Elon and Jack TLDW

They talked about everything Bitcoin, from it being the future currency of the internet to its sustainability and uses of renewable energy. We went ahead and took the most interesting parts of the discussion for your reading enjoyment. 

Steve Lee: what’s influenced your views on bitcoin

Elon Musk: Really, it's best to think of money as an information system, primarily an information system for labor allocation. And for practical purposes, it exists in a series of heterogeneous databases, like very different databases in bank mainframes around the world, it moves quite slowly, in reality, it may seem to move fast, sometimes it does with PayPal, which is real time. But the vast majority of the systems out there are batch processing. So the actual reconciliation may take one to five, business days, sometimes longer….So I think it makes sense to support something that improves the quality of information with which we conduct the economy. And if Bitcoin is a candidate for that, and it's obviously it's evolving, and there were additional things like lightning being done on top of Bitcoin. But Bitcoin per se is mostly solving for scarcity, or rather, solving for essentially having no throat to choke decentralized. So there's no one who can be coerced in any way to empty their Bitcoin accounts. Well, I guess they could technically buy on an individual basis, but the system as a whole cannot. And it has an open ledger, which is also quite good. But transaction volume is low. transaction cost is high. And usability for the average person is not it's not yet very good, but has a lot of potential. In general, I'm a supporter of Bitcoin and the idea of cryptocurrency in general...Apart from [owning Tesla and SpaceX stock], I do own Bitcoin. And Tesla owns Bitcoin, and SpaceX owns bitcoins. And I do personally own a bit of a theory and Dogecoin, of course.

Jack Dorsey: the network and the community. It's deeply principled, it's weird as hell. It's always evolving. And it just reminded me of the internet when I was a kid...But when I saw Bitcoin in 2009, you see a chance to replace the whole foundation. And everything that you Elon was talking about in terms of ach and the credit card networks were built with very different agendas and a very different timeframe. And it's crazy that they still exist, and they have scaled, but they, they just are not relevant to today. And they're certainly not relevant to the future, especially when you consider the entire world and countries like Nigeria or Ghana or India, and its interconnection with countries like the United States and Canada and all over Europe. So what, what really drove my thinking and drives my passion around it is like, if the internet gets a chance to get a native currency, what will that be? And, and to me, it's Bitcoin because of those principles because of that creation story because of its resilience, because of the number of tests it's been. But what inspires me the most is just community driving. It just reminds me of the early internet.

Steve Lee: I like to ask you, jack is you said before the Bitcoin changes everything. Can you speak more to that?

Jack Dorsey: When you get to a system where the potential for people to truly own it, they can verify it themselves. You don't have to have trust going in, you don't have to trust it at all, you can verify it through source code, or whatever your appetite is. And that any particular person can help drive the future of it. And at the same time, it's not controlled by any state. It's not controlled by any bank. It's not controlled by any corporation. And these three parties of people participate in the network, people who mine, and also the developers constantly debating the correct roadmap and the way forward is a beautiful thing. And I don't know of many other consensus-based models that have existed at that scale for this long with this amount of success.

Steve Lee: jack, you referenced earlier, it being or becoming the native currency of the internet, can you speak more to that, and also how it relates to maybe how institutions think about it?

Jack Dorsey: if you just focus on the worldwide remittance problem, Bitcoin solves so many of those problems today instantly, without having to go through any intermediaries, or any slowness, or complicated systems that a corporation or state created. So I think, having sound money that is separate from the state, is the idea of having a completely verifiable by everyone, including the state, including corporations, including individuals, including developers who want to build on top of it, is quite powerful. And that's what keeps it secure, and strong.

Steve Lee: o you're drawn to Dogecoin a little bit. Are there any Other gaps in Bitcoin that you see that cause you to be drawn to towards

Elon Musk: Doge community I think has a somewhat irreverent obviously and is, has great memes and loves dogs and I love dogs and memes and it doesn't take itself too seriously. And I think there's this Occam's razor, which is the simplest answer is the most likely. It's a summary of Occam's razor. The simplest answer is the most likely one, then there's a friend of mine came up with a variant on that, that the most ironic outcome is the most likely one. And then I've learnt on that which is the most entertaining outcome as the most likely one. So if that is true, then the most ironic and entertaining outcome would be that the cryptocurrency that was started as a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies ends up being the leader, the leading cryptocurrency that would be the most ironic outcome. 

Steve Lee: Elan. You've been vocal on this. you said many things about Bitcoin and its energy use...What do you think the state of things is with respect to that?

Elon Musk: Yeah, so I do think that there appears to be a positive trend in the energy usage of Bitcoin, I actually part of this is due to the drop in bitcoin price. So what I observed or what I thought I was seeing the most recent disagreements on this, but from when Tesla now started at acquire Bitcoin and was doing Bitcoin transactions, that there was a massive run-up in the bitcoin price, and also a massive increase in the amount of energy used to mine Bitcoin...Now it looks like Bitcoin is shifting a lot more towards renewables, and a bunch of the heavy-duty coal plants that were being used, have been shut down, especially in China. I wonder a little bit more diligence to conclude that the confirmative side of renewable energy usage is most likely sort of at or above 50%. And that there is a trend towards increasing that number. And if so, then Tesla will resume Bitcoin and accepting Bitcoin. 

Steve Lee:  You've stated that Bitcoin incentivizes renewable energy as what we're talking about. Now. Do you have any additional thoughts on that?

Jack Dorsey: It's also incentivizing a lot of innovation and interest in the energy space. And just like looking at unused energy, there's a company called Great American Mining that caps the methane players on oil fields to power their rigs. And just imagine all the unused energy that is just being wasted every single day. And being able to get that energy and convert it, converting it into a secure sound money system for the planet feels like a worthy trade-off.