Tesla boss and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk recently denied that the electronic car company has plans to participate in the digital currency market. In a recent podcast with ARK Invests Cathie Wood, Musk said that he would not put Tesla’s resources into cryptocurrency but praised Bitcoin, nonetheless.

Elon Musk tweeted about Bitcoin in October, giving rise to speculation that he could be involved with the world’s premier digital coin. There are even theories going around the internet that Musk is the real Satoshi Nakamoto, the famed but anonymous creator of Bitcoin.

Wanna buy some Bitcoin? 😉😉 pic.twitter.com/9ZbBJ5fuVq — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 22, 2018

People suggest that Musk has adopted an eerily silent attitude on Bitcoin, except for that one tweet, while he has been vocal about new and emerging technologies in the past. He, however, has denied being Nakamoto.

The majority of his conversation with Wood and ARK Invest analyst Tasha Keeney in the Tuesday podcast focused on Tesla’s future in electric vehicles and automation. He said that the company would have the technology needed to operate driverless vehicles by the end of this year.

In the podcast, he said that “Bitcoin is interesting and could be a good way to transfer money. Bitcoin’s structure is brilliant, but I don’t think it would be a good use of Tesla’s resources to get involved in crypto,” he told Cathie from ARK Invest, which has holdings in the electric car manufacturer.

Musk talked about Bitcoin’s ability to circumvent currency controls and control paper currency. However, he also highlighted the flaw with mining cryptocurrencies.

He added,

“Paper money is going away, and crypto is a much better value for a transfer of value than pieces of paper, but it has its pros and cons. It’s very energy intensive to create bitcoin at this point.”

Bitcoin follows a consensus algorithm called Proof of Work which allows miners around the world to compete to solve complex mathematical puzzles to create a new block. This helps in validating transactions on the network, but only the first miner who is able to mine the block first gets the block reward.

He noted that his October tweet about Bitcoin was a tongue in cheek response and his account even got temporarily suspended by Twitter because there is some automatic rule on the platform about selling Bitcoin. He said that he was only joking in that tweet.

Such Elon Musk’s position confirmes why he have always remained silent during the Lightning Network torch challenge.



