Elon Musk: Bitcoin’s Structure is ‘Brilliant,’ Paper Money is Going Away

By Kapil Gauhar

Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, has officially gone public with his belief that digital currency offers an improved alternative to the conventional money type we have been using for ages.

In a podcast interview with an investment firm ARK Invest yesterday, Musk talked about his viewpoints on the future of his companies and also responded particularly to questions about his thoughts on cryptocurrency.

To that end, Elon Musk said that he believes bitcoin is a “Quite Brilliant” structure, adding –

“It [crypto] bypasses currency controls. … Paper money is going away. And crypto is a far better way to transfer values than a piece of paper, that’s for sure.”

With that said, Musk also pointed out the aspects of the industry which are keeping his companies from getting involved in both using as well as applying the technology.

While speaking to the downsides of cryptocurrency, in the case of Bitcoin, for instance, he said that he believes its use of a large computing network for securing its ledger is “computationally energy intensive.”

He even added for a company that’s aiming to boost the adoption for sustainable energy that it may not be “a good use of Tesla’s resources to get involved in crypto.”

He said, “it’s very energy intensive to create bitcoin at this point.”

This is, notably, not the first that Musk had made any remarks on cryptocurrency. In October 2018, he made a mysterious tweet about buying bitcoin which whipped up speculation on social media.

Also, he has been posed as several times on Twitter by scammers who have attempted to use his profile’s likeness in crypto give-away schemes, which is a development that he noted in his remarks.

He equipped,

“Bitcoin and ethereum scammers were so rampant on Twitter I decided to join in and I said at one point wanna buy some bitcoin?”