Elon Musk, the brain behind Tesla, SpaceX, and Paypal has cleared the air on his opinions on cryptocurrency. During a podcast, he states that he is “neither here nor there on Bitcoin”.
When asked by the interviewers on his take on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, Musk referred to Satoshi Nakamoto’s whitepaper as “pretty clever”. He also stated that his stance on cryptocurrencies “gets the crypto people angry.”
He says,
“There are transactions that are not within the bounds of the law — there are obviously many laws 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. You need an illegal-to-legal bridge. That’s where crypto comes in.”
While he thinks cryptocurrency could be a replacement for cash, he does not believe cryptocurrency can serve as the primary database for transactions. Cash has become a lot harder to use but alternatives would need to be usable for both illegal and illegal purposes.
“You must have a legal to illegal bridge. So where I see crypto is effectively as a replacement for cash. I do not see crypto being the primary database [for transactions].”
Musk, known for his highly logical reasoning asserts that he is not judgemental of cryptocurrency.
“I think there’s a lot of things that are illegal that shouldn’t be illegal. I think that sometimes governments just have too many laws about the missions that they should have, and shouldn’t have so many things that are illegal.”
Musk has been known to make cryptic tweets about digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. In 2019, he tweeted Ethereum founder, Vitalik Buterin who promptly tweeted proposals about Ethereum back.
As a driving force behind the infamous PayPal Mafia, Elon was able to scale the payment services startup which has transformed several industries and played a huge role in the remittance of money. Â
