Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

For the same reasons the people who tried to short and manipulate Tesla (and GameStop) into bankruptcy for gains didn't go to jail.

Also for the same reasons market makers and hedge funds like Citadel can still exist while blatantly manipulating the market every second of every day and deliberately shorting healthy companies into bankruptcy for gains.

All of the above parties are doing way way way worse than Musk in broad daylight. All Musk does is arguably pump and dump. The above parties pump and dump and are constantly wash trading, influencing/buying the SEC, buying media (CNBC "Tesla is almost bankrupt, sell now", etc) for pump and dumps, pump & dumping on Twitter (Cramer), naked shorting illegally, messing with order executions, HFT DDoS attacks on exchanges for profit and so on and so forth. All at the attractive cost of meaningless tiny fines (assuming they get fined at all) and 0 jail time.

Yes. The US financial markets are completely rotten.

Ironically, I feel that the crypto markets are much fairer. At least you can buy a real token directly and sell that real token for money on an exchange of your chosing. At least it's clear that Musk is pumping and dumping (as opposed to Jim Cramer on CNBC, who does exactly the same for hedge funds under the veil of "trustworthy media").

As a comparison: ever tried to get your hands on stock certificates for stock you own? Good luck with that. Can you point me to a broker where you can directly own a share? You can't. They don't exist. Can you point me to a broker that doesn't lend out the shares which YOU "own" to hedge funds? I know of some in Europe, but they are very rare. Can you point me to a broker that allows you to route your orders to the exchange of your choice? I can only name 1: IBKR. The vast majority of brokers get paid to route your orders to the exchange that is worst for you and best for whoever is paying off your broker. And then there's "cheap" brokers who offer "payment for order flow" where traders essentially pay a "trade fee" to whoever is paying for order flow (to give you worse execution than themselves).

I could go on and on and on.

PS: to be sure, I don't mean to turn this into whataboutism and to argue that Musk's pump & dumps are ethically OK because others are doing worse. The point I'm trying to make is that the US markets are essentially rigged and unfair. And claiming that Musk should be in jail for pump-n-dumping is fine, but then many others should be jail too. Preferably for longer and with way higher priority.

I think if you think it is bad, then that implies a certain world view about absolute good and evil. The implication is that this is an evil thing, and only an evil person would want to do it, and so if the only reason they won’t do it is because of public opinion then that doesn’t change their inherent evilness.

But the other possibility is that the person making the decision believes it’s a good thing, or at worst a neutral thing, but are not willing to pay the cost once they find out how badly everyone reacted to it.

Maybe Musk thinks decentralised money is more important than the setback to climate change? Maybe musk thinks that crypto will become green over time and it won’t matter? Or maybe he just wanted to do a pump and dump. There are all sorts of things musk can think, who knows.

But either way, people got what they wanted.

That wouldn't do anything to energy consumption. It would just increase the hash rate.

As far as I can tell, the fact that bitcoin/eth weren’t phased out for better alternatives tells me that: * a significant usage of crypto is pure speculation/investment * peoples identity gets tied to particular coins * people care more about existing network than usability (eth vs solana, for example)

I have respect for the people in this space who are trying to do meaningfully new or interesting things, although its overshadowed by the wealth of blatant Ponzi schemes, memecoins, or copycats/scams just trying to make a quick buck.