Popular technology entrepreneur and CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk recently said that Bitcoin’s structure was quite brilliant and that digital currency is “a far better way to transfer value than pieces of paper.” Musk made these remarks while in an interview with advisory services firm ARK invests’ Podcast on Feb 19.
During the podcast, he also answered a question on whether Bitcoin will become the only native crypto-currency of the internet. Musk responded by saying that the “the Bitcoin structure was quite brilliant, he also voiced his thoughts on the downside of crypto by saying “one of the downsides of crypto is that computationally it is quite energy intensive”
He added;
So there have to be some kind of constraints on the creation of crypto. But it’s very energy intensive to create the incremental Bitcoin at this point.”
On that note Musk stressed that;
“it would not be a good use of Tesla resources to get involved in crypto. We’re just really trying to accelerate the advance of sustainable energy.”
He went on to say that crypto “bypasses currency controls […] paper money is going away, and crypto is a far better way to transfer value than pieces of paper, that’s for sure.”
In a February 2018 tweet, Musk revealed that he only owned a paltry 0.25 BTC that had been sent to him by a good friend many years ago. Apart from the 0.25 BTC gift from his friend, Musk revealed that he literally owned no cryptos.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is not the first to make a case for crypto as a great store of value or “digital gold”. Former Goldman Sachs partner and founder of crypto merchant Bank Galaxy Digital, recently said that “Bitcoin is going to be digital gold, a place where you have sovereign money, it’s not U.S. money, it’s not Chinese money, it’s sovereign. Sovereignty costs a lot, it should.”
Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey, is also a big believer that Bitcoin will become the “native currency of the internet”.
He said earlier this month that
“[Bitcoin] feels it’s the one that wants to be currency the most, versus others that are doing more general purpose things or distributed computing […] I think [the altcoin space] has generated some really amazing ideas, but I’m focused on currency and the transactional aspect.”
Such high profile endorsements of crypto are certainly not enough to drive crypto prices up the charts but they do serve to influence and energize market sentiment. Investors both individual and institutional are slowly warming up to crypto and only time will tell how quick this industry can grow.
image courtesy of fossbytes
