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With this week’s Tesla dismissing Bitcoin for its energy use and at the same time Elon Musk pumping the joke currency Doge another level of hypocrisy has been reached. Enemies of Bitcoin are happy because the big Elon has shown Bitcoin its limits. I have a message for you: All of you living in cosy, western, secure, democratic countries - go and check your privileges, before you dismiss a neutral, community money from the people for the people that allows permissionless access to finance for everybody regardless of age, wealth, status, gender or color. 7 billion people do not have, what you have. While “we” and our money system have been commodifying the planet’s resources to raise our wealth and living standards, you want to exclude the rest of the world from it? If you don’t want or can’t see Bitcoin’s potential, then just don’t use it. And by the way: Bitcoiners want to save the planet too, only some want to go to Mars.
“The job of every altcoin is creating a narrative against Bitcoin and whoever has the best narrative against Bitcoin gets the most ignorant money”, says John Carvalho in episode 34 of my podcast where we are discussing narratives against Bitcoin.
Last week I featured some old men yelling at Bitcoin, this week Elon Musk and Tesla made a 180 degree turn on Bitcoin. What Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet and Elon Musk have in common is, that they all got rich in a inflationary money system that allowed them to accumulate wealth through cheap credit.
#Bitcoin only some understand it, most need it, but those who need it the least, have the strongest negative opinion.
— Anita 🟩🏳️
🏻
♂️ (@AnitaPosch) May 13, 2021
Interestingly enough though dismissing Bitcoin for its electricity demand and stopping to use it as a payment for Tesla’s, Tesla Inc will hold on to the bitcoin they already own. It’s mind-boggling how a car manufacturer and a guy who is sending rockets to the sky to colonize Mars - instead of saving the earth - suddenly supports a joke cryptocurrency like Dogecoin, which is using the same Proof-of-Work mechanism that Bitcoin is being bashed for. My new book, that will be released on July 24th, includes a chapter on Bitcoin’s ecological footprint with studies and facts, but all of these don’t get very far, if people who make the argument that Bitcoin uses too much electricity don’t want to see the greater positive potential of Bitcoin. Here is Andreas M. Antonopoulos, who has written the technical standard books about Bitcoin and Ethereum, speaking about that problem at Min 41:35
Talking about carbon credit markets, Tesla makes most of its money from renewable energy credits (RECs). Where carbon credits help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, renewable energy certificates offset electricity use from non-renewable sources. Instead of offsetting carbon, RECs offset kilowatt hours. So RECs are not helping to reduce carbon emissions, they enable polluters to pay for damaging the environment, but the damage is done.
Tesla makes most of its $ from RECs, not cars. Last year, it made $1.58bn from sales of RECs to gas-powered auto companies (which must buy to offset their CO2 emissions). Tesla has never been profitable without REC sales to bolster its auto margins.
— Elisabeth Steyn (@Elisabeth_Steyn) May 13, 2021
That’s about to change.
Tesla also relies on government subsidies, so in my opinion, this is a politically motivated move. But then it’s getting ridiculous, when Elon tweets:
Working with Doge devs to improve system transaction efficiency. Potentially promising.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2021
Dogecoin is a joke cryptocurrency, there have been no technical developments in the last years, it has no supply limit and most importantly uses the same proof-of-work mining as Bitcoin. It just uses less energy as Bitcoin, because it’s less secure.
Dogecoin is a dead project. There has been almost no development activity for years (see chart). Buying it like buying a computer running IBM’s abandoned operating system OS/2 from the early 90s.
— Vijay Boyapati (@real_vijay) February 8, 2021
Good luck with that. pic.twitter.com/AAMKcwvfOM
— The Laughing Man (@laughingmantwit) May 12, 2021
An argument that you will hear more often in the next years is, why doesn’t Bitcoin use a different mining mechanism. Like Ethereum does. At the moment Ethereum is using proof-of-work too, but it will change to proof-of-stake, which needs less energy. So why doesn’t Bitcoin use proof-of-stake? Well, because it’s less secure and it’s basically a voting mechanism, which means that wealth can buy votes and therefore influence the system, which is not possible in Bitcoin. Here is Andreas M. Antonopoulos on the differences between proof-of-work and proof-of-stake (Min 45:20):
Listen to Gabriel Shipton, Julian Assange’s half-brother, explaining why we need Bitcoin to enable publishing the truth, how WikiLeaks was able to keep on working and publish war crimes and how authorities are silencing whistleblowers in the interview of the week.
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If you want to check, here is today’s Bitcoin price.
No financial advice. DYOR.
