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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

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

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.