Seems like a bit weird. One side he wants to save the planet and the other side he buys bitcoin that uses tons and tons of energy to even exist and operate. Let alone the other problems with bitcoins.
In what way would Elon Musk save the planet ?
edit: no but really, do you think replacing 1.4B ICE cars with 1.4B electric cars powered by non recyclable rare earth batteries will "save the planet" ?
Or maybe migrating to Mars while we can't even sustain life on Earth which is the perfect eco system we evolved to strive on ?
Or is it starlink that will "save the planet" by providing facebook, instagram and 4k netflix to the world ?
People believing in these pipe dreams are so disconnected from reality... I don't even know what to tell them. Musk is a brilliant business man, engineer, visionary maybe, but he won't save the planet more than Amazon or Apple would
Ah, let me clue you in. You may have heard of something called climate change. It is a phenomenon where the atmospheric concentration of certain gases is increasing rapidly, causing substantial and harmful changes in the global climate. It is heavily driven by human co2 emissions, a significant portion of which come from ICE vehicles. Electric vehicles are capable of being powered entirely by clean energy, whereas ICE vehicles, not so much. Switching to all electric vehicles is an important step we must take to combat climate change.
NASA has a great website where you can learn more about climate change: https://climate.nasa.gov. There are many other sources as well.
Also, it’s a good economic move. $1.5bn bought $8bn of market cap appreciation, which Musk can likely turn into more than $1.5bn of new cash. Tesla scaling faster does more for the environment than some bubs buying Bitcoin.
He’s a businessman not a philanthropist. His sales pitch was using the thing millennials care about to get them invested (both emotionally and with capital) in his company. We got played by Elon.
"Bitcoin is almost as bs as fiat money" - Elon Musk, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1340588909974200321 E.g. it's still not the ideal, final solution - but Tesla seemingly aligning to being on the side of the "army of HODLers" makes business sense; you don't want that army that's financially incentivized via the MLM/pyramid scheme that it is to start rallying against you and your products/services.
Compared to what? The banking industry? Do you know how much it takes to send/secure 100 tons of gold? bitcoin comparatively is minuscule, energy use is going to increase whether you like it or not, the alternative is starvation and death, africa alone is going to double the energy use before long, in the process saving millions from starvation.
Obviously this is only theory, and the devil is in the details, but the empirical results appear to corroborate that theory.
The IEA did a report on the Bitcoin footprint: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/bitcoin-energy-use-mined-th...
> Around 60% to 70% of bitcoin is currently mined in China, where more than two-thirds of electricity generation comes from coal. But bitcoin mining facilities are concentrated in remote areas of China with rich hydro or wind resources (cheap electricity), with about 80% of Chinese bitcoin mining occurring in hydro-rich Sichuan province. These mining facilities may be absorbing overcapacity in some of these regions, using renewable energy that would otherwise be unused, given difficulties in matching these rich wind and hydro resources with demand centres on the coast.
> Electricity generation in other key bitcoin mining centres are also dominated by renewables, including Iceland (100%), Quebec (99.8%), British Columbia (98.4%), Norway (98%), and Georgia (81%). Globally, one analysis estimates that the bitcoin is powered by at least 74% renewable electricity as of June 2019. Another analysis of data from 93 mining facilities (representing 1.7 GW, or about a third of global mining capacity) estimates that 76% of the identified energy mix includes renewables.
Another report, https://coinshares.com/assets/resources/Research/bitcoin-min...:
> Furthermore, we show that Bitcoin mining is mainly located in global regions where there are ample supplies of renewable electricity available. And finally, we calculate an estimate of the renewables penetration in the energy mix powering the Bitcoin mining network at 73%, making Bitcoin mining more renewables-driven than almost every other large-scale industry in the world. Our renewables estimate has marginally dropped since our last report, reflecting increased levels of mining in low-renewables regions such as Kazakhstan. However, we still caution that our location estimates likely have error margins of ±5% and should be considered within that context.
If you believe all this to be true, then you could reasonably conclude that Bitcoin stimulates the demand for cheap (read: clean) energy, and Elon Musk just took a big step towards perpetuating that stimulus.
A relevant tweet that blithely captures Elon Musk's calculus: https://twitter.com/NeerajKA/status/1358788953713836033
In the meantime after a year of the US government printing 20% of all dollars ever made, perhaps an alternative form of currency is a slightly more complex issue than just it destroying the environment. Maybe some people realise the monetary crisis that's inevitably coming.
The issue will be getting people to use something other than Bitcoin, not solving the technical challenge. Bitcoin mining will always be Proof of Work, and thus energy-intensive.
It is about a proof-of-stake scheme like ETH2 where the blockchain is still immutable, but due to a purely abstracted notion of "mining" which rather than electricity at all relies upon mechanisms where attempts to mutate the blockchain turn into pointless losses of money.
It is fully trustless, and I would argue even more trustless because it is accessible to all users, unlike mining.
"proof of work", is by definition waste.
They will have to do something than increasing difficulty and and an ever increasing transaction log, as both are unsustainable.
1. https://www.vox.com/2019/6/18/18642645/bitcoin-energy-price-...
How about we try to deal with facts rather than google search proofs
A huge amount of mining is located around Sichuan province, China or Pacific NW United States, all of it hydro-powered and excess electricity. Others players in the field are chasing wasted flaring from oil/gas fields and using that to power shipping containers full of ASIC's.
This argument gets tiring because at this point if there a large amount of wasted energy anywhere on Earth someone will eventually realise they could mine crypto with it instead. Heat, gas, you name it, everything is on the table.
Meanwhile we all lament not being able to take international flights for a year.
The opening statement is in a completely different tense than yours, AND hypothetical.
I don't try to say it is true or false. I give an alternative point of view.
These kinds of takes don't help Bitcoin, or cryptocurrency in general. Bitcoin has an energy problem. Trying to hide that fact by demanding comparisons against the entire financial industry instead of just whatever you're trying to compete against for end-users (be it settlement or end-user financial transactions) isn't going to help, because that's even more scale that Bitcoin would have to struggle even harder to reach. And it raises the question of what value you actually get from avoiding the infrastructure (and the resulting economies of scale) that everyone else uses.
[1] Admittedly, that is a bit unfair, since the aircraft carriers aren't mentioned until the very last paragraph. But the article does repeatedly push for comparing against larger and larger segments of the financial system, giving the distinct impression that the author would complain about unfair comparisons should Bitcoin be found to use more energy than anything being compared.
But the second important point of the article is that the sources who say that "Bitcoin has an energy problem" usually come to that conclusion by taking average electricity price and multiplying it by total Bitcoin network hashrate. They (intentionally?) omit the fact that Bitcoin mining is by design just barely profitable. The difficulty rebalances itself according to the Bitcoin price, energy price and number of miners. That means that for the miner mining bitcoin was probably the better alternative use for that energy in that particular situation. If it wasn't, other people would have used the energy for something else (more needed/more profitable/..) and the miner would be priced out of the market - and that would be totally ok for the Bitcoin network, that's the design.
Yet another point is that currently the mining is still subsidized by the issuance of new Bitcoins, which is still higher than the transaction fees. But that will soon stop being the case, quite likely within the next 4 years. When miners are motivated primarily by fees, then the economic pressure will force them to reject small-fee transactions and that will move Bitcoin on-chain transactions to similar position as the international fiat settlements. Coffee will be paid with lightning, on-chain will settle big blocks of transactions worth millions of dollars, where a $100 fee is no problem, and the overall energy use of the whole network won't rise any more - exactly as designed.
It seems like the effort to turn energy production towards renewables (that is, replace carbon emitting means with renewables) is undone by increased energy demand. So instead of replacing the one with the other, we have to keep the old methods around just to meet demand.
This is only partially true. One watt of hydro electricity might equal to another watt of coal electricity, but it's also locked to a particular region (because there's no global electricity grid) and a particular point in time (because you can't "store" electricity cheaply like oil).
Long-term causality is pro-bitcoin. Just like with network bandwidth usage, "whales" (heavy users) drive and finance the build-out and the R&D.