Tesla CEO is known for his market-moving tweets on crypto and is believed to be behind some of the price swings of even the world’s largest crypto by market volume, Bitcoin. In a recent interview, the tech billionaire shared his views on Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and his guess on who the BTC creator, Satoshi Nakamoto might be.
In May, Elon Musk announced Tesla’s decision to stop due to concerns over crypto mining’s impact on the environment. In a recent interview, the billionaire also shared some technical issues that are preventing BTC’s use as currency.
“There is a fundamental issue with Bitcoin in its current form in that the transaction volume is very limited,” Musk told Lex Fridman in an interview. “The latency for a properly confirmed transaction is too long, much longer than you’d like. It’s actually not great from a transaction volume standpoint or latency standpoint.”
However, Musk also acknowledged Bitcoin’s function as a store of value. “It is perhaps useful as to solve an aspect of the money database problem - which is the store of wealth or an accounting of relative obligations - but it is not useful as a day-to-day currency,” the billionaire explained.
Meanwhile, Musk noted that Dogecoin has an advantage over Bitcoin in terms of transaction volume. “Part of the reason why I think there is some merit to dogecoin, even though it was obviously created as a joke, is that it actually does have a much higher transaction volume capability than Bitcoin,” he said.
Another advantage of using Dogecoin is its lower transaction cost compared to Bitcoin. “The cost of doing a transaction, the dogecoin fees are very low,” the Tesla CEO said. “Right now, if you want to do a Bitcoin transaction, the price of doing that transaction is very high, so you could not use it effectively for most things, and nor could it even scale to a high volume.”
Musk also gave his speculation as to the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. “The evolution of ideas is pretty clear for that, and it seems as though Nick Szabo is probably more than anyone else responsible for the evolution of those ideas,” he said.
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