Bitcoin surges, exchanges flooded after Tesla says it bought $1.5bn in BTC, hopes to accept it as payment soon Tesla has plowed $1.5bn (£1.1bn) into buying up Bitcoin, and expects to start accepting the cryptocurrency as a form of payment in the future, it announced on Monday. In an SEC filing detailing its 2020 financial results, the electric car maker revealed it amassed a pile of reserve cryptocurrency last month. The disclosure …
It's... weird. So Tesla spends $1.5bn on cryptograms and says people will soon be able to buy Tesla products with them. Surely it would have been simpler to flog a Model 3 for 1BC?
But then with regulatory credits starting to run out, Tesla won't be able to flog those for ever to pad it's revenues. So I guess hedging your bets makes sense. Value of a cryptogram shot up on news of this announcement, as it has before with other favorable Musk-tweets. As long as it stays, or can be made to stay high, it's a handy way to drive 'profits' made from currency gains.
I guess at some point, Tesla may have to be reclassified from a car & solar maker to a currency trading operation.
t's... weird. So Tesla spends $1.5bn on cryptograms and says people will soon be able to buy Tesla products with them. Surely it would have been simpler to flog a Model 3 for 1BC?
It would if they expected to keep them but by buying them and then declaring them to be magic beans he's limiting the downside. If anyone is stupid enough to buy Bitcoins to buy a Tesla they could easily be buying them from Tesla at who knows what profi, could easily be > 20%. And, given how many fans Musk seems to have, that doesn't seem to be unlikely.
Tesla is so screamingly obviously overvalued (the car maker most likely to be the biggest in the world? Come on, especially with that idiot in charge..) that there are so many companies shorting its shares, it's likely that there aren't enough available for them all to buy them back without pushing the price still higher.
Certainly, if I had any, I'd be selling. Over a billion on something that's not literally a ponzi, but just acts like one?
I wonder if this is another case of some boss getting his company to buy his bitcoin. They get loads of money they can actually use, so who cares about what happens to the company?
Oops, we swapped out that tweet with one that has more context. The above comment is referring to this tweet, which was originally embedded in the article.
C.
I am not sure what the source would be but I am sure people here can figure it out for you. I think that every transaction needs to be baked into the block chain. That means that it needs to "mined". The actual transaction cost that is being claimed here is the total cost of the miners for that particular block that contains those transactions, or about a few minutes of all the power being consumed by all miners.The whole thing is pointless. Not to mention that you are placing your trust in a protocol that has agreed to to this but has also agreed i the past to stop particular coins, without recourse to any legal system. Actually the more you look into the more crap it seems
It's all estimates based on the energy consumption of current mining hardware and the total network hashrate, but here's one source that has been tracking it for years: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
Paying for a Tesla in bitcoin is a risky kind of strategy for Tesla - if they accept it as payment one day and by the time they come to trade their bitcoins on the market, the price crashes through the floor, someone has just made a mug out of them!
You're basically gambling when you buy bitcoins that the value will go up - but why should it? Eventually, people will want to liquidate their BCs and at that point it could easily start a run where no-one is buying and the BCs are effectively worthless. Have these people not seen It's a Wonderful Life? Unlike banks that now have deposit security schemes, there is no such protection for cryptocurrency and why should there be.
"Paying for a Tesla in bitcoin is a risky kind of strategy for Tesla - if they accept it as payment one day and by the time they come to trade their bitcoins on the market, the price crashes through the floor, someone has just made a mug out of them!"
This is addressed in the article:
"...we expect to begin accepting bitcoin as a form of payment for our products in the near future, subject to applicable laws and initially on a limited basis, which we may or may not liquidate upon receipt."
If they're worried about a ₿ crash, they'll convert it to $ as soon as they receive it. I guess they'll convert a proportion of every ₿ sale into $ anyway, depending on how optimistic Musk really feels.
Paying for a Tesla in bitcoin is a risky kind of strategy for Tesla - if they accept it as payment one day and by the time they come to trade their bitcoins on the market, the price crashes through the floor, someone has just made a mug out of them!
That's not really much different to forex hedging. Tesla sells globally, so it's customers pay in a variety of currencies that fluctuate against the dollar. Same with costs, eg if I buy a Chinese-made Tesla, costs would be in yuan, revenue in dollars or sterling. But there's a huge difference in currency fluctuations, and the ability to potentially manipulate currency value.. Which will also affect Tesla's cash, or cash equivalent positions. It makes life more interesting for Tesla's CFO & treasury I guess.
Bitcoin isn't an alternative to fiat currency any more as people are just buying it to invest and not spending it on stuff and so eventually the bubble will burst. Especially as the transaction fees are now ridiculously high for small transactions that it can only really be used for large expensive purchases, and who wants to take the risk of selling something expensive for bitcoin when the market could crash the day after the sale and you are left with nothing but some worthless virtual money.
Elon Musk has enough money to be able to afford to risk $1.5bn on Bitcoin and loose it all and still have enough in the bank to never have to work another day of his life should he choose.
Some interesting comments being made about Bitcoin but it was just the start of Web3.
74% of the mining energy comes from renewable sources. Fiat currency and the banking system needed for paper money uses double the energy of Bitcoin.
It is common knowledge that the banks of the world can't be trusted and if you deposit your money in one it no longer belongs to you. The decentralised internet and decentralised finance is already happening and the fork in the road between those that hold paper money and digital currency is a reality. PayPal now accept Bitcoin in the US, Square have adopted it and VISA are testing an API for digital wallets. Billions of dollars have been invested by large companies like JP Morgan, Micro Strategy and Greyscale because they know this is the first store of value that can't be manipulated by governments or the banking system.
Anyone care to name any other investment that has beaten Bitcoin over the last 10 years?
Your $100 in 2009 would now be worth $9.2M.
Even if 74% of the energy comes from renewable sources, that's GigaWatts of electricity that's not being used for something actually worthwhile.
Your $100 in 2009 would have been hacked from some exchange, probably Mt Gox, or you'd have lost the private key.
One word for anyone believing the price is sustainable: Tether.
Also, Bitcoin doesn't replace "the banking system". It maybe at best replaces the cash and transaction bits of it. If you want a mortgage to buy a house, or need funding for a business idea, you will still need banks, even if they give the loans / funding in bitcoin rather than US$ or whatever.
It surprises me that the denizens of this forum who are typically so well-informed about many matters continually repeat the same tired myths about cryptocurrency and appear to be so under-informed about defi, settlement layers and so many intricacies of this emerging tech. Bitcoin or Ethereum or any of the other currencies may well collapse but the sniping here seems to have a very strong odor of emotional reaction. For example, the commenter who asserts that "you will lose your keys" might as well be thumbing his nose with his tongue out. Really?
It's all good. I'm happy with my modest cryptocurrency investment, taken as part of a diversification strategy and now worth many, many times my basis. If I lose it, fair enough. Until then, I'm brushing up on Loopring, Uniswap, Filecoin and some other interesting ideas.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
