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.

Elon is pretty busy, before he got into space flight, he new very little about it. Some people at the time said as much. However 2 years later the same person said he was literally an expert on many things and had learned an insane amount.

This seems more like Elon became convinced of the potential of crypto currency in general, told Tesla to look into it, if it is a viable cash storage and if it is, logically using it for payments make sense.

Then they based on their internal team for evaluation of environment they saw that their entrance in the market caused a massive spike and released if this continues and they continue to drive people in that market it would be damaging for the mission.

It reasonable that they didn't understand how large the increase in power consumption was and how large it would be if it continued to be adopted. So rather then continue to drive in that direction they pulled the plug.

I know, its not a crazy big brain story, but its actually how most flawed process happen.

Even if it moved entirely to renewable energy it would still be a massive opportunity cost. There are productive uses that energy could be put to. Bitcoin is not productive.

Using gigawatts to process a few transactions a second, when existing financial frameworks can process millions of transactions a seconds at a fraction of the energy input means that bitcoin is always a massive waste.

> 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...

It is not myopic to look at, and call out, the elephant in the bedroom

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.

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?

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...

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.

PoS would be a completely different fork, and it's not clear how secure/censorship-proof it would be.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/exclus...

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.