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Elon Musk: Bitcoin Structure is Brilliant, But Has Its Cons; Paper Money is Going Away (ark-invest.com)
Elon Musk, who among other things, is a pioneer in the payments industry, has weighed in on one of the most divisive topics in finance today: Bitcoin. In a podcast with Cathie Wood of ARK Invest, Musk, the co-founder and chief executive of electric car maker Tesla, was asked to "go off topic" and offer up some thoughts on the most famous cryptocurrency. From a report: "I think the bitcoin structure is quite brilliant. But I'm not sure that it would be a good use of Tesla's resources to get involved in crypto," he told Wood. Musk, who founded PayPal, added that the days of paper money are numbered and digital currencies could offer a more efficient solution to shifting value. "Paper money is going away and crypto is a far better way to transfer value than pieces of paper, that's for sure, but it has its pros and cons," he said.
If he means money made of paper, then he's probably right, but wrong otherwise. There's plenty of people who don't, won't, or can't have a credit card and more who wouldn't have a personal computing device to do their daily transactions with.
Normally that is how I would respond. But in this case there are some mitigating circumstances. Elon was involved with Paypal, some sort of payment tracking system. And it is mentioned to be off-topic. So I am going to be a little forgiving here.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
He has two bachelor's degrees. One in economics and one in physics. His experience with PayPal aside, Bitcoin is firmly within his areas of expertise.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Wide swings in value is not a "con" - it's a non-starter for the general public. Ask the Weimar or anyone unfortunate enough to live in Venezuela.
That's a good reason for keeping the banks alive, not a good reason for bailing them out though. Buy them out, to the tune of their existing debt, break them up, and send them on their way, with large low-interest government loans to repay. After imprisoning all the executives that decided their personal profit was more important than national security. And all the regulators who were either incompetent or corrupt enough to not spot the problem sooner.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
"Crazy left wing sites". The irony of it is that those sites would be moderate, fence sitters in any other country.
It isn't hard to wind up in that category. A former co-worker closed a bank account. A year later, some place hit the account with an ACH debit, and then the bank placed the co-worker on the Chex Systems blacklist. Even though the account was closed, that $25 for some yearly thing became $250 with all the fees the bank assessed. No word was sent to the co-worker by mail. He found out about it when his savings account was closed by the current bank.
The current US system has no protection for anyone but businesses. It is like the early 1900s, all over again, with hucksters and snake oil sellers everywhere, no laws to protect consumers, and step out of line, and the Pinkertons will end you. Only difference is that we have a recession-proof economy that only goes up and a stock market which is crashproof, so most people really don't care about this stuff.
Getting COMPLETELY away from cash is what boggles my mind. Sure, all my professional and mostly personal things are handled electronically, but I often travel to weird places, at weird times, where things like electricity or signal can not only not be relied upon, but sometimes don't exist to begin with. Not having say, $200 in cash is just mind boggling to me.
I guess if I never left my green zone I wouldn't care, but why live that way.