that is done, we can look at problems on the ten thousand to ten million year scales that cost quadrillions of dollars to solve, like "moving to a second planet".
Let me be blunt - unless we go all out, the collapse will happen a hundred years before any Mars colony is self-sufficient, and none of them will survive.
"Global Warming" is about the Earth going ~2C to 4C out-of-whack with our traditional norms over the next century or so.
Mars is about being at -60C all the time, or roughly 80C away from what humans want. And temperature isn't even the worst part: Mars doesn't have enough oxygen for Humans to survive. Mars doesn't have enough nitrogen for plants to grow (and make oxygen). Mars doesn't have enough gravity to keep a dense enough atmosphere for us.
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Look, I recognize the difficulty that Global Warming has on the human race. But Global Warming is a far, far, far easier problem than trying to have a sustainable, livable experience on Mars.
There's 7 billion human brains on earth. We can spare a couple to focus on making our species multi-planetary while the rest deal with cleaning up the mess at home. It's unreasonable to expect the entire human race to stop what they're doing and focus on one issue.
There is no meaningful difference between surviving extreme conditions on mars and extreme conditions on earth.
The only difference is that the number of people that can live in extreme conditions is much smaller than the number that can live in normal conditions.
Fighting against climate change is purely about making sure that the earth can maintain 7 billion + humans. Any mars colonization program will not progress fast enough to let 7 billion humans inhabit mars within the next 200 years.
>It's unreasonable to expect the entire human race to stop what they're doing and focus on one issue.
Nobody said "stop what they're doing" except you. But the usual argument is that Elon Musk is accelerating the progress toward mars colonization and accelerating that progress simply isn't needed because of time constraints that no amount of money can solve. It will take decades no matter what a conman tells you.
...and Rome wasn't built in a day, what's your point? Just because we won't see tangible results in our lifetime doesn't mean the effort, lessons learned and thought energy in that direction is meaningless.
Trying to live on Mars is meaningless. All effort put towards it is complete, and utter waste.
As I said in other comments, feel free to waste your resources on the project. But if you're trying to convince others that the project is useful or fruitful (and ask for other people's resources or help on the matter), then be prepared for some resistance.
> In your nightmare scenario we're going to need terraforming tech both on Earth and Mars.
The hypothetical technology to reduce Earth's temperature by 4-degrees Celsius is simply going to be fundamentally different from the hypothetical technology to increase Mars's temperature by 80-degrees Celsius.
Whether or not A) is true has nothing to do with whether or not B) is worth doing. There's no reason to imply that I'm making a false dichotomy fallacy.
I'm not saying you're not allowed to work on it. If its a task you feel like wasting your money on, that's fine.
But don't expect me to support the effort by any means, not until you give me an argument for why Mars Terraforming would be a worthwhile use of resources I control or resources I have otherwise influence over.
The fact that he's spending resources on nominally going to Mars is completely idiotic. I've got enough of a brain to figure that out.
Its a free country. Which means I'm free to make my opinion on how others spend their money and resources.
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This is relevant because of all of the highly questionable moves Musk has done in the past weeks. He pumped BTC, pumped DOGE online. He pretends that he's a busy and (Aspergers) CEO despite spending huge amounts of effort on pop culture like Rick and Morty, Saturday Night Live, and other cultural mainstays. He proposes that terraforming Mars is a fruitful endevour.
He lies about "Full Self Driving" to the public for years, even as news reports come out as people literally die and burn to death inside of the cars his companies make. He claims COVID19 is a hoax, in an effort to keep his factories open.
He publishes a Finite-Element-Analysis of Hyperloop so basic that a 1st year college student could have done it. He builds tiny tunnels without any emergency contingencies while putting highly flammable lithium Ion batteries inside of those tunnels for Las Vegas.
And then finally, we come to this topic. Where he first hypes BTC (after buying it), and then after selling a huge chunk of it (over 10% in the past quarter), seemingly moves to dump the price of BTC.
Etc. etc.
At some point, we have to recognize that this guy is not an "engineer" at all. Musk is a hypeman at best. His lack of focus (so many topics covered...) suggests mania (as opposed to Aspergers). I dunno. Its getting harder and harder to take Musk seriously on any of these issues.
Nicely put. Just one point on the last paragraph, I guess somebody with Asperger's could also have ADHD. They can concentrate on something that catches their interest and forget about everything else for a while, but they can also shift their focus to whatever draws their attention next. In fact sustaining their effort over one long-term thing might be a skill they have to hone just like many other people. There doesn't seem to be a contradiction IMO.
> In fact sustaining their effort over one long-term thing might be a skill they have to hone just like many other people. There doesn't seem to be a contradiction IMO.
* Solar Panels? Utility scale electric generators?
(SolarCity?)
* Space? (SpaceX)
* Infrastructure? (Hyperloop? Boring Company?)
* AI? (Self-driving cars)
* Internet infrastructure? (Starlink?)
* BTC / DOGEcoin? Crypto-currencies?
For Payment Processors: we're looking at web technologies like Javascript, Two-factor authentication, Back-end Web processing, etc. etc. That's very much in the know for us nerds who hang around here in ycombinator: an extended "hyperfocus" on Payment Processors is a lifetime of effort alone.
There's simply not enough time for Elon Musk to reach "expert" levels of understanding in any of these subjects. Anyone who knows anything about these subjects knows that Musk's discussion points are EXTREMELY shallow. They're deep enough that maybe a layperson thinks that Musk is smart, but... seriously, look at his recent DOGEcoin / BTCcoin discussion points. The dude barely understand cryptocurrencies (or at least pretends he barely understands them, as he "suddenly" realizes the energy implications of BTC).
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I'm not really doubting the ability of someone with Asperger's to change subjects. But given how quickly Elon Musk changes subjects, its my personal opinion that he probably doesn't have Asperger's. Do remember: that all the while he's changing these subjects, Elon Musk is partying hard and participating in pop culture (Saturday Night Live, Rick and Morty, Twitter rants, etc. etc.).
His behavior does NOT match any Asperger's individual I've ever met. I know everyone's case is unique, but... that's a lot of "non-Asperger's" things going on (social partying, pop culture, appearances on TV, live talks, CEO position, "jack-of-all-trades" behavior instead of depth into particular subjects... etc. etc.)
I'm no expert in psychology. But this behavior is _mania_: common in say Bipolar individuals. Which is useful in its own niches of course (much like Asperger's is useful in engineering: mania typically causes an individual to visit many subjects... albeit shallowly but yeah, that's probably useful to a typical CEO moreso than hyperfocus actually)
I think it is the opposite. He is very transparent - it is just people do not want to believe his goals are exactly what he says they are.
I have lost count the number of times in the past about something I have told people the truth, the 100% truth and they tried to skip over what I said because it did not match what they wanted to believe.
Worse, afterwards when events prove they were wrong they then try to make all sorts of excuses to support their original claims.
You can try and pick on Elon's fine details, but look at the stuff people said he could not push thru. If this was before 2010 the idea of the Tesla cars, Solar Tiles, Power-walls, Falcon Rockets, Dragon Capsules, Boring Tunnel and Neuralink all seem like fantasy - yet today they all exist.
Instead I see people send lots of time concentrating on things like Hyperloop not working out so far while trying not to mention the successes.
I think you're confusing mental bandwidth with intelligence, likewise you seem to be putting him on a pedestal expecting him to have an amazing network of advisors on every conceivable topic.
No, he's human and his limited attention is split between Tesla, SpaceX, and arguably the other projects he has. Likewise these are complex organizations with a lot of moving parts and it's impossible to not delegate to other competent people, hopefully more competent than not, and then if bad decisions are made by say a Board of Directors and/or CFO then it's perfectly reasonable to reverse course - it's more reasonable than expecting Elon to be an expert of everything, he's not super human.
However I imagine the situation's more complex than meets the eye, some people like you are sticking to cherrypicked facts, others are putting forward conspiracy theories founded on no evidence that this was Elon pumping and dumping purposefully, or that he's just doing it to piss off the SEC because he hates the SEC. Who knows.
Elon in the not so distant past tweeted: "Bitcoin is almost as much bs as fiat money" - so he certainly has enough of an idea to make that statement.
>He thinks it's easier to make Mars habitable than it is to keep the Earth habitable.
It probably is easier to survive long term on Mars than Earth because Mars has a very thin atmosphere. Earth could pull a Venus. Earth life on Mars requires underground small sealed compartments with radiation shielding which is a more survivable architecture than one big shared ecosystem.
Your definition of "long term" is stretching it a bit. If Earth "pulls a venus" it will be 100+ million years from now due to the expansion of the sun.
I thought the surface Venus was incredibly hot and uninhabitable mainly to the thick greenhouse gases in it's atmosphere. Why does the sun need to expand for that to happen on Earth?
That's not the answer but it's close. The correct answer is that "geniuses" can be dumb. Intelligence doesn't make one invulnerable to bad ideas, cons, indoctrination, herd behavior, logical fallacies, addictions, delusions, or anything else.
Related is the fact that billionaires and millionaires are just humans with lots of money. People seem to think a lot of money makes people somehow superhuman, or vice versa. It doesn't. Billionaires are subject to all the same fallacies and errors as anyone else. There is no superhuman enlightened "illuminati" that is somehow above and beyond the rest of us, at least cognitively. They might have a little bit more information but they are no more rational than we are.
Based on the COVID denial, cryptocurrency stuff, and memes if I didn't know better I'd say he's been hanging around on the 'chans... and I don't know better.
I think what you want to say is that he doesn't have a crystal ball instead of him not being that bright. How can anyone predict any of the above before hand? Bitcoin remains probably one of the few perplexing behaviors from Musk.
I admire you for calling Musk out on this platform. He's a quandary for sure...I've not worked him out. He's done too many amazing things to be an idiot - but yeah, he's done some super dumb shit too.
COVID could have started to go away in May 2020 with extremely aggressive lockdown and quarantine measures. In fact, where I live, it did - we reached 0 active cases for the first time almost exactly a year ago today, and have only had any cases in the community for a grand total of about two weeks since.
Musk opposed those measures though, which makes his level of expertise on the matter somewhat more dubious.
Vaccinations could've been an option last May. The mRNA vaccines were designed days after receiving a full genetic sequence of the virus (in January). Those are the same two vaccines we are currently injecting people with – we just spent a long time on trials/approval/ramping up production. Far longer than necessary.
Previous attempts at mRNA vaccines had failed, due to the side effects being too serious. There was no reason to believe in May 2020 that a COVID mRNA vaccine would be any different than all the previous mRNA failures.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/15/co... is a post from April of last year detailing the different types of vaccines, which does mention some of the issues mRNA vaccines have had in the past. I think there's a fuller discussion of mRNA somewhere on that blog, but the gist of it is "we've been trying this for about a decade and we might finally have all the kinks worked out."
My statement wasn't quite accurate. It was previous attempts at mRNA treatments that failed due to too many bad effects from the delivery mechanism.
Some companies gave up on mRNA then. Those that wanted to continue switched to trying to develop mRNA vaccines instead of mRNA treatments for non-viral conditions. Vaccines would require lower doses, which they hoped would reduce the problems with side effects.
Experimental mRNA vaccines were developed for a few viral diseases, but not had gotten through trials and been licensed for use in humans.
There's a really big difference between what public figures say and what they believe.
When you have the power to influence policy/markets/opportunities simply by saying the right or wrong thing, that starts to factor into public statements a lot more than what you actually believe.
Your first two points are basically political positions. I know it's fun to imagine that the other political side is less intelligent, but don't take that impulse too seriously.
That's a maybe. Even if he really is guilty he might not have a bad time. The world is not just and there's very little justice in the judicial system.
He called a guy a pedophile with absolutely no evidence and paid no price for that.
I'm no fan but 1) any moron on the web know about energy consumption of Blockchains 2) musk cannot be more stupid than them. He's (sadly) trolling the system imo
This looks like a pump and dump scheme in its finest form. Nothing changed over last year in regards to energy consumption. There's no way that Elon or those in Tesla discussing this were not aware of this prior.
Elon is a gambler on a hot streak. He keeps making big bets that pay off, but the luck to cunning ratio is dangerously high.
Some day the shoe is going to go cold and he's going to be fucked. He'll drop off the richest people list faster than he climbed it (which was too fast).
Just from a couple tweets he's made, I infer that Elon actually agrees that a lot of his wealth is fake.
Tesla's valuation is insane, it's great evidence that markets are just kind of broken right now. We could speculate on why, but I decline to do that right now.
It appears to me that he mostly focuses on the fundamentals of his companies, including engaging in braggadocio and performance art to pump interest and keep people thinking about what he's doing. But the point of crap like "full self driving", in my opinion, is to sell Teslas. Pumping Tesla stock is a nice side effect, right up until it isn't.
My point is that if Tesla can get robustly profitable, but the stock declines to some reasonable multiple of actual revenue, Elon would count the negative thirty billion dollars next to his name on the Forbes list as a win.
Like it or not, and I'm undecided, that's principled on his part.
He's been pretty clear that he thinks shorting, as it works right now, is dirty pool and should be illegal.
I try to stay out of esoteric finance stuff, but it's hard the way the world works these days. I kinda think he has a point about naked shorts, at least, Gamestonk showed everyone an ugly failure mode for that one.
So my take is that the huge Tesla pump was just a side effect, this was Elon taking something personally and wading in like the 800 pound gorilla he is.
No opinion on whether he should have been punished more, or deserved it, I basically don't understand where the boundaries on market manipulation or insider trading or any of those things are really supposed to be. Just moderately confident that he was personally trying to rake short sellers over the coals, not so much moon Tesla stock to an insane valuation.
>moderately confident that he was personally trying to rake short sellers over the coals, not so much moon Tesla stock
You're saying he committed securities fraud for a higher moral purpose and you're moderately confident that the fact it led to him briefly becoming the richest man in the world didn't motivate him in any way?
> He'll drop off the richest people list faster than he climbed it (which was too fast).
His level of wealth presently is silly and unsustainable, however SpaceX can probably sustain him on the richest list just fine (takes $20b+ to stay in the top 100, SpaceX can give him that by itself). It would have to RUD for him to fall off, which appears quite unlikely at present. I'd bet against Tesla before I'd bet against SpaceX. There are no serious competitors to SpaceX looking out five years, whereas Tesla has enormous competition coming at them from every angle (not least of which is in China, where they may have already extracted what they wanted from Tesla, explaining the recent propaganda attack there against Tesla and turn south in the narrative in the state controlled media). The US Government, NASA and the military all desperately need SpaceX to succeed, they're nice allies to have so vested in your well-being, they help smooth over problems and risks; they've been paving the way for SpaceX since early on.
Unfortunately that's not how the current setup works.
The most successful the gambler is, the more of other's people they get to gamble.
He's at that point where he could never be right again and it'd never personally affect him. I mean if Tesla goes to 100 tomorrow morning, who gets hurt more? Elon or instructional investors that are supposed to be funding things like pensions?
I think once SpaceX gets big, he will get so focused on milestones that if he loses some astronauts and gets sued for damages, he's likely to leverage everything he has for more flights. No matter how safe those ships are, they're not infallible, so while it may be a safe bet it's not a guaranteed bet. If another crashes after that, or he loses contracts, he could be filing for bankruptcy, and taking Tesla down with him.
Assume Tesla stock fell to 100. Well I bought mt stock at 189 pre-split, so the share I bought at 189 are still worth 500. It is the day traders who get hurt, but the people in it for the long haul are still doing fine.
I always get a laugh for the people trying to scare people that Tesla stock will fall while not realizing a lot of the early purchaser will still make a profit even it the stock tanks big.
I don't think I've ever seen someone fail to grasp a point so confidently?
Or maybe you don't know what an institutional investor is? Because you're not an instructional investor...
The comment is saying even if Tesla goes to 100, it doesn't matter to Elon. It's not saying Tesla is going to 100. 100 is an arbitrary number representing a steep drop. It's not about what an "early purchaser" holding peanuts compared to any instructional investor is holding.
It's saying the standard of living of the guy worth 154 Billion isn't going to change because Tesla stock goes up or down. His entire Tesla stake could go to 0 tomorrow morning and he'd still be worth enough for it not to matter to his life past maybe some vanity issues.
How is this a pump and dump? They never dumped. It is certainly stupidity from Musk, but I don't know why you are implying maliciousness when they are still holding Bitcoin and therefore they are equally hurt by this drop in value.
It is incredibly hard to imagine that the upside in Musk's personal Bitcoin stake, whatever it is, is anywhere close to approaching his personal stake in Tesla. Something like 70% of his net worth is Tesla stock. It would be unbelievably stupid to jeopardize the value of the Tesla stock to pump up the value of his Bitcoin holdings.
Some of these anti-Musk conspiracy theories are truly crazy especially considering the man is so out there that you don't even need to fabricate weird theories like this to make him look bad.
> It is incredibly hard to image that the upside in Musk's personal Bitcoin stake, whatever it is, is anywhere close to approaching his personal stake in Tesla. Something like 70% of his net worth is Tesla stock. It would be unbelievably stupid to jeopardize the value of the Tesla stock to pump up the value of his Bitcoin holdings.
I think it's fair to suspect something here though, and question Musks behavior these last few years. Yes, originally he wanted to save the world with Tesla and also find a new world with SpaceX (at least that was the outspoken goals), but his current dealings that skirt on legality of things, gives another side of him.
Some people who seemed to be driven by the goodness of their heart ends up chasing the same money-dragon as many before them. It's not impossible.
I am not judging the goodness of his heart or whatever. I am simply stating that this theorized plan of him using Tesla as a pawn to increase the value of his Bitcoin holdings is both an idiotic plan and one that there is no evidence of actually existing. The only reason anyone would believe it is because they are forsaking critical thinking in favor of their bias against Musk that exists for both legitimate and illegitimate reasons.
> Something like 70% of his net worth is Tesla stock.
That's why they're not actual net worth. They are not liquid and will almost never be.
Private pump and dump schemes generate real cash, that can be used.
Musk can never leverage his Tesla stocks to do anything useful near the theoretical amount he has. better get some real cash that can buy actual yachts.
Remember this guy tweeted "funds secured to make Tesla private at 420$ per share" to take revenge on Tesla shorters blaming him for smoking marijuana on TV
You are equating a stupid in the heat of the moment Tweet by one person to a premeditated months long conspiracy by multiple people in Tesla's leadership. The two aren't equivalent.
It is incredibly hard to imagine that the upside in Musk's personal Bitcoin stake, whatever it is, is anywhere close to approaching his personal stake in Tesla. Something like 70% of his net worth is Tesla stock. It would be unbelievably stupid to jeopardize the value of the Tesla stock to pump up the value of his Bitcoin holdings.
this is a good point, but if I held Tesla, I would probably prefer cash. it could be that Tesla's greatest value is as a prop for BTC scams.
Teslas catch on fire randomly. Their roofs fall off sometimes. Their self-driving tech doesn't work as well as people expect, and when people get that expectation wrong, it sometimes results in them dying. The bulk of the company's revenue comes from carbon credits.
maybe he's pumping and dumping Bitcoin because he doesn't expect his wealth to last, and if he sold a bunch of Tesla stock, people would notice. a little scam to set aside a nest egg just in case the other scam doesn't pan out.
the weaknesses in this argument are SpaceX and PayPal, so I'm not totally convinced of my own position here, but I haven't seen any good counterarguments otherwise.
he could also just find scams fun for their own sake.
You better sell your GM stock then since that seems mostly to be happening to Bolts lately. Second thought, if you think people are dying driving in cars you better sell all car stocks.
Sure, his net-worth might be higher if this "tesla dabbling with bitcoin" never happened... but he made those tweets anyway, and any effects on tesla stock happened.
Maybe there was no master plan, but it would be a lot better for his personal net-worth if he went long/short on bitcoin before each tweet.
No it wouldn't. The best thing for his net worth is to make Tesla valuable, and holding loads of Bitcoin while saying Bitcoin's not great is not what you would do if that's your motivation.
...expanding a bit, Spacex could be the first company domiciled off of the planet if/when they build a private space station. What tax laws apply to artificial satellites used as "HQ" these days?
“Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”
But did he jeapordize the value of his Tesla stock? At all? The price of Tesla stock is entirely disconnected from the worth of the company, and seems to be doing just fine.
Or better yet, did they move into Dogecoin, which apparently uses a lot less energy. Setting up the inevitable 'use Doge instead, it's better for the environment'
Doesn't matter: considering that all cryptocurrencies have significant environmental impact, using them would force ESG-screening funds to drop the company.
Bitcoin is deliberately inefficient to a horrifying degree but it is not "all cryptocurrencies". Most modern designs are thousands or millions of times more efficient.
And thus worth 1000s to 100000s of times less money. Bitcoin is about turning electricity into bits, the trick is the decreasing amount of bitcoin, thus get in at the base of the pyramid to make more money
Does it use less energy intrinsically, or because it hasn't gone up enough yet, triggering more hashing with a concomitant increase in difficulty and energy use?
Why does it matter? Manipulation is de facto legal in crypto, because no legal jurisdiction has absolute control of it, and people getting involved need to factor that in as a rule of the game and optimize their own strategies taking that into account.
Why would Musk fuck around with a personal trading account? He probably owns some coins personally, but it would be an insignificant fraction of his networth (which is tied to Tesla).
Last information we have is from late April saying that TSLA sold off 10 percent of their bitcoin holdings. Nobody has any idea what their holdings are today.
They sold 10%, so they expect to be in for a few more rounds. Pump and dumpers rarely just aim for one single big cycle, you go in waves for max profit.
but in a pump and dump scheme the dump is the result of the orginal pumpers selling, not from the pumpers wanting to make the stock go down. It is in the interests of the pumpers to keep the stock price inflated as long as possible.
How are you downvoted for this? Tesla directly lost over $100M as a result of this decision. If this was a pump-and-dumb, they did a horrible job of it. Also, a pump-and-dump scheme doesn't require you to crash the price of an asset after you exit your position. Suggesting this was a pump-and-dump is flat-out idiocy.
More likely is that Musk liked the idea of Bitcoin, but got a lot of pressure from environmental activists after committing to it and decided it wasn't worth it anymore. Companies change their positions based on the outcry of political activists all the time. That's far more believable than saying Musk tanked his own company in effort to execute the worst pump-and-dump of all time.
Elon Musk wanted to adopt Bitcoin, but he knew there was this big problem with energy consumption. It's bad for his brand, and perhaps goes against his own ethics. Could he say "hey, get the energy consumption down and I'll go all-in with Tesla"? People wouldn't think much of it.
Better option: Buy a huge stake in Bitcoin, announce that he'll be accepting bitcoin at Tesla, get people really excited, heat up the market, and then pull it out from under them. Now all of the big stakeholders in Bitcoin have a clear, almost measurable incentive to clean up bitcoin's act. If Bitcoin adopts proof-of-stake or whatever needs to happen to bring down energy consumption, people will look back and thank Elon Musk for it.
Surely by next week he’ll be tweeting, like, “we are building a giant battery in the desert to mine Bitcoin, Bitcoin is good again, you can use it to pay for Teslas,” and the price will shoot back up, and I’ll once again hit the button that auto-generates this column.
There was a time Porsche made more profits than revenue, back before the 2008 crash. Mainly due to financial shenanigans, primarily with VW. Came crashing down in 2008 with the failed acquisition of VW, that ended with a merger of kinds.
Maybe Tesla ends up in a similar situation, making the majority of it profits from Bitcoin. Wouldn't be to bad for them short term, it would mud the waters regarding Tesla even more so.
Whenever people start talking about Big Brain 4D Chess I think, probably not it.
Elon is pretty busy, before he got into space flight, he new very little about it. Some people at the time said as much. However 2 years later the same person said he was literally an expert on many things and had learned an insane amount.
This seems more like Elon became convinced of the potential of crypto currency in general, told Tesla to look into it, if it is a viable cash storage and if it is, logically using it for payments make sense.
Then they based on their internal team for evaluation of environment they saw that their entrance in the market caused a massive spike and released if this continues and they continue to drive people in that market it would be damaging for the mission.
It reasonable that they didn't understand how large the increase in power consumption was and how large it would be if it continued to be adopted. So rather then continue to drive in that direction they pulled the plug.
I know, its not a crazy big brain story, but its actually how most flawed process happen.
Even if it moved entirely to renewable energy it would still be a massive opportunity cost. There are productive uses that energy could be put to. Bitcoin is not productive.
Using gigawatts to process a few transactions a second, when existing financial frameworks can process millions of transactions a seconds at a fraction of the energy input means that bitcoin is always a massive waste.
There is utility in the bitcoin network that is not found in existing financial systems (censorship-resistant, seizure-resistant, borderless, and pseudonymous). And If you are thinking about the energy consumption of btc on a per transaction basis you are misunderstanding that the btc network should be thought of as a settlement layer, rather than a payment layer.
> Bitcoin is therefore best understood as a high-integrity utility-scale settlement network, similar to Fedwire [...]
No surprise that like other real-time gross settlement systems, Bitcoin is a suitable base upon which other payments networks can be built. These are numerous, but they include off-chain transactions at exchanges, near-chain solutions like Lightning, sidechains with new trust models like Liquid and Rootstock, and smart contract platforms like Blockstack that rely on Bitcoin’s security.[0]
The myopic focus placed on the bitcoin networks energy consumption has always seemed absurd to me. Considering all the plastic junk manufactured in China, shipped on giant container ships all across the globe, emitting vast amounts of carbon, only to be thrown away a year later. To me, this alternative monetary systems provides far more utility to humanity than some plastic funko pop figurine. But the latter slips under the radar and the former attracts huge amounts of criticism. It's almost as if there is some concerted effort tarnish the public opinion of bitcoin.
> the btc network should be thought of as a settlement layer, rather than a payment layer
This ruins all of the stuff you mention. Or at least restricts these nice features to the rich. People don't have access to these features if they are only used indirectly through the major institutions they work with.
All of those features remain intact, even with the eventual creation of a payment layer. There is nothing to prevent someone from transacting directly on the blockchain.
Yes, that’s how the btc network works, that’s what censorship-resistant means. You would primarily transact on a payment layer, which true, may not have all the features of the base layer. But you also have the ability to opt-in and transact directly on the blockchain and get all those nice features listed above, however the transaction fee would be higher and the speed of the transaction slower.
For some definition of "higher" and "slower", yes. The scale of BTC is such that if we distributed transactions evenly across the 7b people on the planet, you get one transaction per five years.
The current mining payout is 6.5BTC per block, or roughly $350,000. We are fitting around 1,500 transactions in a block, meaning each transaction costs $300. The price will only rise as more miners join and there is more demand for space in a block. The international poverty line is such that a single transaction would cost somebody at that line half their year's wages.
All that good stuff won't be available to the masses. Just the rich and powerful. Hooray.
Isn't it per 89 years? So basically every person gets one transaction in their lifetime. (If we are generous and allow for 5 transactions per second, then everyone can make 2 transactions in their lifetime. Yay!) That is rather remarkable.
(1500 transactions/block * 6 block/h * 24 h/d * 365 d/y / 7e9 person = 1/89 transactions per person per year)
I grabbed some page that claimed 7 transactions per second and also did the math wrong. Not sure how that happened.
This is the big reason why I don't buy the lightning network. It won't be possible for people to have a wallet that connects to some lightning hub, since opening and closing a connection requires an on-chain transaction. So it will be impossible for anybody other than the richest few to even possess a useful wallet. Everybody else will have bits in a database they don't control.
> There is utility in the bitcoin network that is not found in existing financial systems (censorship-resistant, seizure-resistant, borderless, and pseudonymous)
That utility exists in most of the crypto offerings. Bitcoin is horribly inefficient as a payment layer although that's exactly what people want. If it's not good for what people use it for, something better will replace it. It's not about who's first, but who's last.
Say you wanted to pseudonymously send funds to a family member with a frozen bank account in say, Gaza, by the end of the day. What tech would you use to accomplish this?
Existing financial frameworks sit on top of the whole lot of trust-providing institutions, that include governments and us army. If you would compare energy consumption of all that, bitcoin could be cheaper alternative. Maybe.
Bitcoin sits on top of those very same institutions as well. The only thing stopping criminal gangs from stealing the keys to your wallet forcibly at gunpoint is the justice system. And the blockchain could not exist without the massive government subsidized investments in network infrastructure.
...which are unlikely to ever get implemented because adoption of such an "initiative" would have to be decided by miners, and that decision would immediately make their very expensive ASIC hardware completely worthless.
The mere technological advance bitcoin has enabled via blockchain alone has led to creation of smart contracts and an explosion of innovation in the space, no doubt all this will inevitably lead to massive productivity gains. Maybe bitcoin itself won't be the final answer but something inspired by it will be.
I don't think there's any 4D chess. With most of his stuff, he's just selling a story.
Lately, that story (and the products to match) have pivoted from eco-luxury (Roadster, Model S/3/Y) to a story targeting the well-off eco-prepper crowd.
Switch out the underlying technologies and the customer demographics and it would would be offroad pickups instead of Cybertrucks, propane generators instead of Powerwalls, suitcases of unmarked bills instead of crypto, flamethrowers instead of guns (ok, I'm stretching the analogy, but you get it).
And just like with the lower tech equivalents, the likelihood/frequency that most of his customers will use the products to anywhere near their full potential is close to zero, because most still live well within the safety margins of civilization.
And whether he actually believes in any of the story himself is sort of besides the point, because there are enough people that fit the above description who will eat up his products and the story that comes with them.
This is not to diminish how much he's done to accelerate EV adoption. He realized that most people aren't really onboard with using EVs for the sake of the environment, and that you have to target people's selfish needs to move a product, not their prosocial feelings. Remember that Nissan Leaf was the first mass market practical EV, before the Model S, but for a whole lot of people it didn't do much for their mojo.
I feel like the acceptable level of due diligence that should have necessary for Tesla to move in the Bitcoin direction should have easily accounted for a possibility like this.
BTC would not survive a PoS fork. The threat model requires a consensus mechanism to include a huge network of hyper vigilant greedy actors that may enter or leave at will. For a linear utxo blockchain, there’s nothing but PoW with those properties.
But there is probably a simpler explanation : crypto is still experimental and Elon is pragmatic as new informations arrive. Where Bitcoin is the graal for some people, for Tesla it was only another real scale experiment about a payment method.
Notice an opportunity for easy money and get into Bitcoin under the pretense of selling cars for it, then pull out "temporarily" citing environmental reasons. They are now in a comfortable position to hold onto it for how long they might want to, without getting too many questions why a car maker is speculating with crypto coins. If they might need cash (or have to pretty up the quarterly results) one day, cash out some. In the meantime, post doge memes to keep crypto in people's minds.
I don't think it has anything to do with energy or the environment. I think Elon Musk distancing himself from Bitcoin is a consequence of the recent spat of highly publicized ransomware attacks using bitcoin. Elon Musk is connected to the military-industrial complex; it is plausible the federal government has given him forewarning of an impending war on crypto currencies, to make sure their asset, the guy who launches lots of their satellites, doesn't get caught in the crossfire.
Yeah, this is more plausible. I think it’s multiple factors simultaneously including the bad PR from the environmental footprint. And it’s kind of funny because Musk has never been a full throated promoter of cryptocurrency ever. Social media is full of people pumping crypto and yet Musk has regularly made technically-accurate skeptical comments about bitcoin or similar cryptocurrency.
I think the Colonial attack has made many people think about cryptocurrencies and the potential for more regulation given the publicity and impact to society. There is no need for him to get any special "tip" to make that determination, or at least have it part of the mosaic of information he uses to evaluate cryptocurrencies.
I'm going through another vivid round of realizing that my parents are humans. They tell you that will happen to you one day, they don't tell you it'll happen over and over.
Musk, a human being with more power than any one person can handle, makes a decision, then other people and events convince him he made a mistake, and he changes back to his old stance. That we don't want politicians and public figures to ever change their minds says much more about what is wrong with us than what is wrong with them.
What is pretty weird to me though was that I feel like he could have hedged this much better by taking a middle ground. If you want to accumulate a position in an asset, and you have a ridiculous amount of money, don't you do the Warren Buffet method of grabbing it a little at a time, maybe when nobody is looking?
If you were trying to build a position in silver, and your company accepts it as payment, don't you keep spending your other assets and just keep all of the silver that your customers pay you with?
- Musk is not very smart, or at least doesn't always think decisions through or go through proper due diligence(we have evidence for this: see SEC tweets, thai children rescue, excessive management turnover, etc.)
- He (and Tesla management) know he can manipulate the crypto market. So they (first) bought $1.5B in BTC unknowingly to the public, (second) told the market they did (third) sold the BTC unknowingly to the public and (fourth) told the market that it wasn't viable and all the while keeping the profits so they can keep wall street happy/distracted from less than ideal financial performance figures.
Crypto advocates want democratization of currency. Well here ya go - whales can easily manipulate the system.
Elon probably read about the retired coal power plant in New York state that's being retrofitted and brought back to life for the explicit purpose of mining bitcoin [0].
Honestly, this is really frankly terrible. Even though I knew that the power consumption of bitcoin miners was high before reading this story, this particular concrete example still moved me.
One could easily be tempted to think "sure it's power-intensive, but this will all move to solar/wind along with the rest of the grid"---but it's hard to square that with stories about dirty power being spun up explicitly for mining.
I think Musk is not taking cryptocurrencies or life in general as seriously as most commenters here. Which is quite alright and refreshing, to be honest.
It’s only perplexing if you assume he knows all that you know.
Musk appears to be a fantastically competent salesman and decent rocket scientist, but we shouldn’t expect him to have the Midas touch on other fields of competence.
And while Musk ought to employ people to warn him about all the issues he now cites as why he changed policy, remember that he did start The Boring Company in response to getting stuck in a traffic jam, and got in trouble with the SEC for repeatedly tweeting stuff that CEOs are not supposed to tweet, and tried to name his kid X Æ A-12 — I assume he has sycophants telling him his every idea is fantastic no matter what he does, just as he has anti-sycophants (sychokrupho? My Greek is terrible) yelling as loudly as possible that he’s evil for failing to spend his money on their pet project.
I think a lot of people realize Bitcoin consumes a lot of energy without necessarily realizing the extent to which the energy consumption correlates with the price of BTC. After pushing up the price of BTC with a $1.5B purchase and a bunch of tweets, it might have been a bit of a wake-up call to then subsequently see the electricity usage of the network immediately start to skyrocket (he did recently tweet a link to cbeci.org).
He really should have known better, but all that said it's not hard to imagine how this could've played out behind the scenes. He's previously mentioned having trusted friends who convinced him of the value of crypto, and he may have genuinely believed that it would drive growth of renewables long-term, but then changed his views as he became more aware of the damage this is causing in the here and now.
I suspect it was a brand-saving decision for Tesla. All of the press about Bitcoin's carbon footprint resulted in very bad PR and I suspect this is a reaction to that.
My theory is that he realized how many people he ruined with the SNL / hustle bit when doge coin dropped and he is trying to get out of it. Probably something he should of considered ahead of time, the music was always going to stop. The space x satellite was his attempt to right it but now he wants to get out and focus on his core work. That or his board of directors threatened to pitch him if he did not get out.
Oh he definitely knows what he's doing, and there's hoping that the SEC do a McAfee on him for the pump-and-dump scheme, though this seems rather unlikely unfortunately.
My guess is that he just isn't very savvy about cryptocurrencies in terms of implementation mechanics and legitimately didn't understand the extent of bitcoin energy consumption until the drop in April brought up that correlation front and center in the news when the price drop was attributed to a disruption in mining due a blackout in China.
It wouldn't be the first time where he jumped into some topic outside his immediate area of expertise and proceed to get criticized for missing some critical nuances (e.g. the ventilator donation thing, the submarine rescue in Thailand thing)
So perplexing we all can bet the argument is bogus and there's a hidden agenda.
Few ideas:
- using another crypto and discrediting bitcoin to move capital onto others (apparently cardano price didn't crash.. yay for Haskell I guess)
- Tesla having its own token ?
- Simply toying with panic to buy more.
Tesla has solar panel, batteries, and custom ASIC know how or partnership, they could also have their own system in the pipelines now. And with the microgrid rumor (far fetched but I heard the idea propped up by another car brand on radio the other day... Surprising). Maybe an energy currency ?
How does Musk decide to throw $1.5 billion worth of Tesla's cash into BTC without acknowledging this?
Easy. By being the nutjob that he transparently is and has been for several years now.
The only mystery here is why so many people seem willing to hitch their wagons to a financial "instrument" whose trading value is so critically dependent on the whims and effluents of such a person.
It’s not simply bitcoins energy consumption - it’s the energy consumption relative to other PoW cryptocurrencies.
There was a study published recently showing that Bitcoin uses more than 2000x more energy per transaction than dogecoin, for example. No doubt it is this revelation that has made musk reconsider which cryptocurrency he should be backing.
Actually he understands that Bitcoin's energy consumption is not a problem. This tweet signals that he wants that energy production must be sustainable. He wants to influence miners to move to sustainable energy.
He puts up a clear incentive: if miners move to sustainable energy, then Tesla will accept bitcoin again.
Probably for the same reason he tweets about doge. IMO he's pointing out how absurd and dangerous the crypto market is. Cryptocurrency needs regulation and controls before it does significant damage. The manipulators are having a field day right now.
He's not an idiot, the people who praise him as a god and follow his every word and beckon are. Musk is extremely smart, he knows Bitcoin energy consumption is high and unsustainable. And he knows how to manipulate a bunch of people who have no idea what they are investing in/how to invest.
What he did (and this is pure speculation) is a basic pump and dump (well sort of dump, I guess they still have a bunch?). Bought a bunch of Bitcoin, pumped it WAY up, and sold a bunch so TSLA hits revenue targets. A win win for Musk, and it's perfectly legal (versus the other time he tried and got slapped on the wrist by the SEC).
The fact Bitcoin/cryptocurrency drops 365B after someone sends out a tweet is another issue.
It's true markets are highly encouraged by global issues (such as Trump tweets sending stocks high or low) but the fact that Bitcoin went down 15%~ after a single tweet is an issue.
It's way to easy to manipulate it, and that's really bad.
This HN library work is so good. Thanks for these types of HN trees.
I've been thinking of offering to help your team with some tooling work. But if you needed help, you'd probably find it somewhere. So I'll just cheer you on here.
(A fella emailed me about Lumen the other day, asking what I thought about Scheme's (let ((a 1) (b 2)) ...) syntax. I said "If you want to, you can write a macro to implement Scheme. But Lumen's design got it right." So, thanks also if your early design conversations influenced how Lumen's LET turned out. Some days it feels I've written more (let ...) blocks than sentences.)
Sorry if it sounded out of place. The context is that Dan's team does so much impactful work thanks to powerful software. But for various reasons, a lot of the required knowledge is esoteric. (Do you know how to write an emacs library to provide proper indentation for arc? If not, are you ready to dive in and learn, without extensive supervision?)
It's also crucial for HN team members to be trustworthy and effective. I'm pretty sure that access to the core HN infrastructure is limited to very, very few people – it has to be. For example, pg used HN to keep notes on startups he was meeting with during office hours. And that's just one of dozens and dozens of sensitive areas. For obvious reasons, no one can have access to those except extremely trustworthy, capable people. Worse, you can't grant access to code related to those things without also revealing the purpose of those sensitive areas. Abuse detection is possibly the mildest example, but I imagine the standard deviation on surprise is extraordinarily high for a random HN feature.
Those two things (esoteric knowledge requirements + {competent,trustworthy,motivated}) means that Dan and his team are often short-handed. I am speaking from ignorance here, but it would be remarkable if they somehow weren't. The YC software team also covers a huge amount of territory as of today, from maintaining ycombinator.com's Rails codebase to keeping "Work at a Startup" infrastructure running smoothly. Some of it needs HN integration, like the ability for the YC application to cross-reference the HN usernames of each founder, which seems to use some sort of oauth token that I'm sure wasn't effortless to get working in Arc.
The most well-placed person to do all of this work is Dan, but Dan himself has to spend a majority of his time moderating HN. Yet through all that work, he still finds the time to create megathread indexes like this one. So, knowing what I know, when I see that, I can't help but take off my hat for a moment and say something. Apologies for the confusion.
Dan also helped design Lumen, a Lisp that bootstraps itself entirely in Javascript or Lua: http://github.com/sctb/lumen I fell in love with it around... five years ago? Something like that. And to this day I still write code in it all the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26804484 (I've been meaning to ship a Tensorflow/Pytorch code generator, one of these days.)
The last aspect of it is that I once had an opportunity to work on getting him some desperately-needed tooling back in 2016, but I totally blew it. The first thing he asked for was an Arc indentation plugin for Emacs, which I had never touched till then. Unfortunately my life was in complete chaos at the time (https://gist.github.com/shawwn/3110ab62fa027c7811578f167fa5a...) and various things were happening that made me turn bitter, to say the least. ("Crazy-seeming dickhead" might be a better phrasing, depending on who you ask.) I ended up delivering nothing, when I could have improved his workflow substantially. (I myself have been using some Arc vim indentation plugin I found somewhere around a decade ago, and god bless whoever wrote that; it's been so lovely. So I know how important that kind of thing can be.)
Once I got my life in order, and have had several years to reflect, I realized what a unique and cool opportunity it was that I squandered, and I've regretted it ever since. So that was the middle paragraph talking.
But! I had my shot, and you might be able to get one too. If you (or whoever's reading this) happens to have a unique combination of skills, a lot of free time, and are willing to work extremely hard, then I encourage you to email hn@ycombinator.com and tell 'em you're willing to lend a hand with whatever odd jobs they need. They'll probably appreciate it.
Or maybe they don't need anything. That was 2016, this is 2021, and HN has been running fantastically well all this time. That's why I shall settle for the cheerleader role. :)
Anyway, this is all entirely off-topic, so if it's inappropriate then please feel free to collapse or detach it, of course. But in my opinion that whole infrastructure hemisphere is one of the more interesting places in the world, a bit like Hogwarts, so I wanted to ramble a little bit. Back to ML!
Wow. Just wow. I like Hacker News like the next person. In fact, I'm here all the time. But it's a business expense for Y Combinator, is it not? That's not a charity. These folks may do great work, and I like it a lot, but isn't it also just their job that they get paid for. There's people that go above and beyond in a lot of companies, many of them sadly less visible, while you make it weirdly (to me) sound like something special, which I just can't see. It's a great website, though, and a major part of my internet diet. So, thanks to all involved, community included.
It's definitely not a charity. Dan offered to pay me a contract rate, but I was such a mess at the time that – and this an impressive fumble – I managed not to say "Yes, thanks! How do you feel about $x?" and instead launched off the deep end somewhere. (I was working on Emacs indentation in between Uber rides, since I was a driver at the time; much hacking ended up being done in a Best Buy parking lot under the actual moonlight. So at the time I was a little, uh, "eccentric" is probably the nicest way to phrase it.)
If I made HN/YC sound weird, it's only because I'm weird; sorry about that. My path through life was nontraditional. At the top of my salary history (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27109946) is "unpaid intern for a year" – I still think that unpaid internship was the best thing that ever happened in my life, especially at 17. (Incidentally, I was paid a few hundred bucks under the table; the problem was child labor laws, which are somewhat onerous in America.) A lot of people would feel that that's unfair. I say that in exchange for them putting up with a sometimes-goofy 17 year old, I was able to learn almost as much in that first year as I have in all subsequent years.
HN is similar in that there's an astonishing variety of interesting, unintuitive infrastructure tasks that you'll be exposed to. (I still rely on Emacs occasionally; that skill wouldn't have been in my arsenal.)
One reason I said anything at all is because Dan has been saying for several years that one day he might open source the moderation browser extension he uses; think of it like an IDE for HN. I was thinking perhaps someone could show up and say "Hey, I'd be willing to help package it up for release!" or something, because I personally think that it would be Hella Cool, as they say, to have some kind of power-user mode for HN. But since it has possibly sensitive moderation features, trust is of course a crucial issue, which takes time to establish remotely.
The other aspect was that Scott Bell (a former mod) was basically my only friend at that time. "Associate" is probably a better description, since he had an almost Vulcan-like detachment; nothing seemed to phase him. He was so cool that he was ice cold when it came to work, yet friendly and interesting when it came to life in general. Much of my present style was influenced by him. I think he put in a good word for me, and I ended up wasting a lot of their time instead, which I've felt badly about for years.
So some of those feelings were coloring my writing a bit; I'm certain that the HN team is a well-oiled corporate machine, as you'd expect.
It was interesting that an opportunity like that was even on the radar for me at one point, since as you allude to, it's somewhat unusual. But it's due to a confluence of factors, and they've likely had an influx of help (and business expense) since then.
So if work like that sounds interesting, email 'em and say something. But a word of advice: go into it with a chill mindset, and realize that it'll take time to earn trust. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20176460 mentions factoring out moderation-only features, so it's understandable that they can't simply say "Here's the code!" to anyone who shows up and asks.
"Hacker News" definitely lives up to the "Hacker" part of the name. It's not too often that such impactful infrastructure is written in Lisp. I think that's super neat, so maybe someone else will too.
EDIT: Oh yes, I should probably mention Numen. If you do end up needing to learn Emacs for random esoteric jobs, Dan's old Node.js debugger is an amazing resource: https://github.com/gruseom/numen/blob/master/numen.el
It stopped working after Node 0.6 I think, when Node dropped the old debug API. But I got it working once, and holy moly it was cool. It was like Indium (https://github.com/NicolasPetton/Indium) in that it was a JS debugger on steroids, and IMO had nicer features than even Chrome. It was even superior to Indium in a certain aspect related to cross referencing function names in the debugger with the actual files/lines they were defined at. I don't remember why, but the new Node debugger system made that super difficult for some reason.
Numen's a great example of the type of work that you'd be in a position to do. Much like Lisp itself, Numen seemed to have an extraordinary amount of power, yet few people noticed. Neat code.
Yeah I guess Coinbase trading publicly or major institutions accepting Ethereum as payments is hugely a disaster for the market. Yeah the IMF finally has their shit balls stuffed up their ass and a new form of valuable currency has arrived. FINALLY.
My hot-take having watched the culling from an invested position follows. Disclaimer: i hold both BTC and ETH.
While the market in general is down, the major losses in this crash were Bitcoin, Doge and Shiba. Bitcoin is an obvious result given the news. Doge and Shiba have had pretty spectacular gains over the last ~30d and seeing them lose considerable value is unsurprising if you follow crypto markets much. Seemingly new money has been racing in lately (see big rises in Eth Classic and Bitcoin Cash as well), i find these dips also unsurprising given past behavior.
As a somewhat meta analysis, i feel BTC could have an interesting summer. BTC plateaued at $1.1T in market cap. Meanwhile, Ethereum has been on a steady rise from 250-500B+. Talk of "the flippening" has returned in a way i didn't anticipate, certainly not this early on.
While this news impacted the whole market (the market still follows big BTC swings to some extent), i have found my personal sentiment shifting to be increasingly bearish on BTC and bullish on ETH.
I'm the oppsite, and I'm not a btc maximalist. I'm not going to make any predicitons about the price direction of either coin, I'm mainly surprised by eth's huge rise. there's some risk with the eth2 / PoS migration, though it comes with a huge benefit. would someone mind explaining the technical risk? i'm not that well versed in it, maybe i'm overstating it (the market is obviously bullish about it). without it, smart contracts are borderline unusable.
eth also has a big target on its back, a lot of the top coins are going after the smart contract space, mainly the centralized bootleg garbage called binance chain, which unfortunately does fill a market need, at least to less discerning "investors." to my detriment, i haven't touched it.
in contrast to eth, i'm not surprised about btc's rise. it does one thing and it does it well. it seems to work well as a hedge against inflation. i don't think that many people care about the environmental impact. it's not immediately visible, at least not like cars and other polluters. it's out of sight and out of mind.
The proof of stake ETH2 chain is already live for Ethereum and has been since December. That chain is parallel to the existing proof of work chain. They now need to merge the POW chain into the ETH2 validator nodes so they can conduct consensus from there on. The merge has been simulated already and is being tested. Core devs seem to be confident it will be feasible with low risk. But of course, there's always a chance something goes wrong.
It's one thing for it to be live, it's another thing for it to be stress tested in actual production/real world with people's actual money.
I have a vested interest in hoping it lands successfully, but being a software engineer, I know how many bugs I've had even in simple programs, I can only imagine the kinds of bugs that will be discovered in eth2 considering just how complex it is.
Don't worry. If anything goes wrong (like a hacker stealing everybody's coins), they can just rollback the transaction. That's not a new thing for ethereum, to just rollback transactions. Lol.
For the uninitiated read about the dao hack and the debate that ensued. Basically, they just rolled back the transaction, just like a bank.
You're mixing up two different issues. One is a bug in the implementation of Ethereum, the other is a bug in a smart contract (that runs on Ethereum).
Undoing the former by rolling back the chain and fixing the bug is the only logical thing to do. Bitcoin devs have done the same a couple of times (e.g. [1]).
The DAO hack, however, was not caused by a bug in Ethereum. It was caused by a bug in the code of a smart contract. Ethereum executed this smart contract faithfully (there was no bug in Ethereum). Bitcoin has never done this.
As someone else said, it's in production. Also, there are many, many forks of the EVM in production that run on proof of stake mechanics (Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, Skale, Qtum, xDai, etc). The main thing you have to worry about with move to ETH2 is contentious forks of the main chain, like if POW miners revolt and start a fork or a blip at the merge point that takes the chain offline for a bit. The ongoing ETH2 consensus and validation mechanic is live already. ETH2 also has client diversity, with 4 different implementations written in four different programming languages (Rust, Go, etc). There is some world class talent on the ETH core team. I have full faith in them and their testing regiment. But of course there is no such thing as risk-free.
It's not really in production until the value of Ether tokens is protected by it. When that happens it will be potentially profitable to hack it. Right now only Ethereum supporters are testing the network, not Ethereum antagonists (black/gray hats).
If an asset is an inflation hedge and it goes up faster than inflation, there is a risk that it will go down eventually to match the inflation rate. This is true for gold. Pretty much nobody believes this for Bitcoin, everyone expects Bitcoin to exceed inflation over the long term.
Even if you ignore the above in general Bitcoin is a poor asset (downgrade from hedge) against inflation because it doesn't care about inflation. It's highly volatile which means it can go down while inflation is going up, which is the exact opposite of what you want from an inflation hedge.
The crypto market is so big now that it's hard to imagine enough new money to make prices go up anymore. How does anyone justify these obscure tokens and coins being worth billions.
> How does anyone justify these obscure tokens and coins being worth billions.
The Greater Fool Theory. This stops working when you run out of fools, but the notion of "there's another sucker born every minute" probably keeps the ball rolling for a while.
In 2017/18 the "smart" money was early into ICOs and the "fools" are just getting into those over the past year. Meanwhile the "smart" money has moved on to DeFi and all that nonsense - DeX, yield farming (ponzi scheming), flash loans, etc. The next cycle you'll see smart money move onto something else, and they'll have figured out how to repackage DeFi to the average fool, which will come with greater linkages to the inherent financial systems.
What made the GFC such a massive bubble was how much the financial system was woven into Mortgages/CDOs. Crypto is not there yet, right now it could pop and you'd hear a few regretful stories and friends who lost a few hundred on the "Doge", but it wouldn't be a widespread disaster. Once you start seeing apps utilizing DeFi to enable average "fools" to purchase equities, fund home/auto/college loans etc that will signal a bubble with vicious potential.
Dogecoin purchases via Robinhood is probably the easiest we have right now to getting the average fool to trade their currency for memes, but that's still a small subset of gambling.
There are a lot of ponzi scehemes in cryptocurrency markets, but you will have to expand on why you think yield farming is one of them.
The typical yield farming scenario is that users provide liquidity to AMM pools in exchange for LP tokens and accumulate trading fees on the pair while they HODL. The LP tokens themselves can often be staked on the DEX in exchange for governance tokens on that DEX (which may have other utility on the DEX as well).
Maybe it isn't a ponzi scheme (I'm no expert) but even after looking up all the acronyms (and maybe especially after looking them up) this sounds like an episode of Schitt's Creek.
But let me try to actually understand.
You provide liquidity to a pool in exchange for a token and accumulate trading fees, while maintaining ownership of your capital.
Ok, first of all this sounds like a bank. But it's decentralized? So what happens when someone has a majority of governance tokens on your DEX?
Yes, correct. First of all, you'd probably DYOR and ensure that the governance tokens at least have the appearance of being community owned rather than centralised, and secondly you'd probably need to ask yourself what having majority voting power on a governance token really offers. It's like shareholder voting power (which is typically held by a majority or a few majority stakeholders), you probably don't want to vote for something if it's going to throw all your other investors under the bus.
Stepping back from that, you need to understand that initially you're dealing with smart contracts. The governors can't fundamentally change the underlying aspects of the contract.
So let's say, "worst case scenario", the governors could decide to reduce the emissions rate of governance tokens on the staking pools you're interested in. Well, they haven't fundamentally changed the underlying contract, you can still unstake your LP token from the farming contract, withdraw your liquidity from the pool and end up with (some combination of) your original capital + any fees you earned over that time (impermanent loss is a topic for another conversation).
Uh, for most of these "obscure tokens" you can't get that kind of leverage. SHIB or SAFEMOON or w/e was worth billions before it was ever even listed on Binance.
Retailer frenzy on top of a new technology alien enough that people don't understand it. If you think these coins are all there is, just wait until you see the thousands of meme coins that never took off.
Also keep in mind that these coins crash with very small amounts of money. The liquidity just isn't there.
I have the opposite take. In bull runs, the market swings between BTC and altcoins. Dogecoin rise unintentionally benefits ETH. It weakened Bitcoin but strengthens Dogecoin and Ethereum. With this crash, people will realize that BTC is the crypto that matters. BTC runs the market. The FUD will cause people to flock to BTC. But that's just a guess. Anything can happen in crypto.
That protects nothing. Constant sustained selling pressure drives something down just as well as someone dumping. In a way it’s worse because it’s certain and there is no room for hope of a quick recovery like in a crash
this is why in finance the most obvious or intuitive prediction or outcome is often the wrong one. "omg..he sold his stock/crypto/token etc., therefore it must fall a lot!"
He should have just sold thee shib, convert to $, and cut the check. Too much of charity these days feels like moving assets around and money instead of donating. That is why the UBI is so popular, because it gives the money to the people instead of middlemen, bureaucrats, admins, and money changers.
Quite right. The alt-coin market is notoriously volatile even by crypto market standards, and not something i follow close enough to give a strong analysis on.
Coinbase's weekly losses chart[0] captures some of what i hoped to express in my parent comment. Bitcoin is interesting because in a way, it hasn't so much lost value lately as not risen with the market the last couple of weeks.
Cardano is actually more subtle than that: it simultaneously tanked because of the whole BTC thing but it also got good (and clearly carefully coordinated) press as a “greener” alternative to BTC as a result of the self-same crash, which boosted its price.
I think people are switching to Cardano because it has lower environmental impact (proof of stake) than others. The Tesla announcement was about the environmental cost of Bitcoin after all.
I'd say this observation might be correct, on the basis that the Tesla announcement also sent the lesser-known NANO currency up by about 60-80%, which uses PoS as well.
If you're referring to their comment "the major losses in this crash were Bitcoin, Doge and Shiba", they are most likely picking that list by market cap (though I did not try to crosscheck).
This is mostly true, but a number of tokens actually do generate an income in the form of fees, inflation rewards, or a combination of the 2. For example, ETH can earn staking rewards, and post ETH2 merge, will also earn transaction fee revenue. A number of the dexes generate trading fees that get distributed to token holders (giving P/E ratios that are high, but not absolute insanity given they are "growth" stocks).
It's fascinating watching the narratives unfold and affecting the price. Bitcoin is the bad guy today, until bitcoin holders just buy up the new liquidity and it starts going up again. Then the narrative will change again.
> While the market in general is down, the major losses in this crash were Bitcoin, Doge and Shiba. Bitcoin is an obvious result given the news. Doge and Shiba have had pretty spectacular gains over the last ~30d and seeing them lose considerable value is unsurprising if you follow crypto markets much.
the interesting thing is that all those 3 coin crashes were again due to Elon Musk. He has been spreading the FUD all this time. I wonder how influencing markets is legal.
I'm surprised that nobody's mentioned it here, but this crypto boom has sent demand for mining hardware through the roof, which has contributed in no small part to the chip shortage. Miners are buying up ASICs, GPUs and FPGAs at a premium.
In the short term, crashing the crypto market can ease demand for semiconductors, but in the long term, getting cryptos to move to Proof of Steak will hopefully ease it up for good (But don't quote me on that!)
It's no secret that one of their biggest supply chain constraints is chips right now (aside from batteries.) So it's not all that ridiculous to imagine them pulling this kind of publicity stunt off so that they can actually produce and sell more cars. And if they can profit off of it at the end of the day, even better!
From https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/09/11/coordination.html "A large mining pool publicly showing how they have internally distributed their nodes and network dependencies doesn't do much to calm community members scared of mining centralization. And pictures like these, showing 90% of Bitcoin hashpower at the time being capable of showing up to the same conference panel, do quite a bit to scare people".
If you follow the link, you'll see a picture of 7 people that controlled 90% of Bitcoin hashpower at the time. Remind me how that's more fair to an arbitrary holder of Bitcoin, than say, letting the holders have the power with staking?
Or, for that matter, leaving fiscal matters in the hands of a central bank with a board of governors appointed by democratically elected officials?
Honestly, I don't see how the status quo in crypto actually improves on that at all (unless you are in the ransomware business, of course. Then it makes sense.)
You could try auditing central banks, see how long you can remain alive. Bitcoin is an open ledger that can be audited by anyone. That alone is a significant improvement.
It is also the closest thing we have in practice to the "Ideal money" proposal by Nash, that Nash spent 20 years giving lectures about around the world.
But the power to set monetary policy is just a restricted version of the power to tax. Creating money is effectively a tax on savings. So why are you OK with taxes in general, but not this very restricted tax?
No, it’s much more than that. For example, by creating money, and using it to buy bonds, you can push down the rate of interest. This has nothing to do with taxes. It’s an interference with market coordination, because interest rates play a central part in this.
For example, let’s say you have a business worth one billion dollars, and you earn 50 million dollars in profit per year (a 5% yield per annum). By setting the Federal Funds rate at 6%, the government can make it profitable to sell this business and deposit the proceeds in a bank account, hereby earning one percentage point more in yearly returns.
The government shouldn’t have the power to halt economic activity in this manner, because it amounts to central planning, ie. communism. Which has been proven to be a disaster.
> by creating money, and using it to buy bonds, you can push down the rate of interest. This has nothing to do with taxes
Of course it does. It's all just wealth redistribution. Lowering interest rates redistributes wealth from lenders to borrowers, i.e. from savers to debtors.
> By setting the Federal Funds rate at 6%, the government can make it profitable to sell this business
The government can do exactly the same thing with tax policy. The only difference is that tax policy is more flexible (because it has many degrees of freedom rather than just one) and hence more powerful. The power to control the money supply is a proper subset of the power to tax. You can't support the latter but not the former and remain logically consistent.
This difference is that in PoS, if anyone ever holds more than ⅓ of the total supply (as is the case with Ethereum's founders currently holding 65% of the overall issuance, for example), they can indefinitely control the chain through their re-org capability.
Could you:
1. Point me to the source that says, " if anyone ever holds more than ⅓ of the total supply (as is the case with Ethereum's founders currently holding 65% of the overall issuance, for example), they can indefinitely control the chain through their re-org capability."
2. Point me to the addresses of Ethereum's founders? Presumably it's then 65% of 115 million eth.
Like i said, it's just a rumour, but from a fairly informed source.
Do you have a better estimate?
Total amount of fundraising ETH did initially was about 20 mil? 1-2 mil sounds like a feasible early VC check to get 10%, not including games you can play later to increase your stack further.
all experiments with onchain voting seem to have that problem, just like with voting in real life.
read up on the DAO exploit and carbon vote. Even in a drastic situation turnout was low.
It's a permissionless industry and I suppose people can try different things, but one thing that sets apart Bitcoin from everything else - it is not a democracry.
Democracy was designed for cities of 50-60k in size, where only rich landowners got to vote and everyone else was basically peons. It doesn't scale and is not particularly great.
PoS is just another string of boneheaded attempts to make democracy great again...by marrying it with plutocracy? idk.
Would you care to vote with your measly stake if you know the insiders have over 50% anyway?
"the insiders have over 50% anyway?" This is false. Hard to take the rest of your premise seriously when they are not based on facts and sound more like maximalism.
In addition to miners, running actual Bitcoin nodes keeps the network safe, that's why it's very important for it to be very cheap to run so that many people/volunteers can do it.
>PoS malicious stakers lose nothing in case of a split
You can only support one side of a fork in PoS and if you try to play both sides anyone can form a proof showing you mined both forks and your stake gets slashed. This is the Nothing At Stake problem and well understood which makes your comment pretty confusing.
There are no attackers or victims in the scenario of the chain forking and a block producer gooing out of their way to mine both chains with the same stake.
By default your validator software picks the unmodified chain unless you install a special update that lets it use the newly forked chain. If you do nothing you continue mining just one chain (the old one) and nothing is lost. If you validate with both then you are penalized. That can't really be done on accident.
It's the non-mining nodes that verify transactions and have the final say, and those can be run on home devices by regular people. That's the difference.
Non mining nodes are programmed to follow the longest chain. That's so they are: readers. They are not writers. They act like slave nodes in a database. They have insignificant power in the grand scheme of things.
Yes. I just wanted to emphasize that in PoW coins, a rogue miner cannot force the whole network to accept blocks because all network participants (even passive non-miners) will just ignore the "invalid" block.
No, but if all the miners fork from all the non mining nodes, the chain with all the miners will be more secure. If a minority of miners side with the non mining nodes, that chain will be more vulnerable to disruption.
Can you elaborate what you mean by “the most say”? The nodes aren’t voting on political proposals. So long as one entity doesn’t control >50% of the validating nodes, it doesn’t really matter, does it?
Just put a carbon tax on everything with environmental side effects and let the market sort it out, otherwise who decides what get's banned?
For example, I think cars contribute very significantly to global warming and use lots of fossil fuels, do I get to say, let's ban all cars and force everyone to use public transport? No!
I agree that there will likely be exceptions, but long-haul isn't one of them. The trucking industry is already subject to a lot of regulations around mandatory rest stops, so there are well-established break points along every major long-haul route.
This has lead to things like [1] where it is significantly more economical for long-haulers to electrify their existing fleet than continue using diesel fuel. I suspect long-haul will reach 90% electrification long before last-mile trucking and private-use automotives.
That said, I imagine you are spot on regarding farming - and pushing industry to less restrictive jurisdictions.
I'm willing to bet that Bitcoin mining will be 100% renewable (compared to 40-70% depending on whose numbers you look at today) before ICE vehicles are all gone. I'm basing this on the fact that miners are incentivized to always seek the cheapest source of energy and that renewable/stranded energy is only going to become cheaper over time. At one point, hydro/wind/nuclear will become much more cheaper than coal/fossil fuels, it's inevitable.
If bitcoin mining is 100% renewable, that is 100% of renewable energy being destroyed instead of being put to use displacing other, more polluting energy.
It doesn't matter if bitcoin mining specifically uses renewable energy. What matters is used in total by everyone. And bitcoin mining will always make things worse, no matter what kind of energy it uses.
As long as there are fossil fuels being used for the production of electricity, either non-clean energy or a mix will be cheaper as a purchaser (regardless of production costs).
All the electricity gets mixed together in the power network anyway, so if you buy 'renewable' electricity you are effectively just paying a premium to say yours came from the pool of renewable electricity. If you increase the power load on the network though, and in-aggregate the power requirement increases, chances are that increase still comes from fossil fuels.
I think we will be waiting a long time until global electricity is 100% renewable, although I hope it happens quick and it's good that you are more optimistic than me :)
Bitcoin does three transactions per second while using the energy of an entire country. The bitcoin network could be run on a single PC from 2004, but it uses, again, an entire country's worth of energy.
There is nothing in the entire history of humanity that has been as obscenely inefficient and wasteful as bitcoin.
Banning it is a no-brainer. The lowest hanging of low-hanging fruit for environmental improvement.
Ask Argentines, Zimbabweans, Cypriots, Greeks, Venezuelans, Turks, Lebanese and a few other billions around the world who are not privileged enough to have a stable monetary environment why they choose Bitcoin.
It has little to do with tps.
They do not have any real property rights, unable to access world's financial market, unable to save, unable to better their lives by accumulating wealth, and whatever little wealth they are able to accumulate is confiscated on the regular by the oppressive regimes.
Of course, your dishwasher is much more important than their human rights.
They don't choose bitcoin, dude. That is pure propaganda, spinning a handful of people doing it into some big movement. It's not real, it's not happening.
You would have to crash the crypto market by 95% for years to have any affect on miners and ongoing investment into chips, which is a small small portion of chip demand.
No, high performance gpus/fpgas/asics are made at bleeding edge fabs, whereas stm32 and the like are made at slightly older fabs.
Currently for the highest end cortex-m micros you're looking at 28 or 32nm ICs (10 year old nodes) up to 180nm for the older, cheaper micros (20 year old nodes).
There has been a you shortage for a quite while in large part due to crypto. The microcontroller shortage only started happening after car companies shot themselves in the foot and decided to screw everyone else over.
I'm more cynical. It looks to me like basic manipulation of the market. Only possible due to 1. A lot of "dumb" money invested in crypto 2. Relatively small market compared to larger forex markets.
Wouldn't surprise me if Musk sold before making the tweet and bought after the drop.
He could have done that by continuing to tweet random meme nonsense and not run afoul of the SEC. Getting Tesla to pile in on BTC makes it a potential regulatory issue.
Yeah but what does him buying/selling bitcoin have to do with a Tesla coin? He could have announced a new coin without risking alienating bitcoin or $tsla retail investors.
He can tank BTC further by dumping all Tesla holdings and at the same time announce the new much better Teslacoin. Every news outlet will post a front page “BTC crashes, Teslacoin up infinite%”.
Then the goal would be to capture the majority of the crypto market. It would be like another “ICO” for Tesla to get a huge shot in the arm
I don't really buy the pump and dump take here. Even if it had been an intentional pump, no reason to trigger a selloff.
Some Theses:
- Elon is a quick decision maker, he could have genuinely been persuaded about energy usage post-hoc. The energy bit does run somewhat contrary to Tesla's core mission.
- In line with this, tesla may be about to form a partnership or make a move with another crypto platform, both because the other platforms have more technical advantages and because they are more energy efficient. Maybe they will even launch their own coin/project
- Musk decided it was no longer worth the headache. His Bitcoin communications may have brought a lot of behind the scenes regulatory or fed scrutiny that we are not aware of
- Some other new information (possibly natsec related) that caused him to change his view on BTC
I find it hard to believe that a guy who talks non stop about clean energy does not know how much dirty energy cryptomining uses. It is even less likely that he signed off on a $1.5b purchase of it, and that no-one involved in that process brought up its energy use.
So your argument is that he is just dumb and didn’t even know how dirty bitcoin is mined, even though all of us do.
Sorry but I buy more into the pump and dump hype machine together with his CONSTANT never ending tiring relentless need to be the centre of attention in the media. Like his political equivalent Donald T used to be.
Proof: open the media every day. I can’t forget how he needed to insert himself into the whole Thai boys in a cave rescue and then needed to be focus of the media again when he called the actual proper saviours pedophiles.
Yep, if you listen to the whole exchange and read through the lines, he's essentially saying to US leadership either we innovate and build with this or we let our main competitor take over.
Palantir shares have been basically bombing for months now. Banks have repeatedly lowered their estimates of where the company's financials are going mid-term. The company's C-level execs have been dumping their stock in huge quantities. At this point, it's looking pretty likely that Palantir went public so that its executives can finally cash out after 18 years of no profits, and then sell itself to someone like IBM.
I own $0 crypto. Good in theory but if you look at it very closely, the whole thing is a racket that enriches a few people manipulating the market and enchants millions of speculators who want to 'get rich quick'.
My gut says it's best to invest in myself and build things that are universally appealing and useful.
You discount the entire category of users who don't "hold" any cryptocurrency at all, but use it as a medium of transfer - buying as much as they need and then transmitting it elsewhere.
As much as they need for what? Aside of ransom payments and drugs, you don't need to buy cryptocurrency, ordinary fiat money works just fine as a medium of transfer.
Tesla's, until quite recently. It's also fantastic for tipping people online without all the grossness of Patreon or Medium. Easier than making a wire transfer (my bank sucks). I tend to use it everywhere I used PayPal, minus the places where it isn't supported.
This is a very privileged, first-world perspective on things. You probably have a checking account, and a debit card. If you only have cash, and want to send money to (for example) family in another country, it gets very expensive, very fast.
Exchanging cash for cryptocurrency without a bank inbetween is a pain in the ass, but its a hell of a lot cheaper than, for example, Western Union.
>This is a very privileged, first-world perspective on things. You probably have a checking account, and a debit card. If you only have cash, and want to send money to (for example) family in another country, it gets very expensive, very fast.
I live in Mexico, I don't know if we're first world or not. We're kind of in between. We have bank accounts and debit cards here too. In the past when I wanted to send cash to the US or vice versa, I've used Western Union for the convenience - the local corner store (which in Mexico will be Oxxo or 711) has western union. When my family here in MX needs money, I just transfer it to their bank account via my bank's app.
I think many people in the US overestimate how privileged they are compared to most of the rest of the world, to be honest. I lived in the US when I was young but left because life felt easier here in MX.
Sorry for this kind of ambling response, I don't really disagree with anything you said, your perspective just piqued my interest :)
Why not just use TransferWise? Wiring money can get expensive, I agree, but there are many P2P currency exchange platforms out there these days that cost next to nothing.
By sending an envelope with cash. Services often offer that option. No E-mail or name disclosure required.
A few advantages: Your payment isn't traceable for all eternity for the whole world to see. The amount I pay isn't suddenly worth 10% more or less the next day. Better for the environment.
It's not much different from the current fiat monetary regime. Those closest to the money spigot benefit the most... cryptocurrency opens it up to individuals rather than limiting it to governments.
One big difference is that governments usually set the real returns on their fiat to -2% which is low enough to prevent it from being hoarded too much and crowding out the private markets for productive investment.
I've always wondered why people say crypto isn't a "fiat currency." It only has value because some people say it does. And it doesn't have an Army, Navy, and Air Force to defend it, like the U.S. Dollar has.
Presumably the fiat part comes from the power to create legal tender laws or the power to collect taxes denominated in a currency, or both. Cryptocurrencies don't have either of those powers.
That is, a fiat currency's value isn't based only on objective or subjective/speculative value, but also, to an extent, on the issuing state's power to require people to use or accept it in certain transactions.
The dollar only has value because you are forced to pay the government with it to pay taxes or else you go to prison/get beat to death for protesting. The nice thing about crypto is the absence of a mafia threatening my life if I refuse to use it :)
It's part of the cult-like mind game that underlies cryptocurrency communities.
The in-group must signal its faith by using certain words in the opposite sense of their usual meaning. Bitcoin is following the Scientology playbook here.
Are you implying it could be attacked? Isn't decentralization in general, maybe not in case of BTC, a key factor that would put it into a societal hive-mind and out of physical realms of army's influence?
How many people were buying Tesla's with bitcoin? Tesla hasn't sold their bitcoin, as far as I can tell, they are still holding a portion of their cash in BTC.
The hedge against inflation still exists. The future potential for international industrial payments in BTC for Tesla is still there.
I'm sure there are some accounting tricks there too. Plus, the tweet from Elon clearly states that they are looking at other crypto's with better carbon footprint...ETH moving to Proof-of-Stake (or any DeFi built on ETH) sounds like a good opportunity.
My guess: Offering Bitcoin payments has attracted fewer buyers than it has deterred (because there are all kinds of people who find proof-of-work cryptocurrencies bad, e.g. for environmental reasons or because of the GPU shortages, and some might actually boycott a company over supporting those).
I wonder how much BTC is actually mined with fossil fuel.
Even at the record prices, with efficient ASIC/GPU miners, you need some extremely cheap electricity to make it work.
I suppose owning the power plant might work, as in the example ars article linked in this thread of a company spinning a bankrupt fossil fuel plant up for crypto.
I think you can attribute a lot of other factors to crypto volatility than just Musk tweeting, such as:
* Statements this week by SEC that put doubt on crypto currency ETFs being approved in US markets.. which blows up one of the major bull cases- that crypto would become more main streamed, crypto linked products would hit traditional US exchanges and brokers.. increasing accessibility / addressable market.
* More US probes in crypto space - this time of Binance
You cannot regulate what energy sources are being used for mining Bitcoin. If any particular energy source is available at the right cost somewhere, be it in a remote location with a defunct government, miners will use it.
How long is it going to take Americans to realize that their elites do not play by the same set of rules as everyone else? It’s getting tiresome listening to people talk about current events like we didn’t just all live through the last 4 years of the most cleptocratic behavior of our lifetime. Wake up! Seriously.
I have no solutions to offer, but I’m sick of this repetitive public shock. I’d rather do anything else than witness these feckless conversations repeat themselves over, and over again.
I guess I’d like us all to disconnect from it a bit and find the funny in it. Maybe if we could all take a break from our collective outrage and focus on one thing we might get somewhere.
Ah okay. When you were talking about kleptocracy and playing by different rules, manipulation only applies to the securities market in some small circumstances that can be mitigated with tiny tiny disclaimers. I personally have completely aligned expectations for what occurs in markets without any investor or consumer protection. Its the “markets” fault for deriving confidence from one person. If Michael Saylor wanted to buy the dip at above market prices, he can. If $49,300 is not a price many people really want to buy a lot of bitcoin at, then so be it.
Idk its easy for me to just laugh and move on. To everyone else, don’t trade on leverage maybe?
I mean, in theory someone who owns a big part of a resource distribution system with a high potential waste factor could start a side business that makes use of that resource when it's about to 'spoil'. Be that a condiment factory or BTC mining next to your cubes of lithium.
Building battery backup near solar farms and then burning the surplus as BTC mining whenever the batteries get full but it's a windy, sunny day would reduce the footprint of BTC a bit. But like the rest of the grid, those happy stories are built on a bed of lies/coal/natural gas. You can change the ratios all you want but at the end of the day those don't shrink the bad parts very much, and dilution is not the solution.
Also, the sad fact is that as much as I wish it were different, having hardware sitting idle is super expensive, both financially and embodied cost. Mining hardware and the buildings to store them have a carbon - and water - footprint even when they are off.
Have you actually read his paper? Not the bunch of nonsense later published by people like Hyperloop One and other basically scam companies?
What is your bases for dismissing it? Is it videos by one youtuber (who gets reference literally by everybody on this topic)?
And even if its not the best possible solution, he basically spent some amount of time on an idea did some validation on it with teams at Tesla and SpaceX and said he thinks its a good idea and made it public.
Like even if its not the best idea ever, does that prove he is not a good engineer?
Some of the greatest engineers ever had ideas that were not actually workable in practice or were wrong about some major thing.
Even Elon Musk himself doesn't believe in his own ideas. He constantly winds them down. Even his Vegas Loop is just Tesla's in tunnels. Yes it wasn't meant to be a Hyperloop but he didn't even get self driving working in a damn tunnel, all you need for this is line following and collision detection for cars and pedestrians. He told us he was going to build pods that can hold a dozen people, he didn't.
If he can't even do the Vegas Loop properly then how is he going to build something more complicated than that?
He said the Hyperloop will have air cushion suspension and then "downgrades" it to ... wheels? All he did is create a sales pitch. He's not going to build the hyperloop he promised, the same way he is not going to create the Vegas loop in the way he promised.
> Not the bunch of nonsense later published by people like Hyperloop One and other basically scam companies?
Well, that is sad because those companies were actually building Hyperloops. If they are scam companies, then the concept is essentially a scam and Elon Musk avoids being associated with the scam by never building one.
So basically a bunch of non technical opinion about Elon Musk and your partly nonsensical interpretations of his actions? Color me unconvinced.
Las Vegas is literally a first of a kind minimal application. Self-Driving is still planned.
> If he can't even do the Vegas Loop properly then how is he going to build something more complicated than that?
So when Falcon 1 failed were you like 'They can't even do Falcon 1 probably how can they do Starship'. This is just a terrible argument. The question is not if the first of its kind minimal test is perfect but rather if the overall idea and concept holds up.
I have yet to see any actual sensible analysis of why it doesn't that is not based on a totally flawed understanding of the actual design.
Continuously moving public transport based on mass produced electric drive train threw slim tunnels is sensible and cost effective.
> He said the Hyperloop will have air cushion suspension and then "downgrades" it to ... wheels?
You said it yourself. A loop is not a hyperloop. A hyperloop is a connection between two high density areas over a long distance. A loop is for within one city or maybe region and was literally always designed to be used with cheap mass produced electric drive trains.
> All he did is create a sales pitch. He's not going to build the hyperloop he promised, the same way he is not going to create the Vegas loop in the way he promised.
He created a sales pitch and then didn't sell anything? So what makes it a sales pitch? He quite literally said he was gone release a technical blue paper of something he found interesting and did as a personal hobby and that's all he was gone do. And that exactly what he did.
Do you get mad at any company that releases a blue paper without a product?
You are just making up your own version of the story. He literally never promised a hyperloop. Please find me one bit of evidence that Musk ever actually promised anything to anybody. In fact, literally the opposite is true. He said 'I don't have time for this', he literally anti-promised it but somehow because people prefer to read media reports 5x removed missed this point.
It was many years later when he started the Boring company with a different goal of solving a totally different problem.
> Well, that is sad because those companies were actually building Hyperloops. If they are scam companies, then the concept is essentially a scam and Elon Musk avoids being associated with the scam by never building one.
No they were not, please actually compare their concepts to Musk Hyperloop paper. Technically they are quite different and often do things specifically pointed out in Musk paper as things that he considers not viable. They were just people trying to get investment by associating their ideas with Musk because of his popularity. You hardly blame Musk for being popular and people trying to do that sort of thing.
Its exactly because of people like you who say things like 'Musk promised Hyperloop' or associate literally any company that uses the term 'Hyperloop' and associate them with Musk.
So apparently in february tesla bought 1.5 billion in bitcoin as part of a plan to accept payments, then announced today they won't accept those payments and took a nasty hit on the value of that bitcoin because of it.
Do I just interpret this at face value as capricious decision-making?
Hard to take that at face value when Tesla has historically struggled to make profits. If you were worried about liquidity, you wouldn't put that much capital at risk.
Also, liquidity today doesn't say anything about liquidity in a year's time.
Tesla has made profits continually (even during the pandemic) for more then 2 years.
They stated clearly that putting less then 10% of their cash assets into something that was highly liquid, but had also chance at gaining value was preferable to cash.
Specially because they can make it liquid difference currencies very fast.
Musk likes to manipulate Tesla’s value in subtle plausibly deniable ways. He tweets, it dips massively and then dip buying momentum shoots it back up higher. He’s gamified tsla stock buying for the retail investment Reddit crowd.
Yes, but the market cap for companies serves a different purpose. Its a somewhat funny way to compare which companies people (shareholder) value higher. You cant compare share price ofc because of different numbers of shares so the market cap kinda corrects that. The number itself is meaningless but you can sorta compare it as financial size. It might be more relevant than comparing number of people hired or revenue or other metrics especially for companies form completely different branches.
I still don't think the environmental damage is the scariest part of cryptocurrencies since there are likely technological solutions. As even Douglas Adams tried to warn, it's the deflation that is worrisome: https://benoitessiambre.com/specter.html
America was in a deflationary environment for much of the 1800s and GDP grew at faster rate than the 1900s, with smaller crashes (nothing as big as the Great Depression or the GFC). Anti-deflationary propaganda is just FUD funded by an entire industry heavily invested in the current system: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-cantillon-effect-why-...
I gave you textbook macro about deflationary currencies and you gave me hand wavy talking points about the 1800s that are easily verified as lies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit.... But that doesn't even matter since that era's global financial system was too different to draw much parallels. In particular, asset prices weren't globally and instantly synchronized so financial crises were more regional. People still widely relied on barter instead of cash back then, ffs! As soon as the markets became global and connected enough in the early 1900s, gold became the memetic deflationary asset of the time and when it got intertwined enough with the financial system, went on to cause the great depression, fuel WWII etc.
You provided an article about the unrelated Cantillon effect instead of deflation? Maybe you mean to meant to paste another link?
The link you provided doesn't even mention the GDP effect of those recessions, but if you look it up you'll find that none had as severe an effect on GDP as the great depression.
The Cantillon effect is how the financial industry profits from inflation in its current format, which you'd know if you read the link. This incentivises it to produce FUD against deflation.
Look at the "Business Activity" column. I'm not sure you are going to get great GDP figure for the 1800s however.
You are really grasping at straws with the Cantillon effect. There are distribution effects with everything including inflation and deflation.
Deflation however is the one that is widely known, for even a little of it, badly hurting the economy especially workers as few are investing in businesses that are productive and need workers because everyone is chasing tokens instead.
It's possible Musk just wasn't paying close attention to the power aspect of it and recently did, or recently had his mind changed about it.
If we want to go the conspiracy route though.. Maybe he is buying up ETH and this is priming the market for a later announcement about how ETH is the green future of crypto currency.
The media tends to be extremely trigger-happy to blame a correction or dip in crypto on a single event like Tesla not accepting BTC while it's just as likely that this is an effect of the wider market correction that's taking place after the inflation/CPI news this week.
At 3pm PT on 5/12, Bitcoin was at $54.6k USD. Musk tweeted https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1392602041025843203 at 3:06pm. Two hours later, BTC was at $47.7k. One cannot blame the media on this, and it's not the result of macroeconomic news.
DOGE's drop over the weekend also more or less coincided w/ Musk's appearance on SNL (where he called it a "hustle"). If you recall, the previous rise in BTC also followed closely on the tails of the news that Tesla was getting into BTC.
Kinda insane that a single guy can make almost the entirety of the crypto market swing 10-20% every time they mention crypto.
There is yet a killer use case, but AI is coming so just hang on a hot minute. Well be above 100k in six months. Machine learning APIs and Lighting payments are a match made in heaven.
Any Mathcoin (or any trade) is an exchange based on energy spent (not including Mathcoins insane transaction cost). It's an abstraction from someone mining for materiel from the ground and trading. An energy cost is involved.
What's the killer use case? I can just as easily purchase wine, art, or goods which appreciate and will indefinitely hold a non zero value, even if civilisation comes to a halt, someone wealthier than me will want to get drunk.
If the use case is a fungible, I'm good. If I want to do illegal stuff, I can just as easily launder those goods the same way.
p.s. if you buy expensive wine in restaurants, thanks.
How does this even work? Do people hear him saying "Dogecoin is a hustle" and immediately start selling their dogecoins? Where do they get buyers on-demand?
Sort of. Among DOGE speculators, people were saying that the coin might start to be seen as more "serious" (read: track BTC swings more closely) if it reached $1. It was trading at around $0.70. Then Musk came out on national TV and pretty much took a hard "lol DOGE is just a meme" position.
A lot of people were already astronomically up on their DOGE holdings; having its biggest advocate in recent memory (recall Musk crowned himself "Dogefather") basically dismiss any hint that it might be a "serious" coin amounted to a signal that $0.70 was peak DOGE (IMHO).
Given that this latest quip from Musk is explained as being related to concerns about BTC's power consumption problems, I wouldn't be surprised to see him in the near future pumping another altcoin that advertises as having a power efficient network like NANO.
If the market of crypto was less of a bull run, I’d be inclined to agree, but a lot of the people in it right now are driven entirely by pumpers/peddlers (Anthony Pompliano, Michael Saylor, David Gokhshtein, etc.), Elon Musk tweets, and speculation/wanting to strike it rich. I think when the market is this speculative, it’s fair to blame a downturn on one event (with a pretty close timestamped correlation - you can see BTC tumble after Elon’s tweet and DOGE after he called it a “hustle” on SNL).
You'd think an intrinsically deflationary asset like Bitcoin would move differently in the face of USD inflation. Any explanation for why this might be?
That is just a ridiculous statement. If you want a hedge against inflation you'd buy something like shares of McDonald's (people will keep eating burgers), gold and other commodities, things that people need.
No one actually needs Bitcoin. If Bitcoin disappeared right now, who would lose besides the people who hold Bitcoin? No one. If you want to circumvent the banks there are other ways to do so and very easily so.
It's the biggest speculative bubbles of all time. And at the same time I believe it's a very important innovation by the way (solving the double-spending problem, or more precisely, making it good enough).
Well put. The fundamentals are: pretty much everything in this world has a known fiat currency value.
The difference with BitCoin is that you can't go to a farmer and buy his goods, or pick up a used car, go to an auction, or take a wedge of greenbacks and disappear.
Until that becomes a ready reality, BitCoin is separate from actual trade, and completely vulnerable to speculation.
Currencies are a shared dream, stop believing and they Tinkerbell. That said, a BitCoin does have a definitive value, and won't go away. But it's certainly not $50k.
Exactly, this misconception is being repeated everywhere. It often goes up with inflation, not because of it. An asset with shrinking circulating supply will go up in price. It's self reinforcing because hoarding reduces the circulating supply. This is deflation and it's self reinforcing nature is why it is considered bad in economics.
This happens completely independently of USD inflation. If USD inflation goes up then Bitcoin may go up by the same amount. However, inflation may affect hoarding instincts in either direction, which can wipe out the influence of inflation on the price of Bitcoin.
For example, people may liquidate Bitcoin to buy commodities that are going up in price. The gasoline pipeline incident causes a shortage of gasoline, people start hoarding gasoline because it goes up much faster than the CPI average but Bitcoin itself can only protect against the CPI because Bitcoin holders want to buy things other than gasoline. If you are a consumer that needs nothing except gasoline then you would believe your Bitcoin are worth "CPI Bitcoin price" * (1+gasoline inflation rate). E.g. 25% gasoline inflation means it is worth 25% more than market rate, because you need 25% extra just to stay where you are.
The obvious problem is that there are some goods that went down in price. Assuming 20% deflation, someone else is willing to accept 20% dollars less for his Bitcoin. The average of both is 5%, therefore the "CPI Bitcoin price" would go up 5%. However, since the gasoline guy wants the 25% gains, it makes more sense to liquidate Bitcoin and buy gasoline directly but the deflation guy remains, which paradoxically drags the price of Bitcoin below inflation because it no longer tracks CPI but rather the CPI without the things that went up.
And now, please reciprocate, why do people need Bitcoin? If Bitcoin disappeared right now, what would anyone (besides people who are holding it) be losing?
Inflation figures are a leading indicator of US monetary policy. All other things being equal, higher inflation readings now means relatively tighter US monetary policy later on.
Yes, the Fed has committed to allowing some >2% inflation to make up for past <2% inflation, but it's still the case that policy might tighten one day, and higher inflation now still brings that day closer than it would have been with lower inflation.
Yes, it's true, but persistent inflation requires persistent supply problems. I don't know anything about the gasoline pipeline but if they can't get it to work within a year it is going to cause persistent inflation. If they can get it fixed, gasoline inflation will go away. The Fed is betting that these incidents will resolve themselves, which is why raising rates may not be the best course of action.
It's the same thing with Turkey, Argentina, Zimbabwe etc. They suffered from poor farm yields. Turkey needs more investment into agriculture chemical companies, Argentina suffered a drought in 2018, Zimbabwe had land repossession but financial problems and lack of education prevent the new owners from farming on the land they acquired for free.
If Turkey can do enough investments it can solve its agriculture problems. If Argentina can diversify away from agriculture it will be less prone to droughts. If Zimbabwe supports farmers it can become self sufficient again. These are examples of persistent shortages, something fundamental broke there and the only way this can be fixed is by raising interest rates, crashing hard and then reallocating the economy to the things that are actually important.
> You'd think an intrinsically deflationary asset like Bitcoin would move differently in the face of USD inflation. Any explanation for why this might be?
I guess because right now a big percentage of bitcoin price comes from speculation and not from people realizing its deflationary potential. Which probably will change in future.
bitcoin, like gold, is only an effective hedge against a currency that is falling relative to the US dollar. If you have dollar-denominated assets , such as stocks, there is no need for Bitcoin to hedge inflation.
Technically it is backed by guns, guns that convince other nations to trade in USD and guns that convince US citizens to pay taxes so that the guns are pointed at those who don't pay them.
The other factor is that the US has adopted the USD. The actual reason (e.g. guns) doesn't matter, it only matters that the decision has been made. You can buy things in the US with USD. Therefore the value of the USD is tied to how much stuff a dollar buys you.
The size of the Bitcoin economy is quite small. There are not many things whose price is denominated in Bitcoin, most shops just convert from the dollar price to Bitcoin, which means there is barely any price stickiness that keeps the value of Bitcoin stable. If anything it supports the instability of the exchange rate.
Tesla's announcement was about the environmental impact of bitcoin. Proof of work coins are down precipitously whereas the main proof of stake coin (Cardano) is up significantly. The timing with the announcement is more than just "macroeconomic effects".
I wouldn’t be surprised if they bought Cardano’s ADA ahead of this. It’s the biggest crypto that already implemented proof of stake, so the most likely place anyone seeking refuge may move value to, increasing its price dramatically. This could make it a dump & pump, if that makes sense. Dump BTC with a claim that pumps ADA.
If the dollar is inflating away, you'd want to sell dollars and buy BTC and otherwise run away from the dollar.
The inflation argument makes no sense. Inflation would cause BTC to go up in value. Something else is causing BTC to drop in value.
Personally, I think this has more to do with Vitalik's $Billion donation to charity. What do you think would happen when a whale decides to sell $1-Billion worth of various cryptocoins? I bet they're liquidating all of those various cryptocoins into BTC, and then using the large BTC-exchanges to convert it into fiat.
All this Tesla stuff seems like a red-herring to me.
So many comments in this thread suggest Musk is an all knowing individual. "How could he miss this?" "I can't believe someone so wealthy can miss something so important!" And so on.
This is a really sad view, IMHO. Wealth may provide more opportunities to learn and expand, but that doesn't mean the wealthy know everything. He should have done his research, maybe he did and decided to go that route anyway, but wealth is only correlated to knowledge, not causative.
Edit to add: No defense for Musk here, I just hate seeing wealth equated to smarts.
He may not be all-knowing, but my retired, former customer service employee grandmother knows Bitcoin is produced with dirty energy in China. It's not exactly secret knowledge.
Musk is not a random wealthy dude. His wealth comes mainly from Tesla shares, a company that (apparently) aims to accelerate the transition to renewable energy.
He has
1) Shown us what his word is worth to the speculative market club
2) Brought about two news cycles in which Americans will be taught about cryptocurrency
3) Made the right long-term move for the environment. If crypto is indeed the currency of the future then there's absolutely no reason for us to all pile on to any version of it that requires us to pollute.
Sound familiar?
Welcome to the wide world of symbolic lessons. If this blows your mind, wait 'til you take a long look at Republicans.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the SEC investigates him (again), this time for what was quite possibly a pump-and-dump. Personally, I don’t think he started accepting BTC in good faith, it seems like a (pretty transparent) move to manipulate the price.
I find it hard to believe that Tesla invested $1+ Billion in Bitcoin without doing the most basic due diligence. This isn't like a WSB trader burning their stimulus check. A team of lawyers, accountants, etc. had to be involved in this. Concern for energy consumption is one of the most obvious things you'd run across when researching Bitcoin. This definitely feels like something unspoken happened behind the scenes for the rapid 180. I'm not suggesting any crazy conspiracy theory, like I don't think government spooks are involved or anything like that. It just seems like normal corporate speak excuse for this change where they aren't going to really discuss what happened.
Musk might be claiming this is about the environment, but it might also be a concern about real liquidity of Bitcoin assuming Tether is a scam and will collapse. Of cause if that was the case you wouldn’t say it out loud, but instead find some way of stopping the exchanges of tether backed Bitcoin for Tesla’s, while quietly trying to offload as many bitcoins as possible in the floating market before it implodes. Probably you’d find some silly excuse for doing this like saying your trying to save the trees of something. Because being honest would push the implosion closer.
I didn't downvote you, but your comment is the kind that gets downvoted.
You're pointing out something that's true and besides the point. MSFT stock can decrease in value without any shares getting destroyed. The market value is in fact what people mean by "$X wiped off".
Ok, I might not have been familiar with the use of the term. I thought in the context of crypto, where coins can actually be "wiped off", in that they can be destroyed and removed from the available pool, it was a little confusing to me. But if this is a common usage to mean a sudden drop in price then I take it back.
General crypto news and talk is pretty lowest common denominator. I agree because of pointing cryptocurrency to null essentially and literally wiping it out, the phrase isn’t the best. But it’s still a common enough phrase.
FYI. I know virtually nothing about cryptocurrencies.
Wiped off its market cap denominated in US dollars. It didn't lose value if you measure its value against some other crypto assets. Everything is relative, but it's not surprising the USD is the root metric considering there isn't much of any real economy that produces anything or pays wages in crypto. Anyway, these articles are generally silly.
Will mining the last few % of available bitcoin make the power draw drop? Or is it the same for all transactions, accounting for after all the bits are mined.
I got a thinking. Tesla sold CO2 emission right which is a considerable amount of revenue for them. Then, they traded their car with bitcoin which is a very inefficient use CO2. Thinking about this, I think Tesla should have had to buy CO2 emission right rather selling it based on where that bitcoin was mined or transaction processed.
Elon Musk will learn that Bitcoin is difficult to control. He seems pretty confused about the market. My guess is Elon has been using Dogecoin to reign in Bitcoin. He's somewhat got what he wanted. Bitcoin has been stagnant for a few months. However, his promotion of Dogecoin pumps other crypto, like Ethereum and their meme tokens. Elon Musk probably didn't expect this. Promoting Dogecoin doesn't directly hurt Bitcoin. It strengthens other altcoins. At some point, it'll hurt Dogecoin.
Bitcoin is shaking Elon Musk off. It has a history of sending thought leaders to the trash bin.
Nobody thinks that EVs have a zero carbon footprint.
But over the lifetime of the car, they have a lower footprint than ICE. Yes, they have a higher footprint than ICE to manufacture, but even if you get your power from coal, over the long term their carbon footprint is lower. And if your power comes from a renewable source, then the break-even point is less than two years.
Engineering Explained did a good video doing the math behind the carbon footprints of ICE versus EV over the life of the car:
No one suggest they have. As long as they have less than an device that does the same task but uses gas then it reduces emissions.
Rockets as well, they pollute but making them reusable pollutes less. Also depending on fuel type its perfectly possible to produce it form solar energy.
But DOGE just burns energy it does nothing with it that could not be done without.
Its significantly less then Buttcoin but it explodes with popularity as well. And every energy wasted is too much in the end.
Making rockets reusable uses more fuel but requires more raw materials to be mined, refined, and fabricated into parts. It's a tradeoff. The chief argument for reuse is cost, not emissions.
"More fuel" is irrelevant its about pollution.
You can never make parts without using a fix amount of resources and energy and if they are used they will end up as waste which is pollution too. Fuel however is just energy in a specific form. If the fuel is created with electric energy and it all comes form coal then it pollution is high but there is a clear path to reduce it down the line. There is no such path with rockets parts that have to be fabricated again and again and again.
Cost is the reason why it is feasible. But it still reduces pollution. The additional fuel used to land the rocket causes way way less pollution than creating a new one for every launch. Embodied energy (gray energy) is often significantly underestimated. Just transporting the raw material from all around the world to make a final product uses immense amour of energy and very often its in the form of oil.
Also down the line the additional fuel to land can be created with low pollution energy so pollution is reduced even further.
Unless you quantify the marginal energy cost of carrying additional fuel payload and recovering a component, convert it to an environmental impact quantity, and compare it to the environmental impact of marginal construction, you shouldn't make claims that sound correct in your head but are not backed up by anything. There's a tradeoff and we don't know which one has greater negative externalities. Not all cost of marginal production is allocated to energy and materials.
In this universe there is no way trashing the booster instead of land it would have less environmental impact.
No we dont need a 20 page paper to make that claim. Basic understanding of economics and common sense is all it takes. Only small things or things that have very title environmental impact could ever challenge that. So unless you use boosters that grow on trees, is not even a debate.
Electric cars and rockets only profit from becoming more efficient. Almost everything does, actually.
Proof-of-work cryptocurrency does not. In fact, it counteracts efficiency, by design. If a new ASIC makes mining Bitcoins more efficient, difficulty is adjusted up.
I personally feel that Musk's strategy is that any publicity for his companies is good publicity, so he puts himself out there trying to connect popular themes like cryptocurrency to them in any way possible. Other practitioners of this strategy that come to mind are Richard Branson in business and Donald Trump in politics. Their number one priority above all is to dominate the news cycle, which equates to free marketing.
Given the above, I highly doubt that this (or the original adoption of Bitcoin earlier this year) is due to any deep feelings he may have about the merits or otherwise of Bitcoin itself. I also predict that he'll soon reverse himself publicly all over again.
The fact that a single company not accepting BTC can have this impact tells you all you need to know about this payment revolution... I'll stick with the €.
So reviving old power plants was the final straw for Musk? If that hadn't happened, he'd continue to support Bitcoin even with this incredible energy usage?
I don't know. It seems very convenient to list them as reasons now.
I don't know either. But he did the right thing in the end.
Could also be some other person, like his wife or kids who pushed him to do this. Or other members of Tesla management worrying about the brand damage.
How long until other companies take it off their balance sheets? It is amazing how many smart people got sucked into the BTC nonsense. It has always been a libertarian dream currency that was never going to be useful in the real world, other than for buying drugs online.
…Congratulations? You didn’t actually address his concerns (although they were troll-y in nature). You just flexed about your own wealth, which just as easily could’ve come from betting on the right stock in 2013. I don’t understand crypto advocates whose only plus-one for crypto is that it made them personally rich. It just as easily could’ve gone nowhere and just because the market happens to be in your favor for now does not validate crypto as a whole in my eyes. What is its genuine value at the moment?
You got lucky. That doesn’t make you smart or cryptocurrency smart for anything that has happened. It would be silly for someone to smugly talk about how smart they are for winning the lottery.
SEC wouldn't allow this with the stock market, how is this any different? His actions were intentional by the way it is obvious he is manipulating the market intentionally.
Laws still apply to individual people even if those people denominate their illegal actions in BTC instead of USD. They're not going after exchanges or miners here.
Market manipulation isn't illegal because it hurts investors, it's illegal because it hurts the market which is important for the economy. The crypto market isn't, so it doesn't need that kind of legal protection.
Hurting the market is no different from hurting investors because bad practices that hurt one investor have a chilling effect on other investors' activity. Moreover, regulators don't have to clear a "does this hurt the whole market" test before taking action. For example, I know a guy who was running a business at an investment bank and got in trouble with FINRA for trading through NBBO on a very small order (retail sized).
The crypto market has grown to a size and role that affects the greater economy. We see that in so many ways, not only due to the holdings but also because different economic participants are catering to miners and setting up payment options for holders of crypto. It's no longer a cute side project.
Folks have forgotten the reasons why the SEC was created in the first place, probably because the heyday of unregistered securities, etc, was over 100 years ago.
While you could make plenty of argument that the SEC should do more, it doesn't make any sense that it should do less.
Lots of folks will lose a lot of money in cryptocurrency schemes in the next few years. We desperately need more regulation.
Why not? There have obviously been several scams in crypto, and as a market it is extremely disorderly.
Buying and selling gold is highly regulated. What makes you think crypto shouldn't be similarly regulated, even if it's only to ensure that taxes get paid and exploitative schemes get busted?
This reads like something you'd overhear at a Sackler family cookout.
Surely you can recognize the benefits of government regulations in lopsided markets where small participants lack either the power or the information needed to keep large participants honest.
I'm a big fan of Matt Levine's "Money Stuff" column on Bloomberg - he always has amusing and insightful commentary particularly on Elon -
> My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Liam Denning points out that “Musk’s move may also indicate that Teslas weren’t flying off the shelves as a result of accepting Bitcoin payment,” and in fact it’s not entirely clear whether Tesla has sold any cars for Bitcoins.[2] I hope it hasn’t. I hope Musk can make the price of Bitcoin go up or down by 10% by announcing that Tesla will or will not accept Bitcoins for cars, without ever actually accepting any Bitcoins for any cars either way. There’s something pure about that: The price of Bitcoin depends on Elon Musk’s attitude toward it, not on the existence of any grubby commercial transactions in which Bitcoins are exchanged for cars.[3] The source of value for Bitcoin is not its use as a currency or economic importance; the source of value for Bitcoin — for everything — is simple proximity to Elon Musk.
Hey, I accept pieces of paper (and now bits in a computer) for my valuable work, and bought a valuable home, car, and computer with those papers and bits.
Money works purely on belief. If we all suddenly disbelieved in the dollar, the value would be zero.
Curiously, most cycles of hyperinflation come more from loss of faith than from money printing. When people lose faith in a currency, they sell it off as a value store.
Elon Musk's net worth is $28B. His faith in a crypocurrency as a value store counts for a lot.
> Money works purely on belief. If we all suddenly disbelieved in the dollar, the value would be zero.
Is this true? Yes.
Are you wildly underselling what "disbelieving in the dollar" means in practice? Also yes.
I believe in the dollar because the United States has the worlds largest nuclear arsenal, spends nearly a trillion dollars on its military every year – and that's only what it puts on the books – and has been proven to have an itchy fucking trigger finger.
That trust isn't going anywhere without massive global conflict.
Also democracy. What if Bitcoin went up to $100M/coin? What is the likelihood that both Trump and Biden are going to be like "Well the BTC people were right and now they can buy all the companies and real estate. The rest of you americans will have to just have fun being poor, there is no way we will tax BTC wealth"
MSTR down 10% to $500 (60% off the highs) depsite btc only being down 24% from highs. Put options on MSTR plus being long BTC seems like a good micro-strategy. MSTR is overleverged and at risk of defualt if btc falls below $10k.
