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Bitcoin powers towards $50K as Tesla takes it mainstream

57 points by mikesabbagh 6y ago

imtringued 6y ago
Bitcoin's lowest price was $5k on the 12th day of march. Not only is that extreme cherry picking. The calculation is still wrong. That's only a gain of 820%. If you bought BTC on a random day in 2020 you're more likely to have paid 8k-10k for it. Suddenly we are back to the usual 300%+ gains.
- tomw1808 6y ago
  saying "300%+ gains" and "_usual_" in one sentence is only to some folks out there usual :)
technicolorwhat 6y ago
Seems like a bit weird. One side he wants to save the planet and the other side he buys bitcoin that uses tons and tons of energy to even exist and operate. Let alone the other problems with bitcoins.
- user-the-name 6y ago
  Musk is a charlatan and a liar, is the only reasonable conclusion one can draw from this.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    An equally reasonable explanation is that he's overly optimistic and he's on the spectrum, and the bitcoin play is a hedge [1]. [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-i-really-think-bitcoin-ray-dalio/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-i-really-think-bitcoin-r... | "Bitcoin looks like a long-duration option on a highly unknown future" -- Ray Dalio
    - loriverkutya 6y ago
      You can’t be a bit on the spectrum. Either you are on the spectrum or not.
      - sprkwd 6y ago
        no. there are gradients of autism. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-016-2760-2 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-016-2760-2
        superbcarrot 6y ago
        > gradients aka "the spectrum"
      - dash2 6y ago
        I thought the whole point of the idea of "the autistic spectrum" was that everyone was on it to some degree?
    - user-the-name 6y ago
      This move will wipe out all carbon savings that Tesla has achieved within a short period of time. It shows he is completely uninterested in actually being environmentally friendly.
      - toomuchtodo 6y ago
        Ehh, credit where credit due. States and governments wouldn't be enacting future combustion vehicle sales bans and GM didn't run a Superbowl ad [1] about switching to EVs had Tesla not existed and pushed hard towards an EV future. Consider the returns on the entire world electrifying light vehicle mobility due to Tesla and Musk's efforts. Don't miss the forest for the trees. I suppose you could make the argument that if Tesla has enough cash reserves to invest in bitcoin, they are no longer financially engineering aggressively (investing all working capital in capex to grow faster). I still think bitcoin is a suboptimal value of store considering it's power requirements, but I can see what's attractive about it to those who want to store significant amounts of value in a macro environment where every central bank is racing to devalue their fiat faster (whether through "money printer goes brrr", negative interest rates, etc). [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/02/why-gms-super-bowl-ad-for-electric-cars-is-so-important/617958/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/02/why-gms-...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - zpeti 6y ago
    Yeah, the only one. Obviously. Well done. Not that perhaps he's a libertarian or someone who embraces new technologies. No. He's a charlatan and a liar. Who btw put 2 humans onto the space stations as a US company. But yeah, its all a lie.
    - user-the-name 6y ago
      I mean, I already said he's a charlatan and a liar, adding libertarian seems a bit redundant.
  - leesalminen 6y ago
    I just ordered a Starlink kit for delivery next month. Which will provide high speed, low(ish) latency internet to my house. Currently, my only option is Viasat/HughesNet. I’d call this progress. An order of magnitude improvement for me and my family.
- kgc 6y ago
  Well, if he buys up all the Bitcoin it should use less energy right? (joke)
- decafninja 6y ago
  One reasoning I've heard is that he absolutely despises the levers and players of traditional finance, so this entry into BTC is another big f*ckyou to Wall Street.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    That's ironic, given how he's used said levers and players and Wall Street to become the richest person in the world.
- yaa_minu 6y ago
  Majority of bitcoin mining is done with renewables[1]. In fact, it won't be long, only mining with renewables may be profitable. 1. https://www.vox.com/2019/6/18/18642645/bitcoin-energy-price-renewable-china https://www.vox.com/2019/6/18/18642645/bitcoin-energy-price-...
  - polote 6y ago
    Doesn't seem true https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-09/tesla-s-bitcoin-binge-spells-overtime-for-xinjiang-coal-miners https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-09/tesla-s-b...
    - BelenusMordred 6y ago
      Bloomberg just published an article on how some Russian company broke AES encryption. How about we try to deal with facts rather than google search proofs A huge amount of mining is located around Sichuan province, China or Pacific NW United States, all of it hydro-powered and excess electricity. Others players in the field are chasing wasted flaring from oil/gas fields and using that to power shipping containers full of ASIC's. This argument gets tiring because at this point if there a large amount of wasted energy anywhere on Earth someone will eventually realise they could mine crypto with it instead. Heat, gas, you name it, everything is on the table. Meanwhile we all lament not being able to take international flights for a year.
    - elif 6y ago
      "there's a chance" that "new bitcoins mined" "will" The opening statement is in a completely different tense than yours, AND hypothetical.
      - polote 6y ago
        The parent link also says "A new report claims it’s mostly powered by renewables. Be skeptical." I don't try to say it is true or false. I give an alternative point of view.
    - trickstra 6y ago
- zpeti 6y ago
  Cryptos with less of a footprint are on the way. This issue will be solved. In the meantime after a year of the US government printing 20% of all dollars ever made, perhaps an alternative form of currency is a slightly more complex issue than just it destroying the environment. Maybe some people realise the monetary crisis that's inevitably coming.
  - kritiko 6y ago
    Yet most people purchasing Bitcoin are treating it as an asset denominated in USD, not a currency.
    - loceng 6y ago
      They're also treating it like an MLM - where they know if any significant amount of people sell before regulatory capture occurs - then their Ponzi-Pyramid scheme will crash; the ones with the most to lose are the later adopters who buy high, and ones with the most to gain are the earlier adopters as gains are weighted towards earlier adopters. It's quite the clusterfuck.
  - loceng 6y ago
    The first counterargument always seems to be that at some point in future the energy consumption problem will be solved, but isn't the rate of computation a or the main factor against 50%+ attacks? Else the solutions proposed seemed to rely on centralized services that don't actually play on the blockchain to reduce the actual amount of transactions and load, also then avoiding the delays - but then re-adding the supposed main issue of having a "trustless" blockchain.
    - sneak 6y ago
      No, there are other systems that work to solve the same trust issue such as Proof of Stake or Delegated Proof of Stake, as well as other variations on that theme. The issue will be getting people to use something other than Bitcoin, not solving the technical challenge. Bitcoin mining will always be Proof of Work, and thus energy-intensive.
- georgeplusplus 6y ago
  I feel like this is something that shouldn’t need to be said but based on the numerous identical posts like this I feel gobsmacked to not say it. He’s a businessman not a philanthropist. His sales pitch was using the thing millennials care about to get them invested (both emotionally and with capital) in his company. We got played by Elon.
  - loceng 6y ago
    Reposting a comment I made yesterday: "Bitcoin is almost as bs as fiat money" - Elon Musk, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1340588909974200321 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1340588909974200321 E.g. it's still not the ideal, final solution - but Tesla seemingly aligning to being on the side of the "army of HODLers" makes business sense; you don't want that army that's financially incentivized via the MLM/pyramid scheme that it is to start rallying against you and your products/services.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  My take? It was a savvy PR move to cushion the China news. Tesla had to kowtow Beijing in a way that could have lit real political fires. Politicians are distracted. The Bitcoin announcement took care of the base. Also, it’s a good economic move. $1.5bn bought $8bn of market cap appreciation, which Musk can likely turn into more than $1.5bn of new cash. Tesla scaling faster does more for the environment than some bubs buying Bitcoin.
  - georgeplusplus 6y ago
    The distraction worked on me cause I didn’t even hear about it! What was the China news regarding Tesla?
- lm28469 6y ago
  > One side he wants to save the planet In what way would Elon Musk save the planet ? edit: no but really, do you think replacing 1.4B ICE cars with 1.4B electric cars powered by non recyclable rare earth batteries will "save the planet" ? Or maybe migrating to Mars while we can't even sustain life on Earth which is the perfect eco system we evolved to strive on ? Or is it starlink that will "save the planet" by providing facebook, instagram and 4k netflix to the world ? People believing in these pipe dreams are so disconnected from reality... I don't even know what to tell them. Musk is a brilliant business man, engineer, visionary maybe, but he won't save the planet more than Amazon or Apple would
  - angelbar 6y ago
    All the other part of the humanity can try to save the planet (included you and me).... Elon appears to be focused on saving the lineage of humanity by spread it to the cosmos.
  - dwaltrip 6y ago
    > no but really, do you think replacing 1.4B ICE cars with 1.4B electric cars powered by non recyclable rare earth batteries will "save the planet" ? Ah, let me clue you in. You may have heard of something called climate change. It is a phenomenon where the atmospheric concentration of certain gases is increasing rapidly, causing substantial and harmful changes in the global climate. It is heavily driven by human co2 emissions, a significant portion of which come from ICE vehicles. Electric vehicles are capable of being powered entirely by clean energy, whereas ICE vehicles, not so much. Switching to all electric vehicles is an important step we must take to combat climate change. NASA has a great website where you can learn more about climate change: https://climate.nasa.gov https://climate.nasa.gov. There are many other sources as well.
- matz1 6y ago
  save the planet ? Do you think planet need human to survive ?
- bhupy 6y ago
  While true, mining seems more analogous to high frequency trading where the most profitable mining operations seek to eke out every single advantage they possibly can in the unit economics to maximize profit. If energy is an input and money/profit is the output, then the mining market would obviously seek out the cheapest energy, which happens to be wind and solar. Intuitively, it's far more profitable to operate ASIC farms on cheap land in the middle of Nevada powered by solar panels than operating a similarly sized network off of the coal sourced power grid in West Virginia. The former has somewhat high upfront cost, but basically zero marginal cost, and amounts to essentially free money in the long run. While there will always exist a small set of "retail" miners that don't care about the source as long as they make some profit, mining will probably converge towards some power-law distribution (just like every other financial market) where 80-90% of mining activity will be done by a small minority of big/rich institutional miners that explicitly seek out cheap (read: clean) energy. Obviously this is only theory, and the devil is in the details, but the empirical results appear to corroborate that theory. The IEA did a report on the Bitcoin footprint: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/bitcoin-energy-use-mined-the-gap https://www.iea.org/commentaries/bitcoin-energy-use-mined-th... > Around 60% to 70% of bitcoin is currently mined in China, where more than two-thirds of electricity generation comes from coal. But bitcoin mining facilities are concentrated in remote areas of China with rich hydro or wind resources (cheap electricity), with about 80% of Chinese bitcoin mining occurring in hydro-rich Sichuan province. These mining facilities may be absorbing overcapacity in some of these regions, using renewable energy that would otherwise be unused, given difficulties in matching these rich wind and hydro resources with demand centres on the coast. > Electricity generation in other key bitcoin mining centres are also dominated by renewables, including Iceland (100%), Quebec (99.8%), British Columbia (98.4%), Norway (98%), and Georgia (81%). Globally, one analysis estimates that the bitcoin is powered by at least 74% renewable electricity as of June 2019. Another analysis of data from 93 mining facilities (representing 1.7 GW, or about a third of global mining capacity) estimates that 76% of the identified energy mix includes renewables. Another report, https://coinshares.com/assets/resources/Research/bitcoin-mining-network-december-2019.pdf https://coinshares.com/assets/resources/Research/bitcoin-min...: > Furthermore, we show that Bitcoin mining is mainly located in global regions where there are ample supplies of renewable electricity available. And finally, we calculate an estimate of the renewables penetration in the energy mix powering the Bitcoin mining network at 73%, making Bitcoin mining more renewables-driven than almost every other large-scale industry in the world. Our renewables estimate has marginally dropped since our last report, reflecting increased levels of mining in low-renewables regions such as Kazakhstan. However, we still caution that our location estimates likely have error margins of ±5% and should be considered within that context. If you believe all this to be true, then you could reasonably conclude that Bitcoin stimulates the demand for cheap (read: clean) energy, and Elon Musk just took a big step towards perpetuating that stimulus. A relevant tweet that blithely captures Elon Musk's calculus: https://twitter.com/NeerajKA/status/1358788953713836033 https://twitter.com/NeerajKA/status/1358788953713836033
- thysultan 6y ago
  >that uses tons and tons of energy to even exist and operate Compared to what? The banking industry? Do you know how much it takes to send/secure 100 tons of gold? bitcoin comparatively is minuscule, energy use is going to increase whether you like it or not, the alternative is starvation and death, africa alone is going to double the energy use before long, in the process saving millions from starvation.
user-the-name 6y ago
Increased bitcoin price leads, due to the economic equilibrium on which bitcoin rests, to greater energy usage and greater emissions. Bitcoin already emits as much carbon as the nation of New Zealand. It emits ten times more carbon per year than Tesla, according to their own numbers, have saved over the lifetime of the company. Increasing the bitcoin price by just 10% will eventually lead to an increase in emissions that will wipe out all of Tesla's environmental gains in a year.
- hanniabu 6y ago
  That's why Ethereum is the future. It's where all innovation is happening anyways.
  - whitepaint 6y ago
    It will take time for people to realize because Ethereum is so much more complex that Bitcoin. But it will happen eventually and inevitably imo.
  - newsbinator 6y ago
    For some applications, yes. I believe Stellar (XLM) is the future for transferring money across borders.
    - tryptophan 6y ago
      Why would any bigger institution (like a bank) ever use a non-private chain where everyone can see how much they have and how much they sent to do transactions? Blockchain is being taken up by banks, with projects such as r3-corda, but is is a private chain, with no shitty "coin" for morons to speculate on and thus gets no attention.
      - hanniabu 6y ago
        Ethereum will allow for private transaction so institutions can conduct business on it in an opaque manner.
cblconfederate 6y ago
Next step, Tesla makes an ICO
- superbcarrot 6y ago
  I'm honestly suprised this hasn't happened already. Just imagine the levels of absurdity that the hype could reach.
numpad0 6y ago
So how does it all work? Market cap and price only has weak connections against each other right?
- dmurray 6y ago
  Wrong. Market cap and price are the same thing.
- gruez 6y ago
  market cap = price * units outstanding. For bitcoin, the change in units outstanding is negligible, so price is directly tied to market cap.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > For bitcoin, the change in units outstanding is negligible, so price is directly tied to market cap. Market cap is a meaningless metric for Bitcoin. With companies, the whole company legally exists and gets bought and sold and pays dividends and goes bankrupt. Nobody operates on the whole with cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrency "market caps" are a vanity figure.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
u678u 6y ago
He's been pumping doge to his followers then goes and buys BTC. Nice move.
- kreetx 6y ago
  We should have put more thought into it. I personally thought he was just having fun with doge (smoking pot, listening to Darude and tweeting..) while in actuality was a cryptic sign that something much more substantial was going on under the covers..
tristanj 6y ago
Elon Musk has single-handedly made hundreds of millions of people into passive crypto investors. Tesla stock is 1.9% of the S&P500 by weight, and Tesla's Bitcoin holdings makes up ~0.2% of Tesla's market cap. This means for every $100k that is invested into the S&P500, $3.50 goes into BTC.
- JoshTko 6y ago
  I think the most impactful aspect of this is normalizing the idea for a company to hold bitcoin on their balance sheet.
  - VMG 6y ago
    the actual pioneer for this was Microstrategy https://cryptopotato.com/microstrategy-ceo-introduced-bitcoin-69000-enterprises/ https://cryptopotato.com/microstrategy-ceo-introduced-bitcoi...
    - hanniabu 6y ago
      Yup, Microstrategy pioneered it, but the brand power of Tesla will normalize it.
    - JoshTko 6y ago
      No one knows who MicroStrategy is. The impact comes from normalizing - CFOs can point to a Fortune 10 company as a precedent and buy bitcoin without looking completely foolish. Buying bitcoin can soon be normal as insuring against currency risk.
- bmcn2020 6y ago
  Elon has become the crypto maker or breaker. A single tweet of his can add billions of dollars to a coin's market cap. Incredibly powerful
curiousllama 6y ago
Tesla made a (paper) profit of $642M on that announcement. Can you imagine this CFO? First, Reddit ceaselessly pumps his stock. Then, he makes more revenue overnight than most full companies do in a year through bitcoin. Kind of convenient that we, in the US, have such blind faith in the only major EV manufacturer, come to think of it.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  It's not blind faith, it's tons of people jumping on the bandwagon whenever Musk farts, because he makes the markets shift, because tons of people jump on the bandwagon whenever he farts.
sysashi 6y ago
It seems I will never afford a GPU to play some games..
- bitxbitxbitcoin 6y ago
  Good thing Bitcoin mining hasn’t been done with GPUs in several years. You can blame cryptocurrency mining for the high GPU prices but not Bitcoin mining.
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    As I understand the cryptocurrency markets, they basically all move in tandem with Bitcoin. So if Bitcoin's price goes up, so do all other cryptocurrencies.
    - oleganza 6y ago
      Also instructive to see prices of altcoins in terms of BTC. Barely anything moves up. There are very temporary spikes, but mostly it's all one giant opportunity cost compared to just holding BTC.
      - bitxbitxbitcoin 6y ago
        Agreed. PS: Cool to see you here on HN, I have been a long time follower on Twitter.
  - t0mbstone 6y ago
    Speak for yourself. I'm currently earning $13-15 a day by mining with my RTX 3090. The RTX 3090 FE costs around $1500 after tax, but I bought it off craigslist for $2000 (after fruitlessly waiting for months for the stock to become available). I should have just bought it back off craigslist back in September or October. If I had paid the scalper prices and just started mining with it back then, it would have already almost paid for itself by now.
    - 6y ago
superbcarrot 6y ago
This is getting ridiculous. It's just bubbles upon bubbles upon bubbles.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nolok 6y ago
Meanwhile "Tesla skips 401(k) match for third straight year". For all the future projections Musk claim to push forward, I wish employees empowerment and the betterment of the human condition could be a bit more on his mind. More related to Tesla than to the story of this thread but I can't help feeling like we focus too much on one side of the equation here, I do believe better techs can mean a better life for all, but it's on us not to forget that second part otherwise it's a waste of innovation.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > I wish employees empowerment and the betterment of the human condition could be a bit more on his mind Can't we have multiple solutions to this problem? Some employers who match 401(k)s and do "human condition" things. Others who push their teams hard, pay them adequately (albeit not well) and give them equity so they win and lose together. Focus should not be underrated. I'm not saying Musk is successful because Tesla doesn't match 401(k)s. But perhaps someone focussed on 401(k) matching isn't a great fit at every workplace.
  - bluntfang 6y ago
    >But perhaps someone focussed on 401(k) matching isn't a great fit at every workplace. That's a really good point. An argument could be made that this is rooted in age discrimination. I'm willing to bet my paycheck that older people are more concerned about 401k match. Anecdata: as i've gotten older 401k match is more important to me.
  - nolok 6y ago
    > Can't we have multiple solutions to this problem? We probably can, but that's not what you suggest. > Some employers who match 401(k)s and do "human condition" things. Others who push their teams hard, pay them adequately (albeit not well) and give them equity so they win and lose together. You make the false assumption that you can't pay well your employees if you push them hard, as if it was an either/or. You can pay well your employees or not. You can push your employees and ask them to do more than average or not. Choosing to push them yet not pay them well is a specific choice that gives the maximum value to the company at the expanse of its employees, and then the word you are looking for is not "push", it is "exploit". It is a logic that doesn't work, which is why company values skyrocket while salary stagnate. I do find that doing this while also investing gigantic sums on something that has nothing to do with your core business is a bit unsavory. There are plenty of companies out there, small and big, that push their employees well above and beyond, but compensate that by also paying them very well. That is also what I am doing at my own company and I've been successful doing so, and I've never had to play the "you're getting screwed for the betterment or humanity, but don't worry maybe someday you will be rich" card. > I'm not saying Musk is successful because Tesla doesn't match 401(k)s. But perhaps someone focussed on 401(k) matching isn't a great fit at every workplace. Absolutely. I'm not saying it in a vaccum, I'm saying that in the context of Tesla doing both of those action (the 401k and the Bitcoin thing) simultaneously. You put the context on the employees but I put it on Musk/Tesla. In the goal of improving the future, I think that is the wrong direction and choice.
tomw1808 6y ago
What stops him from issuing something like ERC-721 Tokens for his cars? You'd be able to do cool things, like you'd be able to trade it P2P, or do stuff like unlock it with your MetaMask wallet and the whole infrastructure is already here. For me doing this would be a logical next step at some point.
- hanniabu 6y ago
  He first needs to discover Ethereum and broaden his horizens.
bluepanda928752 6y ago
One possible rational explanation for this (apart from the usual Elon's trolling) is a mostly legal way for Tesla to bribe some Chinese Bitcoin mining controlling interests
Wronnay 6y ago
Overhyped cryptocurrency fueled by an overvalued EV startup... Bravo. These two seem to love each other... (I am not against Cryptos but e.g. ETH seems way more usable to me and I am not against EVs but the price tag on a TSLA share is ridicules)
- hanniabu 6y ago
  Yeah I'm of the opinion that Ethereum is the top dog, but it will take some time for that to be realized since Bitcoin has the first mover advantage, brand name, is simpler to understand, and is everyone's first exposure to the market.
jl6 6y ago
I really like Bitcoin as a technology and as a statement of decentralized control, but I really hate the power consumption - which is becoming increasingly hard to ignore. How do we kill it?
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > How do we kill it? Isn't the root problem the dirtiness of our (and specifically, China's) power generation? If not, if power usage is a problem per se to someone, aren't there better targets?
  - jl6 6y ago
    Energy is such a huge and all-encompassing problem that we need to pull on all the energy levers we have - more sources, cleaner sources, safer sources, more storage, lower losses in distribution, greater efficiency in consumption, smarter allocation of consumption...
- op03 6y ago
  The answer is always Competition. Pitting one bunch of mindlessly ambitious lunatics against another bunch of mindlessly ambitious lunatics is Natures way of reducing the odds of everyone going extinct - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis
- gher-shyu3i 6y ago
  Why kill it? Embrace it. The power consumption is solved by renewables.
  - jl6 6y ago
    It isn’t, because there’s no cap on it. Cover the planet in solar panels and Bitcoin still might consume more.
    - gremlinsinc 6y ago

57 points by mikesabbagh 6y ago

Bitcoin's lowest price was $5k on the 12th day of march. Not only is that extreme cherry picking. The calculation is still wrong. That's only a gain of 820%. If you bought BTC on a random day in 2020 you're more likely to have paid 8k-10k for it. Suddenly we are back to the usual 300%+ gains.

tomw1808 6y ago
saying "300%+ gains" and "_usual_" in one sentence is only to some folks out there usual :)

technicolorwhat 6y ago

Seems like a bit weird. One side he wants to save the planet and the other side he buys bitcoin that uses tons and tons of energy to even exist and operate. Let alone the other problems with bitcoins.

user-the-name 6y ago
Musk is a charlatan and a liar, is the only reasonable conclusion one can draw from this.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  An equally reasonable explanation is that he's overly optimistic and he's on the spectrum, and the bitcoin play is a hedge [1]. [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-i-really-think-bitcoin-ray-dalio/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-i-really-think-bitcoin-r... | "Bitcoin looks like a long-duration option on a highly unknown future" -- Ray Dalio
  - loriverkutya 6y ago
    You can’t be a bit on the spectrum. Either you are on the spectrum or not.
    - sprkwd 6y ago
      no. there are gradients of autism. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-016-2760-2 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-016-2760-2
      - superbcarrot 6y ago
        > gradients aka "the spectrum"
    - dash2 6y ago
      I thought the whole point of the idea of "the autistic spectrum" was that everyone was on it to some degree?
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    This move will wipe out all carbon savings that Tesla has achieved within a short period of time. It shows he is completely uninterested in actually being environmentally friendly.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      Ehh, credit where credit due. States and governments wouldn't be enacting future combustion vehicle sales bans and GM didn't run a Superbowl ad [1] about switching to EVs had Tesla not existed and pushed hard towards an EV future. Consider the returns on the entire world electrifying light vehicle mobility due to Tesla and Musk's efforts. Don't miss the forest for the trees. I suppose you could make the argument that if Tesla has enough cash reserves to invest in bitcoin, they are no longer financially engineering aggressively (investing all working capital in capex to grow faster). I still think bitcoin is a suboptimal value of store considering it's power requirements, but I can see what's attractive about it to those who want to store significant amounts of value in a macro environment where every central bank is racing to devalue their fiat faster (whether through "money printer goes brrr", negative interest rates, etc). [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/02/why-gms-super-bowl-ad-for-electric-cars-is-so-important/617958/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/02/why-gms-...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- zpeti 6y ago
  Yeah, the only one. Obviously. Well done. Not that perhaps he's a libertarian or someone who embraces new technologies. No. He's a charlatan and a liar. Who btw put 2 humans onto the space stations as a US company. But yeah, its all a lie.
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    I mean, I already said he's a charlatan and a liar, adding libertarian seems a bit redundant.
- leesalminen 6y ago
  I just ordered a Starlink kit for delivery next month. Which will provide high speed, low(ish) latency internet to my house. Currently, my only option is Viasat/HughesNet. I’d call this progress. An order of magnitude improvement for me and my family.
kgc 6y ago
Well, if he buys up all the Bitcoin it should use less energy right? (joke)
decafninja 6y ago
One reasoning I've heard is that he absolutely despises the levers and players of traditional finance, so this entry into BTC is another big f*ckyou to Wall Street.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  That's ironic, given how he's used said levers and players and Wall Street to become the richest person in the world.
yaa_minu 6y ago
Majority of bitcoin mining is done with renewables[1]. In fact, it won't be long, only mining with renewables may be profitable. 1. https://www.vox.com/2019/6/18/18642645/bitcoin-energy-price-renewable-china https://www.vox.com/2019/6/18/18642645/bitcoin-energy-price-...
- polote 6y ago
  Doesn't seem true https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-09/tesla-s-bitcoin-binge-spells-overtime-for-xinjiang-coal-miners https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-09/tesla-s-b...
  - BelenusMordred 6y ago
    Bloomberg just published an article on how some Russian company broke AES encryption. How about we try to deal with facts rather than google search proofs A huge amount of mining is located around Sichuan province, China or Pacific NW United States, all of it hydro-powered and excess electricity. Others players in the field are chasing wasted flaring from oil/gas fields and using that to power shipping containers full of ASIC's. This argument gets tiring because at this point if there a large amount of wasted energy anywhere on Earth someone will eventually realise they could mine crypto with it instead. Heat, gas, you name it, everything is on the table. Meanwhile we all lament not being able to take international flights for a year.
  - elif 6y ago
    "there's a chance" that "new bitcoins mined" "will" The opening statement is in a completely different tense than yours, AND hypothetical.
    - polote 6y ago
      The parent link also says "A new report claims it’s mostly powered by renewables. Be skeptical." I don't try to say it is true or false. I give an alternative point of view.
  - trickstra 6y ago
zpeti 6y ago
Cryptos with less of a footprint are on the way. This issue will be solved. In the meantime after a year of the US government printing 20% of all dollars ever made, perhaps an alternative form of currency is a slightly more complex issue than just it destroying the environment. Maybe some people realise the monetary crisis that's inevitably coming.
- kritiko 6y ago
  Yet most people purchasing Bitcoin are treating it as an asset denominated in USD, not a currency.
  - loceng 6y ago
    They're also treating it like an MLM - where they know if any significant amount of people sell before regulatory capture occurs - then their Ponzi-Pyramid scheme will crash; the ones with the most to lose are the later adopters who buy high, and ones with the most to gain are the earlier adopters as gains are weighted towards earlier adopters. It's quite the clusterfuck.
- loceng 6y ago
  The first counterargument always seems to be that at some point in future the energy consumption problem will be solved, but isn't the rate of computation a or the main factor against 50%+ attacks? Else the solutions proposed seemed to rely on centralized services that don't actually play on the blockchain to reduce the actual amount of transactions and load, also then avoiding the delays - but then re-adding the supposed main issue of having a "trustless" blockchain.
  - sneak 6y ago
    No, there are other systems that work to solve the same trust issue such as Proof of Stake or Delegated Proof of Stake, as well as other variations on that theme. The issue will be getting people to use something other than Bitcoin, not solving the technical challenge. Bitcoin mining will always be Proof of Work, and thus energy-intensive.
georgeplusplus 6y ago
I feel like this is something that shouldn’t need to be said but based on the numerous identical posts like this I feel gobsmacked to not say it. He’s a businessman not a philanthropist. His sales pitch was using the thing millennials care about to get them invested (both emotionally and with capital) in his company. We got played by Elon.
- loceng 6y ago
  Reposting a comment I made yesterday: "Bitcoin is almost as bs as fiat money" - Elon Musk, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1340588909974200321 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1340588909974200321 E.g. it's still not the ideal, final solution - but Tesla seemingly aligning to being on the side of the "army of HODLers" makes business sense; you don't want that army that's financially incentivized via the MLM/pyramid scheme that it is to start rallying against you and your products/services.
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
My take? It was a savvy PR move to cushion the China news. Tesla had to kowtow Beijing in a way that could have lit real political fires. Politicians are distracted. The Bitcoin announcement took care of the base. Also, it’s a good economic move. $1.5bn bought $8bn of market cap appreciation, which Musk can likely turn into more than $1.5bn of new cash. Tesla scaling faster does more for the environment than some bubs buying Bitcoin.
- georgeplusplus 6y ago
  The distraction worked on me cause I didn’t even hear about it! What was the China news regarding Tesla?
lm28469 6y ago
> One side he wants to save the planet In what way would Elon Musk save the planet ? edit: no but really, do you think replacing 1.4B ICE cars with 1.4B electric cars powered by non recyclable rare earth batteries will "save the planet" ? Or maybe migrating to Mars while we can't even sustain life on Earth which is the perfect eco system we evolved to strive on ? Or is it starlink that will "save the planet" by providing facebook, instagram and 4k netflix to the world ? People believing in these pipe dreams are so disconnected from reality... I don't even know what to tell them. Musk is a brilliant business man, engineer, visionary maybe, but he won't save the planet more than Amazon or Apple would
- angelbar 6y ago
  All the other part of the humanity can try to save the planet (included you and me).... Elon appears to be focused on saving the lineage of humanity by spread it to the cosmos.
- dwaltrip 6y ago
  > no but really, do you think replacing 1.4B ICE cars with 1.4B electric cars powered by non recyclable rare earth batteries will "save the planet" ? Ah, let me clue you in. You may have heard of something called climate change. It is a phenomenon where the atmospheric concentration of certain gases is increasing rapidly, causing substantial and harmful changes in the global climate. It is heavily driven by human co2 emissions, a significant portion of which come from ICE vehicles. Electric vehicles are capable of being powered entirely by clean energy, whereas ICE vehicles, not so much. Switching to all electric vehicles is an important step we must take to combat climate change. NASA has a great website where you can learn more about climate change: https://climate.nasa.gov https://climate.nasa.gov. There are many other sources as well.
matz1 6y ago
save the planet ? Do you think planet need human to survive ?
bhupy 6y ago
While true, mining seems more analogous to high frequency trading where the most profitable mining operations seek to eke out every single advantage they possibly can in the unit economics to maximize profit. If energy is an input and money/profit is the output, then the mining market would obviously seek out the cheapest energy, which happens to be wind and solar. Intuitively, it's far more profitable to operate ASIC farms on cheap land in the middle of Nevada powered by solar panels than operating a similarly sized network off of the coal sourced power grid in West Virginia. The former has somewhat high upfront cost, but basically zero marginal cost, and amounts to essentially free money in the long run. While there will always exist a small set of "retail" miners that don't care about the source as long as they make some profit, mining will probably converge towards some power-law distribution (just like every other financial market) where 80-90% of mining activity will be done by a small minority of big/rich institutional miners that explicitly seek out cheap (read: clean) energy. Obviously this is only theory, and the devil is in the details, but the empirical results appear to corroborate that theory. The IEA did a report on the Bitcoin footprint: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/bitcoin-energy-use-mined-the-gap https://www.iea.org/commentaries/bitcoin-energy-use-mined-th... > Around 60% to 70% of bitcoin is currently mined in China, where more than two-thirds of electricity generation comes from coal. But bitcoin mining facilities are concentrated in remote areas of China with rich hydro or wind resources (cheap electricity), with about 80% of Chinese bitcoin mining occurring in hydro-rich Sichuan province. These mining facilities may be absorbing overcapacity in some of these regions, using renewable energy that would otherwise be unused, given difficulties in matching these rich wind and hydro resources with demand centres on the coast. > Electricity generation in other key bitcoin mining centres are also dominated by renewables, including Iceland (100%), Quebec (99.8%), British Columbia (98.4%), Norway (98%), and Georgia (81%). Globally, one analysis estimates that the bitcoin is powered by at least 74% renewable electricity as of June 2019. Another analysis of data from 93 mining facilities (representing 1.7 GW, or about a third of global mining capacity) estimates that 76% of the identified energy mix includes renewables. Another report, https://coinshares.com/assets/resources/Research/bitcoin-mining-network-december-2019.pdf https://coinshares.com/assets/resources/Research/bitcoin-min...: > Furthermore, we show that Bitcoin mining is mainly located in global regions where there are ample supplies of renewable electricity available. And finally, we calculate an estimate of the renewables penetration in the energy mix powering the Bitcoin mining network at 73%, making Bitcoin mining more renewables-driven than almost every other large-scale industry in the world. Our renewables estimate has marginally dropped since our last report, reflecting increased levels of mining in low-renewables regions such as Kazakhstan. However, we still caution that our location estimates likely have error margins of ±5% and should be considered within that context. If you believe all this to be true, then you could reasonably conclude that Bitcoin stimulates the demand for cheap (read: clean) energy, and Elon Musk just took a big step towards perpetuating that stimulus. A relevant tweet that blithely captures Elon Musk's calculus: https://twitter.com/NeerajKA/status/1358788953713836033 https://twitter.com/NeerajKA/status/1358788953713836033
thysultan 6y ago
>that uses tons and tons of energy to even exist and operate Compared to what? The banking industry? Do you know how much it takes to send/secure 100 tons of gold? bitcoin comparatively is minuscule, energy use is going to increase whether you like it or not, the alternative is starvation and death, africa alone is going to double the energy use before long, in the process saving millions from starvation.

user-the-name 6y ago

Increased bitcoin price leads, due to the economic equilibrium on which bitcoin rests, to greater energy usage and greater emissions. Bitcoin already emits as much carbon as the nation of New Zealand. It emits ten times more carbon per year than Tesla, according to their own numbers, have saved over the lifetime of the company. Increasing the bitcoin price by just 10% will eventually lead to an increase in emissions that will wipe out all of Tesla's environmental gains in a year.

hanniabu 6y ago
That's why Ethereum is the future. It's where all innovation is happening anyways.
- whitepaint 6y ago
  It will take time for people to realize because Ethereum is so much more complex that Bitcoin. But it will happen eventually and inevitably imo.
- newsbinator 6y ago
  For some applications, yes. I believe Stellar (XLM) is the future for transferring money across borders.
  - tryptophan 6y ago
    Why would any bigger institution (like a bank) ever use a non-private chain where everyone can see how much they have and how much they sent to do transactions? Blockchain is being taken up by banks, with projects such as r3-corda, but is is a private chain, with no shitty "coin" for morons to speculate on and thus gets no attention.
    - hanniabu 6y ago
      Ethereum will allow for private transaction so institutions can conduct business on it in an opaque manner.

cblconfederate 6y ago

Next step, Tesla makes an ICO

superbcarrot 6y ago
I'm honestly suprised this hasn't happened already. Just imagine the levels of absurdity that the hype could reach.

numpad0 6y ago

So how does it all work? Market cap and price only has weak connections against each other right?

dmurray 6y ago
Wrong. Market cap and price are the same thing.
gruez 6y ago
market cap = price * units outstanding. For bitcoin, the change in units outstanding is negligible, so price is directly tied to market cap.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > For bitcoin, the change in units outstanding is negligible, so price is directly tied to market cap. Market cap is a meaningless metric for Bitcoin. With companies, the whole company legally exists and gets bought and sold and pays dividends and goes bankrupt. Nobody operates on the whole with cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrency "market caps" are a vanity figure.
deleted 6y ago
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u678u 6y ago

He's been pumping doge to his followers then goes and buys BTC. Nice move.

kreetx 6y ago
We should have put more thought into it. I personally thought he was just having fun with doge (smoking pot, listening to Darude and tweeting..) while in actuality was a cryptic sign that something much more substantial was going on under the covers..

tristanj 6y ago

Elon Musk has single-handedly made hundreds of millions of people into passive crypto investors. Tesla stock is 1.9% of the S&P500 by weight, and Tesla's Bitcoin holdings makes up ~0.2% of Tesla's market cap. This means for every $100k that is invested into the S&P500, $3.50 goes into BTC.

JoshTko 6y ago
I think the most impactful aspect of this is normalizing the idea for a company to hold bitcoin on their balance sheet.
- VMG 6y ago
  the actual pioneer for this was Microstrategy https://cryptopotato.com/microstrategy-ceo-introduced-bitcoin-69000-enterprises/ https://cryptopotato.com/microstrategy-ceo-introduced-bitcoi...
  - hanniabu 6y ago
    Yup, Microstrategy pioneered it, but the brand power of Tesla will normalize it.
  - JoshTko 6y ago
    No one knows who MicroStrategy is. The impact comes from normalizing - CFOs can point to a Fortune 10 company as a precedent and buy bitcoin without looking completely foolish. Buying bitcoin can soon be normal as insuring against currency risk.
bmcn2020 6y ago
Elon has become the crypto maker or breaker. A single tweet of his can add billions of dollars to a coin's market cap. Incredibly powerful

curiousllama 6y ago

Tesla made a (paper) profit of $642M on that announcement. Can you imagine this CFO? First, Reddit ceaselessly pumps his stock. Then, he makes more revenue overnight than most full companies do in a year through bitcoin. Kind of convenient that we, in the US, have such blind faith in the only major EV manufacturer, come to think of it.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
It's not blind faith, it's tons of people jumping on the bandwagon whenever Musk farts, because he makes the markets shift, because tons of people jump on the bandwagon whenever he farts.

sysashi 6y ago

It seems I will never afford a GPU to play some games..

bitxbitxbitcoin 6y ago
Good thing Bitcoin mining hasn’t been done with GPUs in several years. You can blame cryptocurrency mining for the high GPU prices but not Bitcoin mining.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  As I understand the cryptocurrency markets, they basically all move in tandem with Bitcoin. So if Bitcoin's price goes up, so do all other cryptocurrencies.
  - oleganza 6y ago
    Also instructive to see prices of altcoins in terms of BTC. Barely anything moves up. There are very temporary spikes, but mostly it's all one giant opportunity cost compared to just holding BTC.
    - bitxbitxbitcoin 6y ago
      Agreed. PS: Cool to see you here on HN, I have been a long time follower on Twitter.
- t0mbstone 6y ago
  Speak for yourself. I'm currently earning $13-15 a day by mining with my RTX 3090. The RTX 3090 FE costs around $1500 after tax, but I bought it off craigslist for $2000 (after fruitlessly waiting for months for the stock to become available). I should have just bought it back off craigslist back in September or October. If I had paid the scalper prices and just started mining with it back then, it would have already almost paid for itself by now.
  - 6y ago

superbcarrot 6y ago

This is getting ridiculous. It's just bubbles upon bubbles upon bubbles.

deleted 6y ago

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nolok 6y ago

Meanwhile "Tesla skips 401(k) match for third straight year". For all the future projections Musk claim to push forward, I wish employees empowerment and the betterment of the human condition could be a bit more on his mind. More related to Tesla than to the story of this thread but I can't help feeling like we focus too much on one side of the equation here, I do believe better techs can mean a better life for all, but it's on us not to forget that second part otherwise it's a waste of innovation.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> I wish employees empowerment and the betterment of the human condition could be a bit more on his mind Can't we have multiple solutions to this problem? Some employers who match 401(k)s and do "human condition" things. Others who push their teams hard, pay them adequately (albeit not well) and give them equity so they win and lose together. Focus should not be underrated. I'm not saying Musk is successful because Tesla doesn't match 401(k)s. But perhaps someone focussed on 401(k) matching isn't a great fit at every workplace.
- bluntfang 6y ago
  >But perhaps someone focussed on 401(k) matching isn't a great fit at every workplace. That's a really good point. An argument could be made that this is rooted in age discrimination. I'm willing to bet my paycheck that older people are more concerned about 401k match. Anecdata: as i've gotten older 401k match is more important to me.
- nolok 6y ago
  > Can't we have multiple solutions to this problem? We probably can, but that's not what you suggest. > Some employers who match 401(k)s and do "human condition" things. Others who push their teams hard, pay them adequately (albeit not well) and give them equity so they win and lose together. You make the false assumption that you can't pay well your employees if you push them hard, as if it was an either/or. You can pay well your employees or not. You can push your employees and ask them to do more than average or not. Choosing to push them yet not pay them well is a specific choice that gives the maximum value to the company at the expanse of its employees, and then the word you are looking for is not "push", it is "exploit". It is a logic that doesn't work, which is why company values skyrocket while salary stagnate. I do find that doing this while also investing gigantic sums on something that has nothing to do with your core business is a bit unsavory. There are plenty of companies out there, small and big, that push their employees well above and beyond, but compensate that by also paying them very well. That is also what I am doing at my own company and I've been successful doing so, and I've never had to play the "you're getting screwed for the betterment or humanity, but don't worry maybe someday you will be rich" card. > I'm not saying Musk is successful because Tesla doesn't match 401(k)s. But perhaps someone focussed on 401(k) matching isn't a great fit at every workplace. Absolutely. I'm not saying it in a vaccum, I'm saying that in the context of Tesla doing both of those action (the 401k and the Bitcoin thing) simultaneously. You put the context on the employees but I put it on Musk/Tesla. In the goal of improving the future, I think that is the wrong direction and choice.

tomw1808 6y ago

What stops him from issuing something like ERC-721 Tokens for his cars? You'd be able to do cool things, like you'd be able to trade it P2P, or do stuff like unlock it with your MetaMask wallet and the whole infrastructure is already here. For me doing this would be a logical next step at some point.

hanniabu 6y ago
He first needs to discover Ethereum and broaden his horizens.

bluepanda928752 6y ago

One possible rational explanation for this (apart from the usual Elon's trolling) is a mostly legal way for Tesla to bribe some Chinese Bitcoin mining controlling interests

Wronnay 6y ago

Overhyped cryptocurrency fueled by an overvalued EV startup... Bravo. These two seem to love each other... (I am not against Cryptos but e.g. ETH seems way more usable to me and I am not against EVs but the price tag on a TSLA share is ridicules)

hanniabu 6y ago
Yeah I'm of the opinion that Ethereum is the top dog, but it will take some time for that to be realized since Bitcoin has the first mover advantage, brand name, is simpler to understand, and is everyone's first exposure to the market.

jl6 6y ago

I really like Bitcoin as a technology and as a statement of decentralized control, but I really hate the power consumption - which is becoming increasingly hard to ignore. How do we kill it?

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> How do we kill it? Isn't the root problem the dirtiness of our (and specifically, China's) power generation? If not, if power usage is a problem per se to someone, aren't there better targets?
- jl6 6y ago
  Energy is such a huge and all-encompassing problem that we need to pull on all the energy levers we have - more sources, cleaner sources, safer sources, more storage, lower losses in distribution, greater efficiency in consumption, smarter allocation of consumption...
op03 6y ago
The answer is always Competition. Pitting one bunch of mindlessly ambitious lunatics against another bunch of mindlessly ambitious lunatics is Natures way of reducing the odds of everyone going extinct - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis
gher-shyu3i 6y ago
Why kill it? Embrace it. The power consumption is solved by renewables.
- jl6 6y ago
  It isn’t, because there’s no cap on it. Cover the planet in solar panels and Bitcoin still might consume more.
  - gremlinsinc 6y ago