Elon Musk – the CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla – is continuing his praise for bitcoin, along with his attack on central banks.
Elon Musk: The Stimulus Was a Bad Idea
Musk has a serious issue with the way the U.S. government has handled the coronavirus pandemic. He says that a trillion-dollar stimulus package is no way to fix the situation, and that printing money out of thin air just so everyone can enjoy a small piece of relief will only mask the real problem. He’s confident that central banks aren’t doing enough to prevent financial catastrophe from occurring.
In a recent interview hosted by Joe Rogan, the South African entrepreneur explained:
You can’t just legislate money and solve these things. This notion, though, that you can just sort of send checks out to everybody and things will be fine, is not true, obviously. The [economic] machine just grinds to a halt.
Guy Hirsch – the U.S. managing director of crypto broker and exchange e-Toro – seems to offer similar sentiment. Hirsch recently praised bitcoin – the world’s number one cryptocurrency by market cap – and explained that it is a solid financial tool and investment in that it is not tied to central banking institutions the way USD or other forms of fiat are.
He explained:
The bitcoin protocol has a monetary policy built into the code and it is therefore not bound by political or other external manipulation. Every 210,000 blocks of bitcoin will hold a stronger stock-to-flow ratio, which makes bitcoin a real source of value. Central banks have now made printing trillions of dollars a normal occurrence, which is not sustainable.
Elon Musk’s initial bitcoin praise-a-thon began about 48 hours ago after Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling took to Twitter to ask fans and followers alike what bitcoin was. The author was clearly looking for an explanation, and after receiving a wide load of responses, decided that the situation was too overwhelming and didn’t want to hear anymore.
In a statement, Rowling explained:
I’m sure cryptocurrencies are fascinating. I’ve genuinely tried to grasp the detailed information I’ve been sent tonight, but I’m afraid this is a total blind spot to me. I’m just about able to grasp a barter system. Talk of collectibles, tokenomics and blockchains and my brain just takes a walk.
Rowling Needs Some Help with BTC
Among those who also took to explaining bitcoin to the author was Vitalik Buterin, the co-creator of Ethereum. In a series of messages, Buterin said to Rowling:
[Bitcoin is] a digital currency. There’s [around] 18 million units of it. It’s not backed by anything. It’s just valuable because it is, like collectibles. There’s a network of computers (which anyone can join) that maintains a decentralized global excel spreadsheet of how many coins each person has. People find [bitcoin] interesting because there is no central authority that controls this network.
