That sounds plausible but Musk must have known this when he made Tesla invest in BTC. So why is he now claiming that this is insane when it was expected?
Because, thanks to NFTs blowing up with a very negative reaction, the social sphere has suddenly realized how bad proof-of-work crypto actually is for the environment and it's now a hot button issue.
You might be giving him too much credit. I realize he's very "with it" but in truth he's probably swamped for time and can't participate in a bunch of message board debates about the pros and cons of crypto. Consequently he probably came to a premature conclusion.
We like to think smart people are going to make the right decision every time, but people have their limits.
I warned about this a while ago. The economics are set up for Bitcoin and Ethereum to eat up most of the electricity in the world, unless their price stop going up. Unfortunately it’s a very reliable feedback loop:
Alright, but even if they do, the original ETH token will be mined. Look at Ethereum Classic. It just recently pumped a lot. Which smart contracts run on it?
That's the thing. Read my analysis... it doesn't matter if something better comes along. As long as the tokens are around they can just be more and more scarce and go up in price.
Many people in the field don’t expect that there will be a viable fork this time, basically all defi smart contracts that are now a huge part of ethereum (not the case at the time of classic) would break triggering a cascading chain of liquidations breaking the usability/viability of the chain. However the past has shown that a broken chain can somehow still be valuable due to irrational speculation so we will have to wait and see.
> Proof of work = trust physics to determine what happened.
This is the kind of vapor Bitcoiners love to inhale and it's just not true. In the history of Bitcoin, it has happened many times where the "work" of a chain was irrelevant because humans disagreed with the contents of that chain. See: 2010 fork, 2013 fork, 2017 fork, etc.
When two chains are mined using the same binary, yes, "physics" seems to be in control on which chain wins (ie. the one with the most work). But when one chain expresses a slightly different protocol, humans take over and decide which protocol is the valid one (even if it has less work).
And if humans are ultimately deciding on what's valid Bitcoin and what's not, we have to ask ourselves which humans are the most influential in the discussion on what's valid and what's not. We need to know who these players are because with a project worth this much, you can bet that they are targets of powerful and wealthy entities.
Boring histrionics aside, you haven’t refuted GP’s point. Pure proof-of-stake consensus systems all suffer from the misfeature of not even having a basic quantitative fork ranking protocol. Jude C. Nelson critiques this better than anyone [1]:
PoW requires less proactive trust and coordination between
community members than PoS -- and thus is better able to recover
from both liveness and safety failures -- precisely because
it both (1) provides a computational method for ranking fork
quality, and (2) allows anyone to participate in producing
a fork at any time. If the canonical chain is 51%-attacked,
and the attack eventually subsides, then the canonical chain
can eventually be re-established in-band by honest miners
simply continuing to work on the non-attacker chain. In PoS,
block-producers have no such protocol -- such a protocol
cannot exist because to the rest of the network, it looks like
the honest nodes have been slashed for being dishonest. Any
recovery procedure necessarily includes block-producers having
to go around and convince people out-of-band that they were
totally not dishonest, and were slashed due to a "hack" (and,
since there's lots of money on the line, who knows if they're
being honest about this?).
Under adversarial conditions like those outlined by Jude C. Nelson, PoS reverts to “phone-a-friend consensus”, or — to use a euphemism coined by Vitalik Buterin — “weak subjectivity”. Centralized Git repos offer a close to identical consensus model.
What’s the point in having a “blockchain” at all if under adversarial conditions, miners are necessarily demoted in favor of trusted human coordinators? Git is very “green-friendly”, too.
> What’s the point in having a “blockchain” at all if under adversarial conditions, miners are necessarily demoted in favor of trusted human coordinators?
In the quote you posted, Nelson is wrong when he states "[Bitcoin] provides a computational method for ranking fork quality". It only provides such a method when both forks agree on the underlying protocol. If two chains aren't being reconciled because the network is in disagreement on which set of rules is valid, the "computational method" is thrown out the window, and the big guns are called in (high profile developers, influencers in the space, etc.). He uses the words "canonical chain" and "attack" as if it's clear which chain is the attacker and which chain is canonical, but we need humans to help us make that determination on which is which. Chains by themselves aren't hostile or not, they're just numbers.
I'm not saying Ethereum is better by the way... they're all the same.
> In the quote you posted, Nelson is wrong when he states "[Bitcoin] provides a computational method for ranking fork quality". It only provides such a method when both forks agree on the underlying protocol.
Firstly, the “underlying [PoW] protocol” assumes the “majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network” (Satoshi, 2009). IOW “Bitcoin” is defined as the chain with the highest cumulative hashing power. That assumption is baked into all PoW networks.
Secondly, Jude C. Nelson — who you seem to have a professional/academic disagreement with — has a PhD in distributed systems from Princeton. I’m not saying your disagreement with Jude deserves no credibility, but I’m also not prepared to give a pseudonyous commenter on HN the same weight.
(JCN runs circles around Vitalik Buterin — a highly entertaining read [1].)
The 2013 bitcoin-0.7 BDB chainsplit incident you’ve propped up as “proof” PoW lacks a fork ranking protocol — which it doesn’t — was ultimately resolved with hashpower (of course). Humans only got involved there to prevent needless network downtime, read: “Eventually 24 blocks would be lost”. The incident would’ve eventually resolved itself on-chain by PoW miners, with hashing power only.
> I'm not saying [PoS] is better by the way... they're all the same.
Proof-of-Stake consensus lacks all notion of cumulative hashrate, and altogether lacks a quantitative fork ranking protocol. To claim PoS and PoW are “the same” in this respect is simply false equivalence.
PoS systems undeniably lack an on-chain mechanism for resolving fork disputes. Hence they have little need for a blockchain — after all, if a top-down human hierarchy presiding over a blockchain is going to unilaterally decide which chainfork to favor anyway, they might as well just skip the blockchain and use Git. As with Git repos, in PoS, forking disputes have to be handled by centralized authorities who outright dictate which Git history is valid. No other dispute resolution protocols are possible here.
Conversely, PoW systems make this determination by ranking cumulative hashing power amongst forked blockchains. PoW networks coldly and quantitatively come to consensus about what constitutes the longest valid chain. PoS systems use less energy than PoW systems, but they can’t even come to consensus without top-down hierarchical human intervention under adversarial conditions, hence they have little reason to use a blockchain at all.
> [The chainsplit] was ultimately resolved with hashpower
Did you read the article? Humans were needed to avoid catastrophe. Here let me post the relevant bit:
quote:
What would have happened if the developers had done nothing?
Throughout the text I’ve emphasized that the downgrade option was the correct one and that speed of developer response was of the essence. Let’s examine this claim further by thinking about what would have happened if the developers had simply let things take their course. Vitalik Buterin thinks everything would have been just fine: “if the developers had done nothing, then Bitcoin would have carried on nonetheless, only causing inconvenience to those bitcoind and BitcoinQt users who were on 0.7 and would have had to upgrade.”
Obviously, I disagree. We can’t know for sure what would have happened, but we can make informed guesses. First of all, the fork would have gone on for far longer — essentially until every last miner running version 0.7 or lower either shut down or upgraded their software. Given that many miners leave their setups unattended and others have custom setups that aren’t easy to upgrade quickly, the fork would have lasted days. This would have several effects. Most obviously, the psychological impact of an ongoing fork would have been serious. In contrast, as events actually turned out, the event happened overnight in the US and had been resolved the next morning, and media coverage praised the developers for their effective action. The price of Bitcoin dropped by 25% during the incident but recovered immediately to almost its previous value.
Another adverse impact is that exchanges or payment services that took too long to upgrade their clients (or disable transactions) might find themselves victims of large double-spend attacks. As it happened, OKPay suffered a $10,000 double spend. This was done by a user trying to prove a point and who revealed the details publicly; they got lucky in that their payment to OKPay was confirmed by the 0.8 branch but not 0.7. A longer-running fork would likely have exacerbated the problem and allowed malicious attackers to figure out a systematic way to create double-spend transactions. [1]
Worse, it is possible, even if not likely, that the 0.7 branch might have continued indefinitely. Obviously, if this did happen, it would be devastating for Bitcoin, resulting in a fork of the currency itself. One reason the fork might keep going is because of a “Goldfinger attacker” interested in de-stabilizing Bitcoin: they might not have the resources to execute a 51% attack, but the fork might give them just the opportunity they need: they could simply invest resources into keeping the 0.7 fork alive instead of launching an attack from scratch.
There’s another reason why the fork might have never ended. Miners who postponed their decision to switch from 0.7 to 0.8 by, say, a week would face the distasteful prospect of forgoing a week’s worth of mining revenue. They might instead gamble and continue to operate on the 0.7 branch as a big fish in a small pond. If the 0.7 branch had, say, 10% of the mining power of the 0.8 branch, the miner’s revenue would be multiplied tenfold by mining on the 0.7 branch. Of course, the currency they’d earn would be “Bitcoin v0.7”, which would fork into a different currency from “Bitcoin v0.8”, and would be worth much less, the latter being considered the legitimate Bitcoin. We analyze this type of situation in Chapter 7, “Community, Politics, and Regulation” of our Bitcoin textbook-in-progress or the corresponding sections of the video lecture.
While the exact course of events that would have resulted from inaction is debatable, it is clear that the downgrade solution is by far the less risky one, and the speed and clearheadedness of the developers’ response is commendable.
Basically none of that is consensus breaking. And I acknowledged the potential of a deep reorg leading to needless network downtime. In the author of the article’s opinion, this deep reorg would’ve resulted in utter chaos, which seems hyperbolic to me. Regardless, how does that disprove the existence of a fork ranking protocol in Bitcoin?
FWIW Ethereum has been planning to move off PoW for years. Really since the very beginning. No idea if it'll work but nonetheless, it's been the plan all along.
Transaction fees are also paid to miners, and transaction volume pushes fees up.
This is entirely by design. Satoshi's original Bitcoin whitepaper reads: "Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free."
I could be wrong, but I bet we've already seen within half an order of magnitude peak btc transaction demand.
Between competition (for example, we are just scratching the surface of eth tx demand, and high throughput competitors are out now) and L2 (ifwhen it ever delivers), I just can't ever see btc block bandwidth being priced 10x its previous peaks.
The Taproot upgrade is already in the process of being rolled out to the Bitcoin mainnet with a soft fork:
https://taprootactivation.com/
Arguably, the Bitcoin scalability efforts have been progressing too slowly. Second generation blockchain designs such as Ethereum and Avalanche are going to dethrone Bitcoin at some point.
The efficiency of the hashing algorithm is irrelevant in Bitcoin, because the difficulty of finding a new block auto-adjusts to keep new blocks coming at a fixed 10-minutes interval.
If hashing gets faster, miners will just hash more, until the
block reward approximates the total cost of operating the mining rigs (which is dominated by the cost of electricity).
These block rewards halve every 4 years, but Bitcoin's price has been increasing faster. Consequently, power consumption kept increasing and will likely continue to increase.
Lol the price and the cost of mining are only related because of humans, not technicals. Efficiency is still a thing which is costly in the near term and a technical feature.
The cost to secure the network is a function of the value of the network. So far, the more valuable the network becomes the more it costs to secure it.
What technology could break this relationship so that the cost of securing the network decreases as the value of the network increases?
> the more valuable the network becomes the more it costs to secure it
I'm not sure you need to completely break this relationship, just make it less linear. If I want to go from securing something against amateurs to securing it against governments I might go from 128 to 1024 bit encryption - at roughly 8x the cost to secure. But if an adversary has to use some form of brute force to crack it, they have to do 2^(1024 - 128) or about 10^70 times the work, so it's a lot more than 8x the security.
Obviously the above doesn't apply to Proof of Work, which seemingly require the relationship to be linear. Maybe Proof of Stake might get us in the right direction.
I don't think this is good for Tesla, not because of BTC, or the crypto market, but because of their customers, potential customers and fans.
In the end it just looks like a poorly thought idea, that in consequence made some people buy into that idea (some literally).
Don't get me wrong, everyone should be responsible for themselves, and Tesla can do what ever they want to, but it does make you wonder: what kind of commitments will Tesla suddenly back from? Was this just a gag? Because it didn't look like so, in fact it sounded quite serious and seemed like a stance?
Vision and mission aside, turning Tesla into a company that has erratic behavior doesn't inspire confidence to the consumer... one thing it's missing tight deadlines, other thing is product flaws due to novelty, but this is just an apparent act of randomness that they're trying to justify with something.
I'm thrilled at the decision. There are things I like and dislike about the Muskiverse, and the decision to promote Bitcoin was always a sketchy one for me.
What this new decision reinforces, to me, is that Musk is able to admit a mistake and do a 180. That is very good.
>What this new decision reinforces, to me, is that Musk is able to admit a mistake and do a 180. That is very good.
I can accept that, yet doesn't take from the fact that it was poorly thought... it lasted what, 3 months?
I perceive them as the leaders of EV innovation, and I think their actions were in line with that, and I thought they promoted something other then BTC when they took the stance - Bitcoin just happened to be the "gold standard".
Now they back tracked showing concern for the type of energy consumption, and are looking into other cryptos that are more energy efficient, but are not dumping BTC, because maybe if BTC goes greener it'll be cool again... are they selling EVs or are they into speculative trading?
> is that Musk is able to admit a mistake and do a 180
He's still hedging somewhat by saying "in the last few months" because it makes it sound like it was a sensible decision when Tesla decided to get in, then energy usage went crazy. In reality this was obvious long before Tesla bought into bitcoin. I'm sure many within the company were entirely aware of this but Elon rules all.
One of the things that worries me most about Tesla is the extent to which a billionaire with an absurd fondness for memes can do whatever he wants. Giving himself the title "Technoking" and his CFO "Master of Coin" is pretty harmless but it's also pretty stupid and makes it seem like there are no adults in the room. The bitcoin thing is the exact same dynamic except with actual damage involved.
I perceive Elon as a showman. Tesla says it doesn't spend anything on marketing. But whatever Tesla is paying Elon is their marketing budget. Because he keeps Tesla perpetually in the news.
It's hard to believe that the person who founded Tesla largely in the belief that it's a greener option to ICE vehicle just realized that Bitcoin wastes a shit ton of energy.
I agree about the showman bit. I really like that about Tesla. Traditional marketing has become invasive and exploitative, and it seems to drag companies into the muck.
Clearly Musk didn't just realize realize the problem this week, but his SNL appearance kicked off a round of criticism (eg: 'Some More News' https://youtu.be/5pNL7MlUpmI) and the Tesla announcement is probably an attempt to get ahead of it.
> What this new decision reinforces, to me, is that Musk is able to admit a mistake and do a 180. That is very good.
That's a very generous interpretation of the situation considering not too long ago Musk was a very vocal defender of BC allegedly using 70% renewable energy and thus being very green.
I doubt Musk would make these kinds of investments and commitments based on half-arsed understanding what's going on, the much more likely explanation is that he uses his social media reach to play pump and dump games with cryptocurrencies.
"I can tolerate a car that shows up a year late and then explodes in my driveway but I can't tolerate being unserious about Bitcoin" seems like it'd be a pretty rare opinion.
47 comments
[ 96.7 ms ] story [ 1109 ms ] threadtl;dr - He's appealing to popular morals.
We like to think smart people are going to make the right decision every time, but people have their limits.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26220992
That's the thing. Read my analysis... it doesn't matter if something better comes along. As long as the tokens are around they can just be more and more scarce and go up in price.
Proof of stake = trust humans to determine what happened.
PoW is superior.
This is the kind of vapor Bitcoiners love to inhale and it's just not true. In the history of Bitcoin, it has happened many times where the "work" of a chain was irrelevant because humans disagreed with the contents of that chain. See: 2010 fork, 2013 fork, 2017 fork, etc.
When two chains are mined using the same binary, yes, "physics" seems to be in control on which chain wins (ie. the one with the most work). But when one chain expresses a slightly different protocol, humans take over and decide which protocol is the valid one (even if it has less work).
And if humans are ultimately deciding on what's valid Bitcoin and what's not, we have to ask ourselves which humans are the most influential in the discussion on what's valid and what's not. We need to know who these players are because with a project worth this much, you can bet that they are targets of powerful and wealthy entities.
What’s the point in having a “blockchain” at all if under adversarial conditions, miners are necessarily demoted in favor of trusted human coordinators? Git is very “green-friendly”, too.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26810619
If you want to see precisely how "miners are demoted in favor of trusted human coordinators" in Bitcoin, you can read this analysis of the 2013 fork: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-...
In the quote you posted, Nelson is wrong when he states "[Bitcoin] provides a computational method for ranking fork quality". It only provides such a method when both forks agree on the underlying protocol. If two chains aren't being reconciled because the network is in disagreement on which set of rules is valid, the "computational method" is thrown out the window, and the big guns are called in (high profile developers, influencers in the space, etc.). He uses the words "canonical chain" and "attack" as if it's clear which chain is the attacker and which chain is canonical, but we need humans to help us make that determination on which is which. Chains by themselves aren't hostile or not, they're just numbers.
I'm not saying Ethereum is better by the way... they're all the same.
Firstly, the “underlying [PoW] protocol” assumes the “majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network” (Satoshi, 2009). IOW “Bitcoin” is defined as the chain with the highest cumulative hashing power. That assumption is baked into all PoW networks.
Secondly, Jude C. Nelson — who you seem to have a professional/academic disagreement with — has a PhD in distributed systems from Princeton. I’m not saying your disagreement with Jude deserves no credibility, but I’m also not prepared to give a pseudonyous commenter on HN the same weight.
(JCN runs circles around Vitalik Buterin — a highly entertaining read [1].)
The 2013 bitcoin-0.7 BDB chainsplit incident you’ve propped up as “proof” PoW lacks a fork ranking protocol — which it doesn’t — was ultimately resolved with hashpower (of course). Humans only got involved there to prevent needless network downtime, read: “Eventually 24 blocks would be lost”. The incident would’ve eventually resolved itself on-chain by PoW miners, with hashing power only.
> I'm not saying [PoS] is better by the way... they're all the same.
Proof-of-Stake consensus lacks all notion of cumulative hashrate, and altogether lacks a quantitative fork ranking protocol. To claim PoS and PoW are “the same” in this respect is simply false equivalence.
PoS systems undeniably lack an on-chain mechanism for resolving fork disputes. Hence they have little need for a blockchain — after all, if a top-down human hierarchy presiding over a blockchain is going to unilaterally decide which chainfork to favor anyway, they might as well just skip the blockchain and use Git. As with Git repos, in PoS, forking disputes have to be handled by centralized authorities who outright dictate which Git history is valid. No other dispute resolution protocols are possible here.
Conversely, PoW systems make this determination by ranking cumulative hashing power amongst forked blockchains. PoW networks coldly and quantitatively come to consensus about what constitutes the longest valid chain. PoS systems use less energy than PoW systems, but they can’t even come to consensus without top-down hierarchical human intervention under adversarial conditions, hence they have little reason to use a blockchain at all.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25984356
Did you read the article? Humans were needed to avoid catastrophe. Here let me post the relevant bit:
quote:
What would have happened if the developers had done nothing? Throughout the text I’ve emphasized that the downgrade option was the correct one and that speed of developer response was of the essence. Let’s examine this claim further by thinking about what would have happened if the developers had simply let things take their course. Vitalik Buterin thinks everything would have been just fine: “if the developers had done nothing, then Bitcoin would have carried on nonetheless, only causing inconvenience to those bitcoind and BitcoinQt users who were on 0.7 and would have had to upgrade.”
Obviously, I disagree. We can’t know for sure what would have happened, but we can make informed guesses. First of all, the fork would have gone on for far longer — essentially until every last miner running version 0.7 or lower either shut down or upgraded their software. Given that many miners leave their setups unattended and others have custom setups that aren’t easy to upgrade quickly, the fork would have lasted days. This would have several effects. Most obviously, the psychological impact of an ongoing fork would have been serious. In contrast, as events actually turned out, the event happened overnight in the US and had been resolved the next morning, and media coverage praised the developers for their effective action. The price of Bitcoin dropped by 25% during the incident but recovered immediately to almost its previous value.
Another adverse impact is that exchanges or payment services that took too long to upgrade their clients (or disable transactions) might find themselves victims of large double-spend attacks. As it happened, OKPay suffered a $10,000 double spend. This was done by a user trying to prove a point and who revealed the details publicly; they got lucky in that their payment to OKPay was confirmed by the 0.8 branch but not 0.7. A longer-running fork would likely have exacerbated the problem and allowed malicious attackers to figure out a systematic way to create double-spend transactions. [1] Worse, it is possible, even if not likely, that the 0.7 branch might have continued indefinitely. Obviously, if this did happen, it would be devastating for Bitcoin, resulting in a fork of the currency itself. One reason the fork might keep going is because of a “Goldfinger attacker” interested in de-stabilizing Bitcoin: they might not have the resources to execute a 51% attack, but the fork might give them just the opportunity they need: they could simply invest resources into keeping the 0.7 fork alive instead of launching an attack from scratch.
There’s another reason why the fork might have never ended. Miners who postponed their decision to switch from 0.7 to 0.8 by, say, a week would face the distasteful prospect of forgoing a week’s worth of mining revenue. They might instead gamble and continue to operate on the 0.7 branch as a big fish in a small pond. If the 0.7 branch had, say, 10% of the mining power of the 0.8 branch, the miner’s revenue would be multiplied tenfold by mining on the 0.7 branch. Of course, the currency they’d earn would be “Bitcoin v0.7”, which would fork into a different currency from “Bitcoin v0.8”, and would be worth much less, the latter being considered the legitimate Bitcoin. We analyze this type of situation in Chapter 7, “Community, Politics, and Regulation” of our Bitcoin textbook-in-progress or the corresponding sections of the video lecture.
While the exact course of events that would have resulted from inaction is debatable, it is clear that the downgrade solution is by far the less risky one, and the speed and clearheadedness of the developers’ response is commendable.
No, block rewards are much bigger than dust & lost keys, so supply will keep expanding for a very long time before it shrinks.
Bitcoin mining reward halves every ~4 years, eventually falling to 0.
This is entirely by design. Satoshi's original Bitcoin whitepaper reads: "Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free."
Between competition (for example, we are just scratching the surface of eth tx demand, and high throughput competitors are out now) and L2 (ifwhen it ever delivers), I just can't ever see btc block bandwidth being priced 10x its previous peaks.
The Taproot upgrade is already in the process of being rolled out to the Bitcoin mainnet with a soft fork: https://taprootactivation.com/
Arguably, the Bitcoin scalability efforts have been progressing too slowly. Second generation blockchain designs such as Ethereum and Avalanche are going to dethrone Bitcoin at some point.
If hashing gets faster, miners will just hash more, until the block reward approximates the total cost of operating the mining rigs (which is dominated by the cost of electricity).
These block rewards halve every 4 years, but Bitcoin's price has been increasing faster. Consequently, power consumption kept increasing and will likely continue to increase.
What technology could break this relationship so that the cost of securing the network decreases as the value of the network increases?
I'm not sure you need to completely break this relationship, just make it less linear. If I want to go from securing something against amateurs to securing it against governments I might go from 128 to 1024 bit encryption - at roughly 8x the cost to secure. But if an adversary has to use some form of brute force to crack it, they have to do 2^(1024 - 128) or about 10^70 times the work, so it's a lot more than 8x the security.
Obviously the above doesn't apply to Proof of Work, which seemingly require the relationship to be linear. Maybe Proof of Stake might get us in the right direction.
In the end it just looks like a poorly thought idea, that in consequence made some people buy into that idea (some literally).
Don't get me wrong, everyone should be responsible for themselves, and Tesla can do what ever they want to, but it does make you wonder: what kind of commitments will Tesla suddenly back from? Was this just a gag? Because it didn't look like so, in fact it sounded quite serious and seemed like a stance?
Vision and mission aside, turning Tesla into a company that has erratic behavior doesn't inspire confidence to the consumer... one thing it's missing tight deadlines, other thing is product flaws due to novelty, but this is just an apparent act of randomness that they're trying to justify with something.
What this new decision reinforces, to me, is that Musk is able to admit a mistake and do a 180. That is very good.
I can accept that, yet doesn't take from the fact that it was poorly thought... it lasted what, 3 months?
I perceive them as the leaders of EV innovation, and I think their actions were in line with that, and I thought they promoted something other then BTC when they took the stance - Bitcoin just happened to be the "gold standard".
Now they back tracked showing concern for the type of energy consumption, and are looking into other cryptos that are more energy efficient, but are not dumping BTC, because maybe if BTC goes greener it'll be cool again... are they selling EVs or are they into speculative trading?
He's still hedging somewhat by saying "in the last few months" because it makes it sound like it was a sensible decision when Tesla decided to get in, then energy usage went crazy. In reality this was obvious long before Tesla bought into bitcoin. I'm sure many within the company were entirely aware of this but Elon rules all.
One of the things that worries me most about Tesla is the extent to which a billionaire with an absurd fondness for memes can do whatever he wants. Giving himself the title "Technoking" and his CFO "Master of Coin" is pretty harmless but it's also pretty stupid and makes it seem like there are no adults in the room. The bitcoin thing is the exact same dynamic except with actual damage involved.
It's hard to believe that the person who founded Tesla largely in the belief that it's a greener option to ICE vehicle just realized that Bitcoin wastes a shit ton of energy.
That's a very generous interpretation of the situation considering not too long ago Musk was a very vocal defender of BC allegedly using 70% renewable energy and thus being very green.
I doubt Musk would make these kinds of investments and commitments based on half-arsed understanding what's going on, the much more likely explanation is that he uses his social media reach to play pump and dump games with cryptocurrencies.
what exactly is the problem here? how is he 'manipulating' the cryto-currency markets?
yes, a lot of people pay attention to what he says, but how is that manipulation?