Thread by @stephanlivera

Bitcoin as a tool for economic empowerment with @CathieDWood @elonmusk @jack & @moneyball

live tweet highlights thread:

thebword.org/c/track-2-Bitc…

@CathieDWood @elonmusk @jack @moneyball Steve: What shaped your views on Bitcoin?
Cathy: Focus on disruptive innovation, economics. Collaborated with mentor Art Laffer, and this launched their efforts.

Elon: Thought about money for a while with PayPal. Thinks of money as an information system. Sees opportunity for something better from an information theory standpoint vs say, ACH, credit card networks.

Fraud and govt interference being sources of error.

Elon: Bitcoin is mostly solving for having 'no throat to choke' i.e. being decentralised, with an open ledger.

Elon: Supporter of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, but wary of Bitcoin energy use that from his POV isn't good for the environment.

Jack: It was the network and the community. It's deeply principled. Encountered alt.cypherpunks as a teenager.

Saw Bitcoin in 2009, it was a chance to 'replace the whole foundation'.

Jack: If the internet gets a chance to be a native currency, it's Bitcoin because of its resilience, and community driving it. Reminiscent of the early internet. Learns a lot from people building Bitcoin today. Grateful for it.

Jack:
- You don't have to trust
- any person can contribute
- not controlled by any state, bank, corp
- people mining and developing constantly debate the roadmap going forward

Jack: A lot of the business models today are dependent on the advertising model. Especially when you consider the whole internet, (Bitcoin) really opens the aperture.

Cathie: discussing with Art Laffer
- Roles of money (SoV, MoE, UoA)
- high value tx over Bitcoin
- how big could it go?
- notion of purchasing power going up over time given supply fixed at 21M

Cathie:
- hedge against confiscation of wealth
- inflation
- comments on the 'bad' deflation that happens where there is counter party risk - bitcoin helping in this scenario too

Jack: If I'm in Ghana, and family is in Nigeria I'd be paying 10-30% just to send that money back. Bitcoin solves so many of these problems today, instantly, without intermediaries, complicated systems of a corp or state. Having sound money separate from the state is the idea.

jack: having it verifiable by anyone, including individuals, states, corporations - is powerful.

Steve asks about Bitcoin tx throughput of Elon.

Elon: Comments on lightning doing well, raises question around money transmitter licence, Bitcoin by itself will not scale at base layer. Agrees it can work with a second layer.

Elon: comments on how outside of his companies his main three investments are Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin

Elon: Does not to want to insult Bitcoin, but is curious about doing more on a layer 1. Repeats earlier thoughts around bandwidth improvements over time.

(Long time bitcoiners would disagree here)

Steve raises the point about sacrificing decentralisation and hurting the censorship resistant properties of Bitcoin.

Elon refers to physics tools of thinking. Refers to scaling down and how parameters were set in 2008.

(ignoring block size was eff. raised even in 2017)

Elon refers to gigabit connections in houses etc.

(though this is ignoring some of the other decentralisation points - e.g. miner latency, utxo scaling, HDD)

Elon has run the idea by his team of having a space heater that was also a bitcoin miner

Elon talks about the hypothetical most ironic and entertaining outcome which is that the cryptocurrency that was started as a joke (Doge) which comes to be the leading cryptocurrency.

Jack's response: Bitcoin has its resilience there, but it is also important to have fun. Anything going towards the path of creating a native currency for the internet is a positive, and it can be fun along the way.

OK now we're getting into discussion on renewable and Tesla acceptance of Bitcoin.

Elon comments on how you couldn't double or triple renewable energy quickly. This seems to be his trepidation about accepting bitcoin as payment for Tesla products.

Elon notes how Tesla only holds Bitcoin, and he personally holds more bitcoin than he does ETH or doge

Wants to do more diligence, but also comments that Tesla will likely resume accepting bitcoin payments in future

Cathie brings up research reports on bitcoin's energy use. Elon responds about the need for baseload power. His idea is for wind + solar + stationary battery to permit bitcoin mining. But also pro hydro, geothermal, nuclear.

Jack: mentions @GAMdotAI and making use of otherwise wasted energy, converting it into secure, sound money for the planet. Asks the question of do we do this at scale?

Elon: Mentions Tesla powerwall and the South Australia project by Tesla. Limiting factor currently = cell production and the need for batteries which have to be mined, produced in an ethically sound way

Elon: the expectation is that energy production must not be pure as the driven snow, but can't be using the world's dirtiest coal

Elon believes long term, renewable will be the cheapest form of energy.

Cathie: Believes Bitcoin will be much more environmentally friendly than gold mining or the traditional financial services sector

Cathie: on the S of ESG, notes the social consequence of Bitcoin - allowing access to payment tech around the world. e.g. remittance, some countries are dependent on it for their GDP. Tonga, El Salvador, Nepal.

Cathie: Notes the 1.3B people who are living in double digit or higher inflation. Saving them from the destruction of their purchasing power is a noble social goal.

Much more expansive than the traditional ESG community.

Cathie: on 'G' in ESG, Bitcoin's complete transparence helps. Sitting and talking with Bitcoin core developers, many of them know economic history better than other people she has met. Comments on the noble mission & goal of working on Bitcoin.

Cathie comments on the 2019 Binance 'reorg attempt' to reclaim 7000 BTC and how this idea was rejected

Jack touching on Square's Bitcoin development efforts. Careful not to disrupt the community in a negative way. Created the @sqcrypto team to work on what they think is important to help Bitcoin.

Created COPA for defense vs IP trolls

Comments on newly focusing on doing more hardware in the space (TBD). Contributing back to the community is important.

Dorsey: "It's not just an asset we own and investment. It has potential to change everything and make the lives of everyone on this planet better. "

Elon: Explains his comment about non-custodial ownership of your private keys. You should be the only one who has your private keys. If someone else has the keys, effectively they own it too!

Steve comments on how the Bitcoin community staunchly defends its principles. Stems from the desire to not have wealthy people or institutions negatively impacting Bitcoin. Asks the question of each panellist, how they plan to positively contribute.

Cathie: ARK stands for democratization and transparency. We're the closest to VC in the public equity markets. Focus on education to help the cause with research.

Jack comments on his focus on bluesky, a decentralised social media protocol. as well as continuing to push the thread of supporting Bitcoin and the community.

Elon asks about the idea of enabling advertisers to pay with bitcoin. Jack responds that his idea is to create an economic incentive such that the model isn't as reliant on advertising.

Elon's thoughts on preserving the ethos: Wants to 'make the future good' (bit vague?)

Believes cryptocurrency will make the world better.

Elon views govt as the 'corporation in the limit', with the monopoly on violence. Doesn't see the point of people who are pro govt but anti corporation.

Steve asks Cathie for advice for corporations looking to put Bitcoin on the balance sheet. Cathie: Bitcoin as intangible asset, we need to get FASB to reconsider this because of no ability to mark up on valuation up, but must revalue down.

Cathie: comments on how deflation will cause some companies to struggle because prices are going down and they haven't been focused enough on disruptive innovation. So this may be the cause of 'bad' deflation. Bitcoin useful for this reason too as hedge.

Elon: Tesla's bank accounts in Europe have negative interest rates. Quite annoying.

Jack: mentions @MuunWallet simple, straight forward, and great with key management. Clever implementation of lightning so you can use it without having to think about it. More work like that really brings us forward.

Jack: We have all these monopolies of violence and monetary control, and they're distracting and taking away attention from the bigger problems that we're trying to solve. Fix that foundational thing with Bitcoin, and everything improves.

Ok we're doing a post mortem spaces here for anyone who wants to join twitter.com/i/spaces/1gqxv…