Elon Musk Just Revealed the Surprising Amount of Bitcoin He Owns
Entrepreneur and engineer Elon Musk — man whose name is synonymous with boundary-pushing companies like Tesla and SpaceX — just revealed how much Bitcoin he owns. And it’s not a lot.
“I literally own zero cryptocurrency, apart from .25 BTC that a friend sent me many years ago,” Musk said in a tweet on Thursday. That’s about $2,552.42 as of Friday afternoon (Bitcoin values fluctuate constantly). Musk, by contrast, is worth $21.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index.
Not sure. I let @jack know, but it’s still going. I literally own zero cryptocurrency, apart from .25 BTC that a friend sent me many years ago.
Musk’s tweet was in response to a Twitter user asking why there were so many spammers impersonating Musk with cryptocurrency scams.
“What’s with all the ETH spam?” a user asked, referring to the cryptocurrency Ethereum.
“Not sure,” Musk responded. “I let [Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter] know, but it’s still going.”
Twitter handles that resemble famous people, like Musk or even President Donald Trump, scam people out of their cryptocurrencies, BuzzFeed reported earlier this month.
The following example was shared by BuzzFeed:
‘I’m donating 250 BITCOIN! to the BTC community!’ @ElonMuski tweeted Thursday in a reply to the billionaire’s real Twitter account. ‘First 250 transactions with 0.2 BTC sent to the address below will receive 1.0 BTC in the address the 0.2 BTC came from!’
Note the name @ElonMuski, with the added “i” at the end.
“We’re aware of this form of manipulation and are proactively implementing a number of signals to prevent these types of accounts from engaging with others in a deceptive manner,” Twitter told BuzzFeed in a statement.
Bitcoin, the first blockchain currency, skyrocketed at the end of 2017, hitting a high of $19,850. It is currently worth around $10,180.60, according to Coindesk. For cryptocurrency novices interested in investing, here’s an excellent primer.
Elon musk bitcoin
Still have a question? Ask your own!
Elon Musk does not own any bitcoin, but he has taken it somewhat positively with caveats, that it needs more work to be done.
Before I dive into more details, I would like to inspire readers to get some more essentials out of the way.
As of today, bitcoin is certainly not looking unsuccessful. I would refer the readers to the history of bitcoin on Wikipedia.
The landmark essentials are that in November 2008, a paper was posted on the internet under the name Satoshi Nakamoto titled bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. This paper detailed methods of using a peer-to-peer network to generate what was described as "a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust".
In January 2009, the bitcoin network came into existence with the release of the first open source bitcoin client and the issuance of the first bitcoins, with Satoshi Nakamoto mining the first block of bitcoins ever (known as the "genesis block"), which had a reward of 50 bitcoins. The value of the first bitcoin transactions were negotiated by individuals on the bitcointalk forums with one notable transaction of 10,000 BTC used to indirectly purchase two pizzas delivered by Papa John’s .
On 6 August 2010, a major vulnerability in the bitcoin protocol was spotted. Transactions weren't properly verified before they were included in the transaction log or " blockchain " which let users bypass bitcoin's economic restrictions and create an indefinite number of bitcoins.
On 15 August, the vulnerability was exploited; over 184 billion bitcoins were generated in a transaction, and sent to two addresses on the network. Within hours, the transaction was spotted and erased from the transaction log after the bug was fixed and the network forked to an updated version of the bitcoin protocol.
This was the only major security flaw found and exploited in bitcoin's history.
Since then, the trust came on line for bitcoin, but it has picked up ever since.
To put it in perspective, if you converted all your net worth into bitcoins exactly one year back, today your net worth would be twice as much.
Here is where you can read more about bitcoin.
From this chart, bitcoin seems to be on the success pathway.
Now to the question:
Published on Feb 26, 2015
In this interview, Elon discusses his thoughts on bitcoin. Will bitcoin be more than a means of illegal transactions? Elon doesn't think so. This is not a bad thing. He does acknowledge that digital currency does need to be revolutionized, however.
- For any currency, the guarantee of the securer is on the line. Think for example about United States Dollars.
As of today, anyone who carries United States Dollars can convert them into British Pound. Would ten years from now the value for both be the same?
May be not! See for example in this chart
that USD has gotten stronger over years.
The second thing is security. Any time something is tied up with something illegal, and there is risk of stealing by hackers, people usually want to play a conservative approach.
Here's How Much Bitcoin Elon Musk Owns
Tesla CEO Elon Musk isn’t exactly active in cryptocurrency. Musk revealed this week on Twitter how much Bitcoin he owns—and it’s not much.
Musk shed light on his bitcoin ownership in response to a question from a Twitter follower asking why there were so many bots impersonating him to push cryptocurrency scams.
“What’s with all the ETH spam?” the Twitter user asked, referring to the cryptocurrency Ethereum. Musk tweeted back: “Not sure. I let Jack know, but it’s still going.” Musk was referring to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
“I literally own zero cryptocurrency, apart from .25 BTC that a friend sent me many years ago,” Musk said in a tweet on Thursday. That’s about $2,500 as of Friday evening (as of Friday afternoon, one Bitcoin was worth $10,012).
Not sure. I let @jack know, but it’s still going. I literally own zero cryptocurrency, apart from .25 BTC that a friend sent me many years ago.
That’s not a lot of money for Musk, who is worth billions. But even if Musk needed to access his bitcoin, he’d be unable to.
Late last year, a theory circulated that the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, is Musk. The blog post that floated the idea was by Sahil Gupta, a former intern at Musk’s other company, SpaceX.
Not true. A friend sent me part of a BTC a few years, but I don’t know where it is.
Someone on Twitter sent Musk a news article about the post. Not only was it untrue, Musk said, but he’s forgotten where his bitcoin is stored. Losing bitcoin isn’t so unusual. As Fortune exclusively revealed, somewhere between 2.78 million and 3.79 million bitcoins have been misplaced over the years.
Elon Musk: Bitcoin as a Legal to Illegal Bridge
Elon Musk, a legend in high tech business circles, is the founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX.
With the first project, Musk wants to revolutionize transportation on Earth with high-performance all-electric cars, and with the second he wants to revolutionize transportation to space.
He hasn’t (yet) Bitcoin projects but recently expressed interesting opinions about Bitcoin in an interview with Aspen Institute’s Walter Isaacson at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit.
The Bitcoin-related discussion begins shortly after 30 minutes in the video. Here is a transcript provided by a Reddit user.
Some Things Maybe Shouldn’t Be Illegal
Walter Isaacson: Do you think Bitcoin will be disruptive in that way? I mean now it’s a speculative currency, will it be something that will be what normal consumers will use and will disrupt the banking industry?
Elon Musk: My opinion on Bitcoin is, I mean I think Bitcoin is probably a good thing. But it’s essentially, its main thing will be [inaudible] I think it’s primarily gonna be a means of doing illegal transactions [laughs]. But that’s not necessarily entirely bad. You know, some things maybe shouldn’t be illegal.
Isaacson: A combination of Silk Road and Bitcoin will save us?
Musk: Well, it will be useful for legal and illegal transactions. Otherwise it would have no value as a use for illegal transactions. Because you have to have a legal to illegal bridge. I don’t own any Bitcoin.
In the discussion on Reddit some people express disappointment and think that Musk, by focusing on Silk Road and similar episodes of illegal use of Bitcoin, shows that he doesn’t get Bitcoin and its revolutionary aspects. It’s possible that Must hasn’t paid too much attention to Bitcoin so far – he is, after all, a very busy leader who wants to save the planet, take us to Mars, and then colonize the planets and live in outer space.
But I think Musk’s observation is worth listening to. Some things shouldn’t be illegal. Laws are a product of their times and evolve with time. All serious politicians and lawmakers know, though they seldom mention it in public, that some degree of creative experimentation outside of the laws, and even against the laws, must be tolerated to permit the evolution of the laws themselves and society as a whole. In other words, society needs bridges between legal and illegal.
What do you think? Comment below!
Images from Phil Stafford, Dong liu and Shutterstock.
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Your search engine does not find any satisfactory results for searches. It is too weak. Also, the server of bing is often off
I created a yahoo/email account long ago but I lost access to it; can y'all delete all my yahoo/yahoo account except for my newest YaAccount
I want all my lost access yahoo account 'delete'; Requesting supporter for these old account deletion; 'except' my Newest yahoo account this Account don't delete! Because I don't want it interfering my online 'gamble' /games/business/data/ Activity , because the computer/security program might 'scure' my Information and detect theres other account; then secure online activities/ business securing from my suspicion because of my other account existing will make the security program be 'Suspicious' until I'm 'secure'; and if I'm gambling online 'Depositing' then I need those account 'delete' because the insecurity 'Suspicioun' will program the casino game 'Programs' securities' to be 'secure' then it'll be 'unfair' gaming and I'll lose because of the insecurity can be a 'Excuse'. Hope y'all understand my explanation!
I want all my lost access yahoo account 'delete'; Requesting supporter for these old account deletion; 'except' my Newest yahoo account this Account don't delete! Because I don't want it interfering my online 'gamble' /games/business/data/ Activity , because the computer/security program might 'scure' my Information and detect theres other account; then secure online activities/ business securing from my suspicion because of my other account existing will make the security program be 'Suspicious' until I'm 'secure'; and if I'm gambling online 'Depositing' then I need those account 'delete' because the insecurity 'Suspicioun' will program the casino game 'Programs' securities' to be… more
chithidio@Yahoo.com
i dont know what happened but i can not search anything.
Golf handicap tracker, why can't I get to it?
Why do I get redirected on pc and mobile device?
Rahyaftco@yahoo.com
RYAN RAHSAD BELL literally means
Question on a link
In the search for Anaïs Nin, one of the first few links shows a picture of a man. Why? Since Nin is a woman, I can’t figure out why. Can you show some reason for this? Who is he? If you click on the picture a group of pictures of Nin and no mention of that man. Is it an error?
Repair the Yahoo Search App.
Yahoo Search App from the Google Play Store on my Samsung Galaxy S8+ phone stopped working on May 18, 2018.
I went to the Yahoo Troubleshooting page but the article that said to do a certain 8 steps to fix the problem with Yahoo Services not working and how to fix the problem. Of course they didn't work.
I contacted Samsung thru their Samsung Tutor app on my phone. I gave their Technican access to my phone to see if there was a problem with my phone that stopped the Yahoo Search App from working. He went to Yahoo and I signed in so he could try to fix the Yahoo Search App not working. He also used another phone, installed the app from the Google Play Store to see if the app would do any kind of search thru the app. The Yahoo Search App just wasn't working.
I also had At&t try to help me because I have UVERSE for my internet service. My internet was working perfectly. Their Technical Support team member checked the Yahoo Search App and it wouldn't work for him either.
We can go to www.yahoo.com and search for any topic or website. It's just the Yahoo Search App that won't allow anyone to do web searches at all.
I let Google know that the Yahoo Search App installed from their Google Play Store had completely stopped working on May 18, 2018.
I told them that Yahoo has made sure that their Yahoo members can't contact them about anything.
I noticed that right after I accepted the agreement that said Oath had joined with Verizon I started having the problem with the Yahoo Search App.
No matter what I search for or website thru the Yahoo Search App it says the following after I searched for
www.att.com.
WEBPAGE NOT AVAILABLE
This webpage at gttp://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0geJGq8BbkrgALEMMITE5jylu=X3oDMTEzcTjdWsyBGNvbG8DYmyxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDTkFQUEMwxzEEc2VjA3NylRo=10/Ru=https%3a%2f%2fwww.att.att.com%2f/Rk=2/Es=plkGNRAB61_XKqFjTEN7J8cXA-
could not be loaded because:
net::ERR_CLEARTEXT_NOT_PERMITTED
I tried to search for things like www.homedepot.com. The same thing happened. It would say WEBPAGE NOT AVAILABLE. The only thing that changed were all the upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols.
Then it would again say
could not be loaded because:
net::ERR_CLEARTEXT_NOT_PERMITTED
This is the same thing that happened when Samsung and At&t tried to do any kind of searches thru the Yahoo Search App.
Yahoo needs to fix the problem with their app.
Yahoo Search App from the Google Play Store on my Samsung Galaxy S8+ phone stopped working on May 18, 2018.
I went to the Yahoo Troubleshooting page but the article that said to do a certain 8 steps to fix the problem with Yahoo Services not working and how to fix the problem. Of course they didn't work.
I contacted Samsung thru their Samsung Tutor app on my phone. I gave their Technican access to my phone to see if there was a problem with my phone that stopped the Yahoo Search App from working. He went to Yahoo and… more
Musk: I Am Not Bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto
3 Charts to Know: Bitcoin Barrels to $10,000
Not only does Elon Musk deny being the mysterious creator of bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto, but he’s also forgotten where he keeps his cryptocurrency.
Musk’s assertions came in response to a blog post coursing through digital-currency sites that suggested the PayPal co-founder and Tesla Inc. chief executive officer himself is probably the bitcoin originator who used the alias Nakamoto.
“Not true,” Musk said Tuesday in a tweet. “A friend sent me part of a BTC a few years, but I don’t know where it is.”
Not true. A friend sent me part of a BTC a few years, but I don’t know where it is.
The banter coincides with Bitcoin approaching $10,000 for the first time, bringing this year’s price surge to almost 11-fold even as warnings multiply that the largest digital currency has become an asset bubble. Should it bust the benchmark today, bitcoin’s $167 billion value would exceed that of about 95 percent of the S&P 500 Index members.
The post on Musk, published on the Medium blog platform last week, based its argument on Musk’s technical expertise, comparing him with U.S. inventor and founding father Benjamin Franklin, who also published under a pseudonym. Bitcoin needs Musk’s help, the blog’s author Sahil Gupta said.
“If Elon is Satoshi, it seems like this knowledge would become public at some point anyway,” Gupta wrote. “But if it were public now, Elon could offer guidance as the currency’s ‘founding father.’”
The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous author of the research paper that conceived bitcoin about nine years ago, remains a mystery. The name appeared atop the original document that proposed a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.
While speculation over bitcoin’s start is nothing new, conversations in mainstream markets over its rightful place are burgeoning. From Wall Street executives to venture capitalists, observers have been weighing in more frequently, with some more skeptical than others as bitcoin’s rise has grown steeper, sweeping along individual investors.
The number of accounts at Coinbase, one of the largest platforms for trading bitcoin and rival ethereum, has almost tripled to 13 million in the past year, according to Bespoke Investment Group LLC.
As Bitcoin tops $10,000, Elon Musk denies he is its creator
Is Bitcoin bubble bound to burst?
IZEA Founder Ted Murphy doesn't just own Bitcoins - he mines them. Murphy weighs in on the future for the virtual currency
One of the biggest stories of 2017 has been the surge in the price of bitcoin, the cryptocurrency touted as an alternative to gold and other investments. For years, many have wondered who the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of bitcoin, is, to no avail.
One person it's not? Elon Musk.
In a tweet on Monday night, Musk denied being the creator of the cryptocurrency after a blog post by a former SpaceX intern claimed that the Tesla and SpaceX chief may be the creator of Bitcoin.
Not true. A friend sent me part of a BTC a few years, but I don’t know where it is.
"Not true," Musk wrote. "A friend sent me part of a BTC [bitcoin] a few years, but I don’t know where it is."
The blog post noted that the source code for the cryptocurrency was written in C++, a computer programming language, a knowledge which Musk has.
Musk did however acknowledge knowing C++ in a subsequent tweet.
Who is the creator?
For years, the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto has been speculated upon. In 2016, Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright told the BBC that he was the creator.
Wright also wrote a subsequent blog post further detailing his role in creating bitcoin.
"Be assured, just as you have worked, I have not been idle during these many years," Wright wrote in the post. "Since those early days, after distancing myself from the public persona that was Satoshi, I have poured every measure of myself into research. I have been silent, but I have not been absent. I have been engaged with an exceptional group and look forward to sharing our remarkable work when they are ready."
The blog post has since been taken down, though others, including early bitcoin programmer Gavin Andresen, believe Wright is the creator.
In 2014, Newsweek wrote a story that it had identified Nakamoto as a then 64-year-old Japanese-American named Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto. After the story ran, there was a message posted on the P2P website by a person identifying themselves as Satoshi Nakamoto claiming that he was not Dorian Nakamoto.
Newsweek later issued a statement after it received hefty amounts of criticism surrounding its story, saying it stood by the reporter and the story.
According to the 2016 BBC report, Satoshi Nakamoto was estimated to have amassed one million Bitcoins (there are only 21 million in total). At today's prices, that would be roughly $10 billion in worth.
There are approximately 16.4 million Bitcoins already in circulation, of which an estimated 3.7 million may be lost forever, worth an estimated $30 billion, according to a recent report in Digital Trends.
Follow Chris Ciaccia on Twitter @Chris_Ciaccia
This story has been updated to reflect the price of one Bitcoin has surpassed $10,000.
Elon Musk Doesn't Know Where He Left His Bitcoin
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? The true identity of bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator remains the cryptocurrency’s biggest mystery (apart from “how high will it go before the bubble bursts?”). But one thing’s for certain: bitcoin’s very own Keyser Söze is not Elon Musk.
The idea that Musk is Satoshi has been doing the rounds recently, thanks to a blog post that detailed the Tesla supremo’s suitability in terms of technical skills, understanding of economics and style of self-expression. The post was written by Sahil Gupta, a former intern at Musk’s SpaceX.
Gupta’s post begged Musk to help bitcoin overcome its current network-congestion problems by offering guidance as the cryptocurrency’s “founding father.”
However, when someone on Twitter sent Musk a story covering the post, he responded that the theory was “not true.”
Not true. A friend sent me part of a BTC a few years, but I don’t know where it is.
What’s more, Musk noted that someone had sent him part of a bitcoin years ago, but he had no idea where it was anymore.
Obviously Musk is a man with a lot on his mind, but losing bitcoin is not uncommon. As Fortune exclusively revealed a few days ago, somewhere between 2.78 million and 3.79 million bitcoins have been mislaid over the years.
With the current value of bitcoin being $9,924, that means as much as $37.6 billion worth of the cryptocurrency is in the wind.
Bitcoin in Brief Monday: Elon Musk Takes on Bitcoin-Bashing Warren Buffett
Today’s edition of Bitcoin in Brief focuses on a clash between the old guard of the global economy, fearing new innovations they can’t understand, and the young entrepreneurs using them to change the world. We will also show how sometimes well-meaning regulations can backfire and hurt the lawmakers’ own goals.
Dinosaur Attack
They say that “if you’re not catching flak you’re not over the target,” so bitcoin must be getting closer to hitting Wall Street because it has gotten a lot of flak recently. Leading the charge was 87-year-old billionaire and legendary investor, Warren Buffett. After previously saying that investing in bitcoin is nothing more than gambling, Buffett has again came out strongly against cryptocurrency at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting on Saturday, May 5th.
“They’re non-productive assets. It essentially will not deliver anything other than supposed scarcity. What does it produce itself? Anytime you buy non-productive assets, you are counting on someone later on buying a non-productive asset. It does come to a bad ending; cryptocurrencies will come to a bad ending. If I could buy a five-year put on every one of the cryptocurrencies, I’d be glad to do it but I would never short a dime’s worth,” he said, concluding that bitcoin is “probably rat poison squared.” And Buffett’s long-time right-hand-man, Charlie Munger, added that trading in cryptocurrencies is “just dementia”.
Musk Strikes Back
Besides bashing bitcoin, Buffett has also taken a swipe at fellow billionaire Elon Musk.
During the latest Tesla quarterly earnings call, Musk explained he doesn’t believe in “moats,” a term often espoused by the Oracle of Omaha. He said: “I think moats are lame. They are like nice in a sort of quaint, vestigial way. If your only defense against invading armies is a moat, you will not last long. What matters is the pace of innovation, that is the fundamental determinant of competitiveness.”
Buffett didn’t like that statement and on Saturday responded by warning that Musk should stay away from his moated ventures. “I don’t think he’d want to take us on in candy,” he said, referring to Berkshire-owned See’s Candies – Buffett’s often cited example of a business with a deep moat around it. The real-life inspiration for Iron Man saw Buffett’s warning as a challenge and soon announced on Twitter he is starting a new candy company to take on Berkshire’s moat, and just to spike the ball he is going to call it “Cryptocandy”.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 5, 2018
Memo Goes Open Source
The creator of Memo, an on-chain social network built on Bitcoin Cash, has announced it is getting open sourced. The developer explained the move by stating that: “Most people think that because memo is on the blockchain, it’s inherently uncensorable. Being on the blockchain does not make memo uncensorable. What will make memo uncensorable is when there are many different implementations…What really makes a social network uncensorable is for it to be decentralized. This makes the power over the network distributed between the service providers, meaning they’d have to collude to censor information…To encourage others to head in the right direction, I’ve decided to open source the entire Memo.cash codebase. My hope is that people will fork and create their own implementations, giving it the decentralization it needs to be uncensorable.”
Huobi Labs’ $1 Billion Industry Fund
Huobi Labs has recently announced they signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Tianya Community to jointly build a “Global Cultural and Creative Blockchain Lab” in Hainan, China. Huobi China headquarters will be moved to the island, where it promises to collaborate with global industry companies and the world’s top universities to build a 40,000 square meters blockchain incubator and initiate a billion-dollar global blockchain industry fund.
The development of the Hainan Special Economic Zone is a national-level strategy set by the Chinese President, Xi Jiping, and the company painted the move as part of that effort. “As a patriotic Chinese company, Huobi China will actively follow-up with the national-level strategy. In the future, Huobi will use Huobi Group’s technology, resources, talents, and capital advantages in the global blockchain industry to contribute to the development of Hainan Special Economic Zone and explore the construction of an international free trade port.”
EU Regulations Kill Cointouch P2P Exchange
Cointouch was a website that helped users find friends of friends that trade cryptocurrency using their social network connections loaded from Facebook and Google, allowing exchange-like functionality with peer-to-peer trading. It was recently shut down after four years in operation due to a new EU dictate called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is meant to bring a new set of “digital rights” for EU citizens and guard them from predatory data companies like Cambridge Analytica.
Developer Chris Beach explained: “GDPR threatens website owners with fines of 4% of turnover or €20 million (whichever is higher) if they do not jump through a number of ambiguously-defined hoops…I concluded that I cannot justify running a free service while taking on a legal risk. So, perversely, this new EU law hurts small website like mine, but helps reinforce the dominance of Facebook, Google and Twitter, who are able to prepare and defend themselves using established legal teams and cash reserves, and who now face less competition from startups. The EU Cookie Law, EU VAT regulation, and now the EU GDPR are all examples of poorly-implemented laws that add complexity and unintended side-effects for businesses within the EU.”
Who will be proven right in the long term, Musk or Buffett? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock.
Do you agree with us that Bitcoin is the best invention since sliced bread? Thought so. That’s why we are building this online universe revolving around anything and everything Bitcoin. We have a store. And a forum. And a casino, a pool and real-time price statistics.
Elon Musk: Bitcoin as a Legal to Illegal Bridge
Elon Musk, a legend in high tech business circles, is the founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX.
With the first project, Musk wants to revolutionize transportation on Earth with high-performance all-electric cars, and with the second he wants to revolutionize transportation to space.
He hasn’t (yet) Bitcoin projects but recently expressed interesting opinions about Bitcoin in an interview with Aspen Institute’s Walter Isaacson at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit.
The Bitcoin-related discussion begins shortly after 30 minutes in the video. Here is a transcript provided by a Reddit user.
Some Things Maybe Shouldn’t Be Illegal
Walter Isaacson: Do you think Bitcoin will be disruptive in that way? I mean now it’s a speculative currency, will it be something that will be what normal consumers will use and will disrupt the banking industry?
Elon Musk: My opinion on Bitcoin is, I mean I think Bitcoin is probably a good thing. But it’s essentially, its main thing will be [inaudible] I think it’s primarily gonna be a means of doing illegal transactions [laughs]. But that’s not necessarily entirely bad. You know, some things maybe shouldn’t be illegal.
Isaacson: A combination of Silk Road and Bitcoin will save us?
Musk: Well, it will be useful for legal and illegal transactions. Otherwise it would have no value as a use for illegal transactions. Because you have to have a legal to illegal bridge. I don’t own any Bitcoin.
In the discussion on Reddit some people express disappointment and think that Musk, by focusing on Silk Road and similar episodes of illegal use of Bitcoin, shows that he doesn’t get Bitcoin and its revolutionary aspects. It’s possible that Must hasn’t paid too much attention to Bitcoin so far – he is, after all, a very busy leader who wants to save the planet, take us to Mars, and then colonize the planets and live in outer space.
But I think Musk’s observation is worth listening to. Some things shouldn’t be illegal. Laws are a product of their times and evolve with time. All serious politicians and lawmakers know, though they seldom mention it in public, that some degree of creative experimentation outside of the laws, and even against the laws, must be tolerated to permit the evolution of the laws themselves and society as a whole. In other words, society needs bridges between legal and illegal.
What do you think? Comment below!
Images from Phil Stafford, Dong liu and Shutterstock.
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