5 ms·

Elon Musk in the exchange above: > I think I have a pretty deep understanding of what money actually is on a practical day-to-day basis, because of PayPal. Hi

Elon Musk in the exchange above: > I think I have a pretty deep understanding of what money actually is on a practical day-to-day basis, because of PayPal. His comments in the exchange seem insightful to me. I assume you didn't bother reading them.

danaris 5y ago
...because Musk bought PayPal, he can speak authoritatively on Bitcoin?
- gunshai 5y ago
  This is a bit of misunderstanding of history. He started X.com which would later become PayPal.
  - Cederfjard 5y ago
    To be even more precise, X.com merged with Thiel's Confinity, which already had a product called PayPal, and later the whole company was renamed after the latter. PayPal existed as a thing before Musk's involvement.
    - mml 5y ago
      oh, and musk was fired for incompetence, and all his code thrown away after the x.com acquisition. he also isn't the founder of Tesla. basically everything "everyone knows" about Elon "monorail" Musk, is a lie.
jcranmer 5y ago
I read them. "Insightful" is not the word I would use. For example, one of the points is that the current financial system is problematic because it runs on COBOL. There's no actual criticism as to why running on COBOL is bad, other than the indirect insinuation that COBOL is old, not modern, and therefore it sucks. Basically, it's futurism for the sake of futurism--new is inherently better than old, and anything that is old is attacked as being bad without analyzing the relative benefits of new and old (see also Musk's comments about Hyperloop and Loop, which are severely lacking in the 'mass' department compared to the 'mass transit' options they are notionally competing against). It is possible to be insightful about issues with the current financial system. You could point to issues like the reliance on unsecured FTP of text files to actually do settlement in SWIFT. Or you might point to issues like the fact that ATH doesn't have protections against unscrupulous users stealing all your money. That kind of information would be insightful, but instead, we get mere castigation at the age of COBOL, which is completely orthogonal to any actual issues with the financial systems. Outside of this dismissal because of COBOL, the only other main point that Musk makes is, well, the standard libertarian viewpoint on economy that inflation is a hidden government tax. But even here, it's not fully developed--perhaps because the "benefit" of dogecoin over bitcoin is that the former has more inflation than the latter, and if you think about it too hard, you might be poking holes in his argument. In any case, "insightful" is not an adequate adjective to describe Musk's comments here.
- mwattsun 5y ago
  > problematic because it runs on COBOL I assumed this was his way of saying the system is antiquated and encompasses your other criticisms, because the show is already long enough for him to spend more time on it
- mcbishop 5y ago
  I appreciate your feedback. But I agree with the other poster's comment that the reference to COBOL is a shorthand way of indicating that it's antiquated. Ways this manifests for the user are evident enough (e.g. 2-3 day ACH transfers). The idea that Musk only thinks COBOL sucks is because it's old... well, most of Tesla's self-driving code is written in C (invented in the '70s). Overall, I maintain that Musk's opinion is at least relevant. PayPal was disruptive to the financial industry, and Musk was very technically engaged there. Like the OP, I'm not a Musk fanboy. But I appreciate his perspectives and contributions. Maybe any ire would be better directed towards corporate raiders that aren't manufacturing anything valuable for society, etc.

danaris 5y ago

...because Musk bought PayPal, he can speak authoritatively on Bitcoin?

gunshai 5y ago
This is a bit of misunderstanding of history. He started X.com which would later become PayPal.
- Cederfjard 5y ago
  To be even more precise, X.com merged with Thiel's Confinity, which already had a product called PayPal, and later the whole company was renamed after the latter. PayPal existed as a thing before Musk's involvement.
  - mml 5y ago
    oh, and musk was fired for incompetence, and all his code thrown away after the x.com acquisition. he also isn't the founder of Tesla. basically everything "everyone knows" about Elon "monorail" Musk, is a lie.

jcranmer 5y ago

I read them. "Insightful" is not the word I would use. For example, one of the points is that the current financial system is problematic because it runs on COBOL. There's no actual criticism as to why running on COBOL is bad, other than the indirect insinuation that COBOL is old, not modern, and therefore it sucks. Basically, it's futurism for the sake of futurism--new is inherently better than old, and anything that is old is attacked as being bad without analyzing the relative benefits of new and old (see also Musk's comments about Hyperloop and Loop, which are severely lacking in the 'mass' department compared to the 'mass transit' options they are notionally competing against). It is possible to be insightful about issues with the current financial system. You could point to issues like the reliance on unsecured FTP of text files to actually do settlement in SWIFT. Or you might point to issues like the fact that ATH doesn't have protections against unscrupulous users stealing all your money. That kind of information would be insightful, but instead, we get mere castigation at the age of COBOL, which is completely orthogonal to any actual issues with the financial systems. Outside of this dismissal because of COBOL, the only other main point that Musk makes is, well, the standard libertarian viewpoint on economy that inflation is a hidden government tax. But even here, it's not fully developed--perhaps because the "benefit" of dogecoin over bitcoin is that the former has more inflation than the latter, and if you think about it too hard, you might be poking holes in his argument. In any case, "insightful" is not an adequate adjective to describe Musk's comments here.

mwattsun 5y ago
> problematic because it runs on COBOL I assumed this was his way of saying the system is antiquated and encompasses your other criticisms, because the show is already long enough for him to spend more time on it
mcbishop 5y ago
I appreciate your feedback. But I agree with the other poster's comment that the reference to COBOL is a shorthand way of indicating that it's antiquated. Ways this manifests for the user are evident enough (e.g. 2-3 day ACH transfers). The idea that Musk only thinks COBOL sucks is because it's old... well, most of Tesla's self-driving code is written in C (invented in the '70s). Overall, I maintain that Musk's opinion is at least relevant. PayPal was disruptive to the financial industry, and Musk was very technically engaged there. Like the OP, I'm not a Musk fanboy. But I appreciate his perspectives and contributions. Maybe any ire would be better directed towards corporate raiders that aren't manufacturing anything valuable for society, etc.