$365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin • Hacker News Board

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#361

Post by soperj » Thu, May 13, 2021, 11:13 PM UTC

Traster wrote: post #344

onion2k wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX wins lots of space contracts with the help of Musk's "Occupy Mars" marketing. Tesla sells lots of cars on the promise of self-driving in the marketing. Musk bought BTC, single-handedly pumped the price of BTC, and then sold at a huge profit. I don't think he's a genius but Musk is definitely not stupid. He's just not playing the obvious game you think he's playing.

Isn't this just the same thing idiots did for Trump though? Look at whatever Trump does, and then find a reason in retrospect why actually that was a smart move. SpaceX wins contracts because they are able to send payloads into space, nothing to do with marketing, and sending payloads into space isn't even that hard - they basically beat out Nasa who weren't allowed to compete and Boeing who can't send a plane to 30,…

If they are so easy, why isn't everyone doing it? Why can't Bezo put payloads into space with a billion every year invested? Why can't every other car manufacture seem to put together an electric car with the same range? I don't want to buy a Tesla, I'd rather something with physical knobs, but there's nothing that quite hits the mark yet.

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#362

Post by throwkeep » Thu, May 13, 2021, 11:14 PM UTC

pumaontheprowl wrote: post #301

throwkeep wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A pump and dump is approximately the least likely explanation.

How are you downvoted for this? Tesla directly lost over $100M as a result of this decision. If this was a pump-and-dumb, they did a horrible job of it. Also, a pump-and-dump scheme doesn't require you to crash the price of an asset after you exit your position. Suggesting this was a pump-and-dump is flat-out idiocy. More likely is that Musk liked the idea of Bitcoin, but got a lot of pressure from environmental acti…

Right, that's a much more likely explanation.

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#363

Post by rawtxapp » Thu, May 13, 2021, 11:15 PM UTC

Traster wrote: post #349

rawtxapp wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peter Thiel is full pro-Bitcoin.

Is that the same Peter Thiel who famously talked about how China was pushing bitcoin to destabilize the dollar?

Yep, if you listen to the whole exchange and read through the lines, he's essentially saying to US leadership either we innovate and build with this or we let our main competitor take over.

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#364

Post by api » Thu, May 13, 2021, 11:15 PM UTC

jreese wrote: post #337

kevinbache wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's single handedly accelerated the adoption of electric cars by 10 years while advancing literal rocket science to the point where launches will be done 10x cheaper. For those of us who measure by outcomes, he's a genius.

> He's single handedly Tesla employs almost 80k workers, and SpaceX employs almost 10k. Elon might have had the idea, but it's the employees that made it possible and a reality.

Traditional car companies and traditional aerospace employ far more people, and those people are not dumb. Leadership matters.

I do agree that it isn't "single-handedly," but when I hear Elon speak he definitely does shout out to the team. I haven't heard him take 100% credit for these things.

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#365

Post by dragontamer » Thu, May 13, 2021, 11:16 PM UTC

tpmx wrote: post #359

dragontamer wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In your nightmare scenario we're going to need terraforming tech both on Earth and Mars. The hypothetical technology to reduce Earth's temperature by 4-degrees Celsius is simply going to be fundamentally different from the hypothetical technology to increase Mars's temperature by 80-degrees Celsius.

(Sorry, you caught my post while I was editing it in the first two minutes.) I don't see why shouldn't try to do both: a) Lower the earth's surface temperature b) Begin the process of building a backup of humanity on Mars

Because B) is a waste of time, money, and effort.

Whether or not A) is true has nothing to do with whether or not B) is worth doing. There's no reason to imply that I'm making a false dichotomy fallacy.

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#366

Post by NickM » Thu, May 13, 2021, 11:19 PM UTC

sakopov wrote: post #31

Very perplexing behavior from Musk, I must say. Bitcoin's energy consumption has been front-and-center for a few years now and even more so when the bull market got hot. How does Musk decide to throw $1.5 billion worth of Tesla's cash into BTC without acknowledging this? I was expecting a little bit more due-diligence from him, but he's been absolutely consumed by crypto markets in general.

I think a lot of people realize Bitcoin consumes a lot of energy without necessarily realizing the extent to which the energy consumption correlates with the price of BTC. After pushing up the price of BTC with a $1.5B purchase and a bunch of tweets, it might have been a bit of a wake-up call to then subsequently see the electricity usage of the network immediately start to skyrocket (he did recently tweet a link to cbeci.org).

He really should have known better, but all that said it's not hard to imagine how this could've played out behind the scenes. He's previously mentioned having trusted friends who convinced him of the value of crypto, and he may have genuinely believed that it would drive growth of renewables long-term, but then changed his views as he became more aware of the damage this is causing in the here and now.

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#367

Post by noxer » Thu, May 13, 2021, 11:19 PM UTC

noxer wrote: post #135

How long until he figures out that DOGE also wastes energy?

Update:

Elon Musk "Working with Doge devs to improve system transaction efficiency. Potentially promising."

Clearly he didn't figure it out yet lol

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1392974251011895300

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#368

Post by api » Thu, May 13, 2021, 11:22 PM UTC

Traster wrote: post #344

onion2k wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX wins lots of space contracts with the help of Musk's "Occupy Mars" marketing. Tesla sells lots of cars on the promise of self-driving in the marketing. Musk bought BTC, single-handedly pumped the price of BTC, and then sold at a huge profit. I don't think he's a genius but Musk is definitely not stupid. He's just not playing the obvious game you think he's playing.

Isn't this just the same thing idiots did for Trump though? Look at whatever Trump does, and then find a reason in retrospect why actually that was a smart move. SpaceX wins contracts because they are able to send payloads into space, nothing to do with marketing, and sending payloads into space isn't even that hard - they basically beat out Nasa who weren't allowed to compete and Boeing who can't send a plane to 30,…

Trump never actually accomplished anything unless you count ugly casinos that go bankrupt and a golf resort. There is nothing redeeming there to outweigh the bad stuff. There's just bad stuff.

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#369

Post by jlokier » Thu, May 13, 2021, 11:25 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #229

pkulak wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cus he's not that bright. Isn't this the elephant in the room that no one wants to consider? Why do we have to start with the assumption that Musk is a genius, then work back from that? The dude thought covid would go away last May. He thinks it's easier to make Mars habitable than it is to keep the Earth habitable. He's thought that full self driving was 6 months away for literally 4 years now. And he didn't really…

SpaceX wins lots of space contracts with the help of Musk's "Occupy Mars" marketing. Tesla sells lots of cars on the promise of self-driving in the marketing. Musk bought BTC, single-handedly pumped the price of BTC, and then sold at a huge profit. I don't think he's a genius but Musk is definitely not stupid. He's just not playing the obvious game you think he's playing.

> and then sold at a huge profit

No they didn't, according to the announcment:

>> Tesla will not be selling any Bitcoin and we intend to use it for transactions as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy.

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#370

Post by danans » Thu, May 13, 2021, 11:27 PM UTC

orblivion wrote: post #156

sakopov wrote: post #31

Very perplexing behavior from Musk, I must say. Bitcoin's energy consumption has been front-and-center for a few years now and even more so when the bull market got hot. How does Musk decide to throw $1.5 billion worth of Tesla's cash into BTC without acknowledging this? I was expecting a little bit more due-diligence from him, but he's been absolutely consumed by crypto markets in general.

Okay, here's my Big Brain, 4D Chess take: Elon Musk wanted to adopt Bitcoin, but he knew there was this big problem with energy consumption. It's bad for his brand, and perhaps goes against his own ethics. Could he say "hey, get the energy consumption down and I'll go all-in with Tesla"? People wouldn't think much of it. Better option: Buy a huge stake in Bitcoin, announce that he'll be accepting bitcoin at Tesla, ge…

I don't think there's any 4D chess. With most of his stuff, he's just selling a story.

Lately, that story (and the products to match) have pivoted from eco-luxury (Roadster, Model S/3/Y) to a story targeting the well-off eco-prepper crowd.

Switch out the underlying technologies and the customer demographics and it would would be offroad pickups instead of Cybertrucks, propane generators instead of Powerwalls, suitcases of unmarked bills instead of crypto, flamethrowers instead of guns (ok, I'm stretching the analogy, but you get it).

And just like with the lower tech equivalents, the likelihood/frequency that most of his customers will use the products to anywhere near their full potential is close to zero, because most still live well within the safety margins of civilization.

And whether he actually believes in any of the story himself is sort of besides the point, because there are enough people that fit the above description who will eat up his products and the story that comes with them.

This is not to diminish how much he's done to accelerate EV adoption. He realized that most people aren't really onboard with using EVs for the sake of the environment, and that you have to target people's selfish needs to move a product, not their prosocial feelings. Remember that Nissan Leaf was the first mass market practical EV, before the Model S, but for a whole lot of people it didn't do much for their mojo.