Yesterday, in a response to a thread from Bitcoin podcaster Peter McCormack on his misinformed shilling of $DOGE in recent weeks, Elon Musk replied “Obnoxious threads like this make me want to go all in on Doge,” in what was most likely a troll for the known jokester.
Equally funny was Musk’s misinformed meltdown that followed.
While Musk no doubt is one of the most successful businessmen in the world, let’s not get caught up in credentialism. What is taking place with bitcoin is far bigger than Musk, and it’s more than probable that his ego is damaged by the fact that he doesnt matter.
“How can you say that Elon doesn’t matter when he’s moving the market with his tweets?” you might ask.
It’s simple: Bitcoin is solving the biggest problem in the world today, providing a sound base layer peg for money to the world. If the market collectively pumps or dumps on the news/rumor that a Fortune 500 CEO is going to move his company’s billion-dollar-plus stash of BTC, the Bitcoin network does not care. Blocks will continue to be mined, and the Bitcoin network will continue to provide a sound money alternative to the great central bank monetary experiment that is plaguing our world. Musk doesn’t change this, no one does. That’s the whole point.
But yesterday’s debacle does raise a question: What might be Musk’s ulterior motives? Tesla the company has struggled to become profitable for the existence of the business, and without the tap of government subsidies, it most likely would not exist today. Musk has in large part built his empire because of handouts from the state, and the very existence of a non-sovereign hard money standard put’s Musk’s empire into question. While the pull of bitcoin’s price appreciation is extremely strong, does Musk realize what’s at stake? It’s tough to know.
What is known is that the individuals around the world that actually understand bitcoin are unbothered and unfazed, and continue to accumulate at a feverish pace.
It would seem plausible that the CEO of a company that bought $1.5 billion of the asset would do some proper due diligence. Well, apparently not. Nodes control the network, and there are 10,000 public nodes running around the world, with tens of thousands more running privately routing over the Tor network. Not your node, not your rules, and node runners control the network’s consensus rules, as was shown during the 2017 user-activated soft fork.
If Musk wants to buy dogecoin, encourage it. Let Musk be taught a lesson in monetary economics in real time. If Musk wants to buy a proof-of-work cryptocurrency with inferior development, global liquidity and security compared to bitcoin, all the power to him. That is simply a gift to all bitcoin accumulators, who will happily continue to hoard the hardest monetary asset known to man at the expense of an ill-informed jokester with an ego problem.
Just remember Musk:
Thanks for the stacking opportunity, truly,
Bitcoiners everywhere.