$365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
But I'd be very interested to see Musk's personal trading accounts, and the trading accounts of his close associates.
Musk should be investigated, this is not the first time his actions lead to massive market perturbations.
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.
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.
...we are talking about Elon Musk, right? The one who got rich founding the definitely-ethical, not-at-all-shady company PayPal? That Elon Musk?
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.
For now. Spacex is going to be the most valuable company on Earth and Mars.
― Shel Silverstein
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.
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.
There's no conspiracy here.
Not true. They made their numbers by selling 100M or so of BTC last quarter.
https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a36266393/tesla-mad...
> The second item that helped Tesla were sales of bitcoin, the "positive impact" of which amounted to $101 million.
The article says that was 1/10 of what they own. We won't know until next quarter how much more they have sold.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
If I could publicly pump and dump something I would also be on a hot streak.
Are we forgetting about the secured funding to take Tesla private tomfoolery.
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.
Once it became clear he'd get nothing more than a slap on the wrist for that stunt they backed off and the hype machine had no counterbalance.
Once the shorts do come back though they will come back with a vengeance.
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.
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?
That's quite an interesting claim.
1. Buy BTC 2. Announce Tesla will accept BTC. 3. Sell BTC. 4. Announce Tesla will no longer accept BTC.
This is pure speculation of course.
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.
Profit.
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.
https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/exclus...
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 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.
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)
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.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.
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.
> 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.
[0] https://www.coindesk.com/frustrating-maddening-all-consuming...
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.
You can't say it is a settlement layer in one breath and then immediately turn around and say that no really everybody truly has access.
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)
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.
I am not a cryptographer, but the cryptographers I know and trust all agree on that.
[0] https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-gaza-west-bank-bitcoin-pales...
It is not myopic to look at, and call out, the elephant in the bedroom
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.
ah there it is, the straw man. The "plastic junk" makes a lot of poor people's lives a bit better, but fuck those people right?
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.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/exclus...
PoS would be a completely different fork, and it's not clear how secure/censorship-proof it would be.
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.
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.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1392974251011895300?s=21 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1392030108274159619?s=21
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.
Tesla sells lots of cars on the promise of self-driving in the marketing.
Musk bought BTC, single-handedly pumped the price of BTC, and then sold at a huge profit.
I don't think he's a genius but Musk is definitely not stupid. He's just not playing the obvious game you think he's playing.
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.
I was thinking of Jacobson v Massachusetts in my original comment, which upheld state and local governments' broad authority in public health.
Here's a balanced view of the powers affirmed in Jacobson and how that has changed over time to better protect individual liberty: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449224/
Note however that applies to individuals, not factories or places of business which are subject to much more regulation.
I really like this, and I propose it be called "Kulak's Law".
Also the word "kulak" is loaded - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak
I think when evaluating situations compassion for people's lives is a more important matter than economical wellbeing. (Even if it's their wellbeing)
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?"
Does the industrial effort to decarbonize our economy really matter? Is it urgent? Is it essential?
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.
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.
not sure if there even can be a complete list with Musk but, let's also add:
1) privileged background thanks to emerald mining fortune made in apartheid South Africa,
2) union-busting and abusive employer,
3) hoarding $175.6 billion in stolen wages during a pandemic,
4) encouraged a coup
I hadn't seen this before. Do you have an article diving into this number?
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.
Intent matters, which also makes market manipulation so difficult to prove.
Start with the guy who started accepting bitcoin for pizza.
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.
Wasn't that one of the big selling points of BTC?
I don't even have to point to any specific laws, just look at all the websites that talk about stocks operating without any SEC intervention.
I have a hard time believing the people here defending Musk dont know this, and can't see how his behaviour _migbt_ qualify as a pump and dump.
Some would argue that Bitcoin is fundamentally a giant "Pump and Dump" anyway, so nothing to see here.
You may be technically correct, doesn't make it any less sketch or immoral
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.
(ooooh, was there lead in your hamburger? just the price of freedom, I guess! if you don't like it, you can go eat fiat hamburgers like the plebes.)
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.
https://www.energy.gov/timeline/timeline-history-electric-ca...
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.
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?".
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.
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.
"He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy!"
For Musk being grounded will have a completely different meaning though :)
EVs would have happened without Tesla. The "kick in the ass" is the same thing that has driven all other emissions improvements: government regulation.
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.
No they didn't, according to the announcment:
>> Tesla will not be selling any Bitcoin and we intend to use it for transactions as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy.
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.
I don't think that counts as a trivial amount on the financials.
Someone wants to buy a 50k car. They give you 50k worth of Bitcoin. You immediately sell the Bitcoin for 50k of dollars.
At no time did you need to own Bitcoin before the transaction.
Of course, that would require Tesla's vendors to start accepting BTC. I strongly suspect LG Chem and Panasonic don't accept bitcoin payments.
Are you sure he has sold?
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.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/13926020410258432...
I don't think musk/tesla has sold a single btc..
In recruiting, on the other hand, the Mars marketing has helped them a lot.
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.
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.
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.
If all of humanity lives on Earth though, we're just one unlucky meteorite away from going extinct.
Given this: let's develop the terraforming tech for Mars, and establish colonies there.
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.
I don't see why shouldn't try to do both:
a) Lower the earth's surface temperature
b) Begin the process of building a backup of humanity on Mars
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.
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.
Nobody wants your support, they just need crazy enough wealthy people
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.
What is Elon Musk's "one long term thing" ?
* Payment Processors? (Paypal? X.com? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com)
* Electric Cars? (Tesla?)
* 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)
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.
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.
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.
Maybe you're right.
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.
That would be an explicit lie then, something the SEC has jurisdiction over? (I'm not actually sure)
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.
Why do I feel like lobbyists right now trying to kybash to any politician who even mentions regulations?
I heard one financial talking head say today that he's buying gold. If worse cone to worse at least he can make some jewelry.
I'm all for bitcoin, but wasting energy throughout the world seems wrong. And man's quest to make money knows no boundaries.
...and it would give me hope that we might get round steering wheels and individual non-touchscreen controls for critical driving functions.
COVID could've started to go away in May with HCT / massively more aggressive vax.
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.
Some links to sources are in the history section of the Wikipedia article on RNA vaccines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_vaccine#History
Musk opposed those measures though, which makes his level of expertise on the matter somewhat more dubious.
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.
For those of us who measure by outcomes, he's a genius.
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.
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.
and the money to convert the idea into execution with a high probability of losing his money.
SpaceX proved government budgets aren't scrutinized enough.
Not particularly shocking.
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.
interesting, can you cite that?
That's odd, I didn't say a single word about whether or not I liked Elon. Did you mean to reply to my post or someone else's?
>SpaceX proved government budgets aren't scrutinized enough.
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.
Electric cars were a gimmick before Tesla, almost no-one was taking them seriously, after Tesla that changed.
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.
The what?
> the Ford Ranger EV
The what?
> honda ev plus
The what?
> Toyota RAV4 EV
The what?
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.
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.
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.
In fact "affordable" Teslas (model S) came after competition like Leaf which was a best seling electric car up until recently.
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.
SpaceX is standing on the shoulders of giants, if SpaceX didn't exist, the science and people wouldn't just disappear.
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.
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.
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.
He might be completely aware that it's not plausible while still publicly saying otherwise for financial gain.
He called a guy a pedophile with absolutely no evidence and paid no price for that.
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.
He can't predict the future, so what?
>He thinks it's easier to make Mars habitable than it is to keep the Earth habitable.
He never said this.
> And he didn't really understand what Bitcoin was when he sank 1.5 billion into it.
How can you prove he doesn't understand what Bitcoin was?
Literally everyone else with half a clue could predict that one correctly.
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.
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's not dumb for a scum that scam billions in profit
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.
Crazy stuff.
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.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/private-equity-f...
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.
He puts up a clear incentive: if miners move to sustainable energy, then Tesla will accept bitcoin again.
- 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.
But on the bright side, guess what?
With every open system 'manipulation' attempt, the market gets smarter & more resilient to such.
--Ben Evans (https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1358760338724974594...)
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 ?
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-renewable-fuel-credits...
Probably means his tweets are nothing but greenwashing.
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.
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.
Tesla Makes More Money Trading Bitcoin Than Selling Cars - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27142261 - May 2021 (171 comments)
Elon Musk: Bitcoin's energy usage trend over the past few months is insane - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27141493 - May 2021 (41 comments)
Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27139348 - May 2021 (256 comments)
Tesla has suspended vehicle purchases using Bitcoin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27135776 - May 2021 (344 comments)
Money Stuff: Tesla Sold Some Bitcoins - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26971773 - April 2021 (61 comments)
Tesla Wants Your Bitcoin Without the Downside - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612901 - March 2021 (48 comments)
Tesla cars can be bought in Bitcoin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26566056 - March 2021 (89 comments)
You can now buy a Tesla with Bitcoin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26564340 - March 2021 (10 comments)
Tesla has made $1B profit on its Bitcoin investment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26236072 - Feb 2021 (46 comments)
Buying a Tesla car in Bitcoins cancels 4 times the CO2 savings for its lifetime - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26164512 - Feb 2021 (113 comments)
Elon Musk wants clean power. But Tesla's carrying Bitcoin's dirty baggage - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26090330 - Feb 2021 (256 comments)
Bitcoin powers towards $50K as Tesla takes it mainstream - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26077118 - Feb 2021 (112 comments)
Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26070744 - Feb 2021 (156 comments)
Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26063920 - Feb 2021 (1298 comments)
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.)
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!
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.
But of course, business expense means business priority. And that leaves no time for interesting yeoman work like open-sourcing a neat HN browser extension. (It's pretty rad: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
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.
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.
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.
0: https://www.coinbase.com/price/s/top-losers?resolution=week
https://twitter.com/CryptoRelief_/status/1392559057764962304
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.
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.
It is shocking how many fools exist.
This streak will break not when the maximum number of fools has been reached, but when the fools with the biggest wallets have gotten involved.
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).
Where is the ponzi scheme in this scenario?
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?
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).
Also keep in mind that these coins crash with very small amounts of money. The liquidity just isn't there.
You might be misinterpreting market cap of coins.
Simple example:
- I create a new crypto called CRY
- I create 1 million CRY coins
- I have converted zero CRY coins to USD
- I sell 1 CRY coin for $1
- The market cap for all coins is now $1M
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.
For more info check out this beautiful site: https://ethmerge.com/
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.
For the uninitiated read about the dao hack and the debate that ensued. Basically, they just rolled back the transaction, just like a bank.
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.
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 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.
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!
There’s so much scope for word play humour here that I’m paralysed by choice. Vegetarianism, steak and chips…
Okay, and what do you think the mining equipment is acquired with exactly?
If miners's new block isnt accepted by the network - they've just lost millions.
Rules are enforced by block verification of the nodes that accept - or refuse to accept mined blocks.
It's amazing that in 2021 people still do not understand the basics of it.
That's all miners are. Mercenaries hired for 10 minutes at a time.
Not sure if you realize the implication of what happens if you arm a bunch of mercenaries and then fire them and turn your backs on them.
The breakaway hostile fork is now worth 2 percent of the original work.
So..nothing?
Anyway I don’t think reality is as simple as your last comment suggests. There was a lot going on at the time including a lot of misinformation.
PoS malicious stakers lose nothing in case of a split. Miners should they attempt a 51% attack will lose everything.
Not even in the same category.
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.
how do you know which one to continue staking on to avoid getting slashed?
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!
We are going to have ICE's for a long time.
Mindless bans like that, if overzealous, will just push even more of industry to Asia/China, where most of pollution happens today anyway.
I wouldn't be surprised if China funds quite a few green causes, big boost for their industries, and they get to just ignore all emissions rules.
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.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/apr/29/swap-...
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
Penetration of crypto in Turkey was 18% (page 9) in 2018, likely a lot higher now. Expected to own in the future 45% (page 10): https://think.ing.com/uploads/reports/ING_International_Surv...
One in five own it, half expect to own in the future.
In the Etherium world, which has more changes, they do. Bitcoin, not so much.
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?
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.)
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.
Nash's notes and slides on that: http://web.math.princeton.edu/jfnj/texts_and_graphics/Main.C...
The improvement of status quo is quite obvious. Bitcoin is a potential solution to the Triffin's dilemma.
This is something of the scale that can alter the course of history and impact every country on Earth.
Money shouldn't be democratic. I'm not OK with a majority deciding that they're entitled to my money.
More generally, private property is a good thing. I don't want majority vote to decide whether I can keep the house or car that I own.
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.
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.
All they can do is refuse to work. Anyone can do that. They cannot force any new changes on you. Proven in forkwars with billions at stake.
PoS have not yet had such a test.
With the usually apathetic voters/stakers, one such loud voice can sway a PoS network easily.
What makes you think eth stakers are apathetic?
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?
In any distribution, the small number of players usually controls most of the wealth, as we've seen throughout the history.
What are the odds it will not be a handful people, coordinating their interest vs everyone else? That's inevitable.
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.
Would honestly love to see the details.
I guess Joe has the other 64.71%, or perhaps there are a whole bunch of other founders that I'm unaware of...
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.
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.
Good luck imagining this is related.
I smell Teslacoin in the works. A ostensibly green cryptocurrency, with his face on it.
Wouldn't surprise me if Musk sold before making the tweet and bought after the drop.
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
and the cycle continues, why pump once when you can do it again?
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.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/3-palantir-allows-payments-bi...
My gut says it's best to invest in myself and build things that are universally appealing and useful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
I musk be missing something here.
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
Some fossil-fuel plants in the US are reopening specifically to serve BTC data centers.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/private-equity-f...
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.
Idk its easy for me to just laugh and move on. To everyone else, don’t trade on leverage maybe?
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.
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.
My base is Elon Musk.
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.
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.
Do I just interpret this at face value as capricious decision-making?
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/musk-says-tesla-sold-bitcoin-...
Also, liquidity today doesn't say anything about liquidity in a year's time.
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.
Announcing the acceptance was probably just advertising for the pump and dump they did.
Market cap explained real simple: https://coil.com/p/XRPFax/Understanding-the-Crypto-Market-Ca...
Because the argument is stated in terms of crypto but is in fact completely generic: no one can buy all of AMZN at the market cap price either.
You provided an article about the unrelated Cantillon effect instead of deflation? Maybe you mean to meant to paste another link?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%201-d&geo=...
and https://www.coindesk.com/price/bitcoin
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.
Kinda insane that a single guy can make almost the entirety of the crypto market swing 10-20% every time they mention crypto.
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.
Are you saying AGIs will earn a living by operating a cryptocurrency mine?
Eventually he either realized or had it pointed out that the environmental controversy would be problematic for an electric vehicle company.
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.
When the price is stable for hours then collapses after an event, you can pretty safely infer the correlation.
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 $1-Billion worth of various cryptocoins? I bet they're liquidating all of those various cryptocoins into BTC, and then using the large BTC-exchanges to convert it into fiat.
All this Tesla stuff seems like a red-herring to me.
This is a really sad view, IMHO. Wealth may provide more opportunities to learn and expand, but that doesn't mean the wealthy know everything. He should have done his research, maybe he did and decided to go that route anyway, but wealth is only correlated to knowledge, not causative.
Edit to add: No defense for Musk here, I just hate seeing wealth equated to smarts.
So, it's obviously a pump and dump.
So this reasoning doesn’t seem correct.
Sound familiar?
Welcome to the wide world of symbolic lessons. If this blows your mind, wait 'til you take a long look at Republicans.
Edit: Hum, not sure why the downvotes, is my understanding wrong?
You're pointing out something that's true and besides the point. MSFT stock can decrease in value without any shares getting destroyed. The market value is in fact what people mean by "$X wiped off".
FYI. I know virtually nothing about cryptocurrencies.
A search for "wiped off accounting" hits a pretty large number of pages, including : https://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/w...
"to reduce the value of something by a large amount"
The dictionary URL implies that it may be US English, but searching for "wiped off accounting uk" shows it is common even in the Queen's English.
"Market cap" for cryptocurrencies is nonsense. It represents absolutely nothing real, least of all value.
Bitcoin is shaking Elon Musk off. It has a history of sending thought leaders to the trash bin.
while we're at it, don't rockets pollute too
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.
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.
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:
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.
Elon Musk "Working with Doge devs to improve system transaction efficiency. Potentially promising."
Clearly he didn't figure it out yet lol
A recent study has shown that Bitcoin uses more than 2000x more energy per transaction than the likes of Dogecoin.
We all knew that Bitcoin was a power hog, but did we really appreciate how much compared to other PoW blockchains?
I certainly didn’t. Maybe musk didn’t either, and now he does and has changed his position.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26973193
> -2 points by deckard1 15 days ago
nice.
they crash the market
they'll buy the dip
rince
repeat
How do you know this?
Do you have any evidence of this claim?
I want to keep an open mind and not jump to gaslighting accusations. But something about this thread doesn't sit right.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1392938133163888640
He might be right.
I don't know. It seems very convenient to list them as reasons now.
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.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27146806.
I've heard it's great for ransomware too
> 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.
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.
Not only that, but he has pretty dominating role in various companies whose market caps are in hundreds of billions at least.
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.
you can disbelieve in the dollar. But you can't disbelieve in the Secret Service/US military showing up and kicking your ass
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.
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.
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.
With people making fortunes or losing everything based on one dude's mood and a single tweet.
The SEC and other's exist because of the Robber-Baron's of old... I'm no "Regulation Hawk", but it does seem silly to allow this nonsense to continue.
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?
https://greyenlightenment.com/2021/03/16/microstrategys-bad-...
MSTR will probably need to sell more debt to cover existing debt and at very unfavorable terms.