Bitcoin is More Credible than Elon. Bitcoin Tech Talk #240

Elon this week has started to criticize Bitcoin and began to ignite speculation about making a competitor out of Dogecoin. His attacks on Bitcoin’s energy use have been debunked many times, but I found this response by Saifedean to be most helpful from an economic perspective to understand why that energy needs to be spent. Jack Mallers also has an incredible tweetstorm about Elon as well.

In this piece, I’m going to explain how he likely got here and what’s likely to happen. As I’ll explain, we’ve seen this all before. There are two fundamental errors here that Elon is making and these are mistakes that a whole host of different people have made in the past.

The first error is that of treating Bitcoin as a technology only. This is generally borne out of hubris, especially from technically-minded people. After all, he’s made a better rocket, a better electric car, and better tunnels. How hard can it be to build a better money? This would be true if money were like mouse traps, where incremental technical improvement is the main criteria for market adoption.