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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.
I think the bitcoin structure is quite brilliant.
The blockchain technology might be brilliant. Bitcoin very definitely is not. We shouldn't confuse the two. The jury is still out on blockchain but I think the more interesting uses of it won't be for currency. Bitcoin is an interesting but ultimately flawed experiment which might also be a pyramid scheme either intentionally or unintentionally.
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
This is just idiotic. Paper money isn't going away any time soon and neither is fiat currency. Maybe in the far future but even then I doubt it. There is simply too much utility in paper money for a lot of transactions. Asking everyone to either carry an expensive computer with them or carry some means to interact securely with one in order to facilitate even the most basic transaction is unrealistic. Not everyone can get a credit card or afford a smartphone and even if they could it still wouldn't be practical some of the time.
If he actually thinks the dollar is trading bits of paper he has no idea what money actually is. (I doubt he's that naive) The vast majority of currency is nothing more than digits in a ledger somewhere. Paper currency is a tiny fraction of the total amount of money in circulation. Somewhere less than 10% of the total.
when you pry it out of my cold dead mattress. /s
Especially when I can get a discount for using cash instead of the seller having to pay a transaction fee if a credit card or some other method of payment is used.
We are already past ten toes over that line. When there is a power outage most businesses shut down, because they cannot process credit cards. Many cannot even process cash.
Obviously much of this is still solvable with cash around. Supposedly.
Of course, this larger ominous question is why the banks were bailed out with the 2008 meltdown. Because if all the big banks were suddenly forced to file for bankruptcy, would the credit cards still work? Could you get gas and get to work? Can that gas station actually get gasoline delivered? Can your grocery store get restocked?
Once a business, say, a gasoline distributor, goes into bankruptcy, they cannot suddenly create a novel procedure to extend credit to the corner station without approval from a judge.
No, it would be about making everyone account for all their money.
The problem is that the people who are hiding their money tend to be the poor. A handyman is a good example, these people don't make all that much money, what they do make is on a cash basis and they usually pay taxes on little or none of that money. This is what makes it possible for you to hire someone on craigslist who comes and installs an appliance for a reasonable rate. There isn't much tax to be gained here.
The people who are dodging significant amounts of tax that are worth pursuing are doing it legally. The biggest dodges are dodging income entirely. There are several ways to do that, real estate is a good one, just reinvest the proceeds or if you own a boatload of stock in a company only sell what you need and give a chunk to charity or to pay a debt to avoid paying tax on it. The stock you gave away counts as money spent but only stock you cash in and dividends count as income.
Troll lol. I guess there are few rich tech beasts with mod points.
If you want to see an example of how the dodge income scam the rich play works just refer to the taxes Warren Buffet helpfully revealed. I'll fudge the numbers because I'm too lazy to look, the concept and rough scale is right. His actual gains were billions but he only directly cashed out maybe 20 mill and dodged almost all the tax on that giving another chunk to charity. For the most part he is able to invest in new companies, make acquisitions, etc by using stock to do it. Hell, he could pay everyone down to his lawn service in stock for all I know and they'd be crazy not to take it as the stock has a good return and appreciates over time unlike cash which depreciates with inflation.
This is the loophole which needs closed, these are the tax dodgers we need to go after. Leave the handyman alone, if he does well his business will grow and he won't be able to hide his few thousand a year from the IRS anymore. For the most part small independent business people like the handyman turn out to have a sense of ethics and want to bring it above board as soon as they have enough going on for it to be worthwhile anyway. That is why the IRS doesn't expend many resources tilting at that windmill.
No, mostly they're called people trapped in a bad situation created by the society they live in. Even assuming someone screwed up to create the problem in the first place, how are they supposed to go about putting their life right again when they can't even get paid for working? (How many decent employers do you know that will pay with cash instead of check?)
I do think that society should recognize that it *creates* such people, and work to fix the flaws that produce such people, and make sure that people born into such conditions through no fault of their own, find it easy to leave. "Tough love" only works when a person's problems are of their own creation, not when it's a systemic problem that might keep you trapped just as surely as it traps them, had you been unfortunate enough to be born or stumble into it.
If we want to encourage everyone to be productive members of society, we need to make it *at least* as easy for the poorest among us to be upwardly mobile as it is for most, not more difficult. But we live in a society that throws up a whole lot of barriers to that climb, some of them pretty substantial. I know people who would be financially devastated by earning a 10% raise - it would push them off the "welfare cliff", and not be nearly enough for them to reach to other side. It is to our shame as a society that we allow such traps to exist.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
For those who haven't seen (felt) polymer banknotes (i.e. Americans), they're like Tyvek sheeting used to wrap houses and also for certain large USPS envelopes (visit the post office). Very strong, durable, and tear resistant.
U.S. currency has to go through certain, brutal tests before it's approved. One of these tests is to roll it into a tight cylinder inside a metal tube, then a piston travels down the tube to smash the paper cylinder down length-wise. This test is repeated multiple times. Any new bill or security feature has to survive this process before the U.S. will adopt it. This is why U.S. bills don't have large holograms like bills from some other countries - this rolling/crushing test destroys them. This is probably also why we haven't adopted polymer notes yet. The polymer notes are resistant to folding, and this test is pretty much the ultimate force-fold test. It probably weakens if not tears some of the plastic fibers substantially, whereas the more pliable plant fibers in paper bills can survive it.