[advantager]

I'm a big fan of Matt Levine's "Money Stuff" column on Bloomberg - he always has amusing and insightful commentary particularly on Elon -

> My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Liam Denning points out that “Musk’s move may also indicate that Teslas weren’t flying off the shelves as a result of accepting Bitcoin payment,” and in fact it’s not entirely clear whether Tesla has sold any cars for Bitcoins.[2] I hope it hasn’t. I hope Musk can make the price of Bitcoin go up or down by 10% by announcing that Tesla will or will not accept Bitcoins for cars, without ever actually accepting any Bitcoins for any cars either way. There’s something pure about that: The price of Bitcoin depends on Elon Musk’s attitude toward it, not on the existence of any grubby commercial transactions in which Bitcoins are exchanged for cars.[3] The source of value for Bitcoin is not its use as a currency or economic importance; the source of value for Bitcoin — for everything — is simple proximity to Elon Musk.

[sp332]

Someone finally securitized the reality distortion field.

[murgindrag]

Hey, I accept pieces of paper (and now bits in a computer) for my valuable work, and bought a valuable home, car, and computer with those papers and bits.

Money works purely on belief. If we all suddenly disbelieved in the dollar, the value would be zero.

Curiously, most cycles of hyperinflation come more from loss of faith than from money printing. When people lose faith in a currency, they sell it off as a value store.

Elon Musk's net worth is $28B. His faith in a crypocurrency as a value store counts for a lot.

[35fbe7d3d5b9]

> Money works purely on belief. If we all suddenly disbelieved in the dollar, the value would be zero.

Is this true? Yes.

Are you wildly underselling what "disbelieving in the dollar" means in practice? Also yes.

I believe in the dollar because the United States has the worlds largest nuclear arsenal, spends nearly a trillion dollars on its military every year – and that's only what it puts on the books – and has been proven to have an itchy fucking trigger finger.

That trust isn't going anywhere without massive global conflict.

[deckard1]

> suddenly disbelieved in the dollar

you can disbelieve in the dollar. But you can't disbelieve in the Secret Service/US military showing up and kicking your ass

[bob33212]

Also democracy. What if Bitcoin went up to $100M/coin? What is the likelihood that both Trump and Biden are going to be like "Well the BTC people were right and now they can buy all the companies and real estate. The rest of you americans will have to just have fun being poor, there is no way we will tax BTC wealth"

[pinkybanana]

> Elon Musk's net worth is $28B. His faith in a crypocurrency as a value store counts for a lot.

Not only that, but he has pretty dominating role in various companies whose market caps are in hundreds of billions at least.