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

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

#391

Post by ChrisClark »

bhouston wrote: post #342
samatman wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla still has 90% of the Bitcoin they bought. If his proclamation knocks, say, half the value off Bitcoin, and it stays there, that wasn't a very clever pump and dump, because they kinda skipped the 'dump' part.

They only declare their sales after the fact. There is a chance that Tesla owns no bitcoin at this time. Probably they still do, but...

Then won't they get in trouble? The most recent statement directly says they have not sold any, just stopping accepting payments in it.

That would be an explicit lie then, something the SEC has jurisdiction over? (I'm not actually sure)

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

#392

Post by trophycase »

rawtxapp wrote: post #178
paulpauper wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crypto market is so big now that it's hard to imagine enough new money to make prices go up anymore. How does anyone justify these obscure tokens and coins being worth billions.

It's called leverage, unfortunately too many exchanges offer way too high leverage to people who might not fully understand what they are doing.

Uh, for most of these "obscure tokens" you can't get that kind of leverage. SHIB or SAFEMOON or w/e was worth billions before it was ever even listed on Binance.

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

#393

Post by Lramseyer »

I'm surprised that nobody's mentioned it here, but this crypto boom has sent demand for mining hardware through the roof, which has contributed in no small part to the chip shortage. Miners are buying up ASICs, GPUs and FPGAs at a premium.

In the short term, crashing the crypto market can ease demand for semiconductors, but in the long term, getting cryptos to move to Proof of Steak will hopefully ease it up for good (But don't quote me on that!)

It's no secret that one of their biggest supply chain constraints is chips right now (aside from batteries.) So it's not all that ridiculous to imagine them pulling this kind of publicity stunt off so that they can actually produce and sell more cars. And if they can profit off of it at the end of the day, even better!

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

#394

Post by tenpies »

jlokier wrote: post #369
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.

> 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.

Realistically we won't know until the Q2 financials are out.

Note the wording "*will not* be selling any Bitcoin" not "*has not* sold any Bitcoin". There were major dumps a couple minutes before Elon's announcement. It should be no surprise if Tesla front-run Elon's announcement, knowing that it would affect the price.

They'll keep a trivial amount on the financials, but I suspect the majority was off the books.

They will also use this an excuse to realize revenue in what will appear to be a very lean quarter. I mean they can't exactly sell to "test liquidity" again.

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

#395

Post by nickik »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #380
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.

Tesla proved rich people buy rich people things. SpaceX proved government budgets aren't scrutinized enough. Not particularly shocking.

What an idiotic thing to say. This is just pure 'I don't like this person so I'm gone shit on everything he does' syndrome.

Rich people buy rich people things, yes, and it matter if its a gas car or an electric. And it matter if the battery industry was transformed by that. And it matters that the image of electric cars was transformed. It matters that the largest fast charging network in the world was financed by this.

SpaceX proved that they could make things the government already does massively cheaper. Literally read any report from NASA or GAO. NASA own evaluation showed that the 300M SpaceX spend on the initial Falcon 9 would have cost 3 billion if done by the government.

Since SpaceX join the race military launches have come down in price by sometimes multiple 100 million $. ULA even outside of the 300M$+ launch prices, received an extra 900M every year.

Literally everything the government is buying from SpaceX could literally not be done cheaper by any other government, foreign or domestic or company foreign or domestic.

When SpaceX got started the commercial launch market was basically 0% US launchers, SpaceX alone changed that to depending on you calculate 50-90% of the commercial market now.

There is seriously not a single argument you can make about SpaceX other then simply arguing the government should be doing spaceflight at all. Everything we know about government internals suggest that both NASA and DoD are beyond happy with SpaceX.

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

#396

Post by Geee »

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.

Actually he understands that Bitcoin's energy consumption is not a problem. This tweet signals that he wants that energy production must be sustainable. He wants to influence miners to move to sustainable energy.

He puts up a clear incentive: if miners move to sustainable energy, then Tesla will accept bitcoin again.

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

#397

Post by DonHopkins »

pkulak wrote: post #234
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.

And denying covid kept workers in his factory, against the law. I think there needs to be some rule in discussion that as soon as you start arguing over if someone is dumb or evil, you have to stop. It's impossible to figure out which (or what mix) it actually is.

Acting that dumb when you literally employ a huge team of top-notch rocket scientists to advise you is absolutely evil.

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

#398

Post by reader_mode »

kevinbache wrote: post #283
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…

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.

>accelerated the adoption of electric cars by 10 years

Did it really ? Tesla rode on the advances of battery tech driven by mobile devices, there were other EV efforts arround the time Tesla came up. I agree they recognised it early on and made it fasionable + they had this narrative driven market valuation which pressured other automotive execs to invest in the EV narrative. But 10 years is way too much - battery tech advancements were bound to bring us to this point even without Tesla R&D (I think they only started using their advancements recently, before that it was just stock batteries ?), and there was enough money in batteries from other markets to drive advancement without the EV push.

Not denying Tesla played a big positive role in this, but certainly not 10 years IMO.

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

#399

Post by tenpies »

soperj wrote: post #361
Traster wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Why can't Bezo put payloads into space with a billion every year invested?

Because he was busy changing the face of consumer retail, the internet, and other huge aspects of society up to a few months ago. Give it a couple of years and you'll see Blue Origin eat SpaceX's cake.

> Why can't every other car manufacture seem to put together an electric car with the same range?

Mostly because other car manufacturers are very serious about not lying about things that are easily demonstrable like range. There's a reason Teslas are the only EV that no one can get the advertised range from, but all the other EVs crush their advertised ranges. Your question is "why doesn't every other car manufacturer lie psychopathically to the consumer?".

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

#400

Post by DonHopkins »

matchagaucho wrote: post #201
steveBK123 wrote: post #198

I wonder how much BTC is actually mined with fossil fuel. Even at the record prices, with efficient ASIC/GPU miners, you need some extremely cheap electricity to make it work. I suppose owning the power plant might work, as in the example ars article linked in this thread of a company spinning a bankrupt fossil fuel plant up for crypto. I think you can attribute a lot of other factors to crypto volatility than just M…

75% of BTC mined in China. 53% of China's power is coal. Some fossil-fuel plants in the US are reopening specifically to serve BTC data centers. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/private-equity-f...

Bitcoin is China's way of exporting coal through the atmosphere.
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