The Hypocrisy of Musk

Musk is rich. Musk is a techie. Therefore Musk must know about crypto, Right? Musk builds “green cars” filled with power hungry batteries. Musk’s cars are worthless without electricity. To recharge a Musk “green car” model S requires 100KW of power and must be on a 50 amp, 240V circuit, the same as a clothes dryer or electric range. A BTC ASIC mining box uses 3.1KW of power and uses a 12 amp circuit at 240V. To recharge either a Musk car or mine a portion of a BTC uses the same energy provided by whatever utility is connected to the wire. If your utility is coal fired, your Musk car uses dirty energy to get you down the road and therefore YOU are complicit according to Musk’s standards. You may or may not be “green” yet you are hailed as a saint, saving the planet. If you mine BTC using the same coal fired power plant you are marked as a villain by the media.

A clothes dryer uses between 3KW and 5KW of power. If you do your laundry, and your utility uses a coal fired plant, you are equal to the pollution caused by the ASIC miner. Are you a villain? How many homes own an electric dryer? Are all your neighbors villains? How much power is required to build a Musk car, from the creation of the batteries, to the creation of the motors, to the mining of the copper and other ores involved, the rubber, the plastics, the production facility, the energy consumed by the workers coming and going to work? How much of that energy is “green”? What about the transmission lines between the Gigafactory and the utility. What was the energy cost of mining that copper, aluminum and steel.

Tell me again how BTC is a dirty technology, but Musk, one of the richest men in the world and Tesla is green. What makes BTC a “dirty” technology is it is a highly efficient decentralized technology and therefore anybody with the skillset can become a miner, and that makes people jealous. Mining is a marginal business and so anything you can do to increase the margin between cost and price, defines profit. This is why BTC mining often is done using energy that is abundantly in excess such as hydro-power or geothermal. Unlike gold mining. which requires you to rip up the earth at a specific location, BTC mining can be done virtually anywhere abundant excess power exists. Excess power otherwise wasted is turned into marginal wealth. Seems like a pretty good deal to me.

Next time you hear some blow dried “reporter” quacking about dirty crypto, you might consider a blow dryer consumes about 1000W.

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