Elon Musk, SpaceX and Tesla CEO, has known for his long and cryptic series of tweets on Bitcoin (BTC). He finally came to his stance on cryptocurrencies in a Jan. 20 podcasts, which he focused on its use for illegal transactions.
He has recently been noticeable for several short and cryptic tweets related to cryptocurrency. On Jan. 10 he tweeted, “Bitcoin is *not* my safe word,” while his old tweet in April 2019, saying “Cryptocurrency is my safe word.”
Bitcoin is an illegal-to-legal bridge
In the company’s podcast, the interviewers asked what Musk thought about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, given their spiritual similarity to X.com, which he founded in 1999 and then merger became Paypal. He responded that he is “neither here nor there on Bitcoin.”
While mentioning to Satoshi’s white paper as “pretty clever,” he prefaced by saying that his stance on cryptocurrencies drives the crypto community insane.
There are transactions that are not controlled by the law, while there are obviously many regulations in different countries and normally cash is used for these transactions. But in order for illegal transactions to occur, the cash must also be used for legal transactions. Crypto comes in where you need an illegal-to-legal bridge.
Musk stated that cash is increasingly harder to use, but any alternative would have to both use for legal and illegal purposes, as it does not count otherwise.
Even though Musk may not be entirely purchased on cryptocurrencies, he realizes a clear purpose for them. He said you must have a legal-to-illegal bridge and that is where he sees crypto is effective as a replacement for cash. He does not see crypto being the primary database for transactions.
Despite the negative view from being used for illegal purposes, he stressed that he does not judge crypto. In Musk’s opinion, the governments overreach in certain aspects.
He sees that there is a lot of things that should not be judged as illegal, sometimes governments just enacted too many laws about the missions that they should have, and should not have so many things that are illegal.
While not a full admission, Musk is not exactly opposite to cryptocurrencies. In an earlier part of the interview, he said that banks are in trouble, although he primarily mentioned to competitors such as Stripe.
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