Elon Musk: ‘Paper money is going away’

[tacobell fan]

Silicon Valley billionaire Elon Musk has sounded the death knell for cash. “Paper money is going away,” Musk said in a podcastreleased Tuesday.

“Crypto[currency] is a far better way to transfer value than pieces of paper, that’s for sure,” Musk said on the “FYI — For Your Innovation” podcast.

In particular, Musk said the technology behind bitcoin is “quite brilliant” and “it seems like there is some merit to ethereum and maybe some of the others.”

However, Tesla will not be getting involved with digital currency, because Musk says it’s not a good use of the company’s resources. Plus, creating or mining cryptocurrency takes a lot of computer power, and therefore electricity.

“I think one of the downsides of crypto is that it, computationally, it is like quite energy intensive,” Musk said. “It is very energy intensive to create the incremental bitcoin at this point.”

Though Musk says he has friends that are “really involved in crypto,” in February Musk said he “literally” owns “zero cryptocurrency” other than .25 BTC that someone gave him years ago. (Bitcoin closed trading at $3,924.24 on Tuesday.)

In the tweet, Musk references, @Jack, Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, who is a proponent of bitcoin.

“The world ultimately will have a single currency, the internet will have a single currency. I personally believe that it will be bitcoin,” Dorsey told The Times of London in March. It will happen “probably over 10 years, but it could go faster,” he said.

[MobileMusic]

Sadly, America is very old-fashioned and computer-illiterate and going to remain so for a foreseeable future - many people still use pen and paper to write letters and mail it through USPS, still read newspapers, use flip phones and printed maps to navigate (literally). Many people have not touched a computer in their lives. The number of tech movies made so far (very negligible) or the futuristic Trance music that is virtually not popular in the US as much as it is in Europe, Asia and elsewhere speak for themselves. Countries towards the east are more tech-literate.

A small, computer-savvy country like India would become cashless much before America would. People in India know what a hashtag is but not many in the US do. Silicon Valley and a few metro cities do not make up the entire USA. Every IT project we see in the US is a kichdi mess. America is still very "country" and a generation change is not going to change that by a lot and this is why the country needs tech-savvy immigrant workers. And India has some of the best tech talent to offer with no language barriers like some countries have.

Elon is just overly excited and delusional about crypto but it can never become mainstream currency due to its dynamic nature - not even eCommerce websites use it for a reason. That's like saying battery-operated cars are going to replace gas-fueled cars or people will get rid of their cars because there is Uber.

[kittaya]

can I exchange, paper money with tesla cars

[tacobell fan]

2 minutes ago, kittaya said:

can I exchange, paper money with tesla cars

yes 

[kittaya]

2 minutes ago, tacobell fan said:

yes 

i have 1$ note 500 count.. how many cars I can expect to be delivered.

[tacobell fan]

25 minutes ago, kittaya said:

i have 1$ note 500 count.. how many cars I can expect to be delivered.

You know the answer sodara