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Comment by consumer451 | Hacker News Reader

> I knew the company had completely lost its way.

For me, the biggest signal was when Tesla was suddenly all-in on BTC, and promised to build their own full node.

It made no sense.

Do you have a source for "promised to build their own full node"? As far as I recall, they just added BTC to the list of currencies they accept.

I used to spend an unhealthy amount of time watching TSLA back then, it was just my recollection. Here is a tweet from Musk on the topic:

> Tesla is using only internal & open source software & operates Bitcoin nodes directly. ...

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1374619379929772034

https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1374619379929772034

That's the proper way to accept BTC payments, with your own node, instead of using some third-party service.

That may be so, however:

1. Up to that sudden 180, Musk had been a cryptocurrency skeptic. What changed?

2. It had nothing to do with Tesla's mission, in-fact it seemed to go against it. At best it was a distraction when there were real problems to deal with.

3. When reality caught up, Tesla reversed course.

I am not stating some grand thing here, this is just my recollection of events.

The first claim isn't true, because Elon has been a bitcoiner for a long time. There was a huge Bitcoin hype / hubris at that time. Specifically, Saylor happened, and he convinced Elon and others that Bitcoin is the best reserve asset, and Tesla had a lot of cash, which was melting like an ice cube due to inflation. There was a lot of inflation talk / protecting against inflation. And in the end it actually worked out for them pretty well, given that BTC has about tripled since then (they bough at $34k).

After they had bought the bitcoin, adding it as a payment option was a way to add hype to increase its value. They quickly found out that it's too volatile for payments to be practical, and the hype cycle was ending anyway and they sold half of their reserve.

This quote is not indicative of someone who was into BTC (2017):

> ... A friend sent me part of a BTC a few years, but I don’t know where it is.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/935329447594541056

Well, he has been aware of it for a long time, and made occasional tweets mentioning it. He has not been a huge bitcoiner, but I don't recall him being a sceptic.

Thanks for "Saylor happened" context, I was not aware of that. It helped fill a void of understanding for me. I appreciate it.

It's a weird thing to fixate on. Everyone who accepts Bitcoin should have a full node. Satoshi was right about Bitcoin having relatively low hardware requirements in the future due to the advancement of hardware.

That's fair. All my other points stand, in my very humble opinion.

I didn't really care because they were not 'all-in' it was never all that big of thing. But yeah it was defently stupid.

Was that before or after they went all-in on Dogecoin?

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