Key takeaways
- Elon Musk’s take on Bitcoin scaling has sparked criticisms towards the billionaire.
- Bitcoin proponents think Musk “may never understand Bitcoin.”
- There is still a lot of need to enlighten the befuddled about Bitcoin.
The cryptocurrency space considers Elon Musk’s involvement in the industry to be very commendable, especially with the recent revelation made via Tesla’s September 3rd quarter SEC filing that there were plans for the electric vehicle company to resume accepting Bitcoin payments for its products and services.
Musk has however also been the subject of a lot of criticisms from Bitcoin proponents as from time to time, his opinions on issues that concern the leading cryptocurrency have been considered to show him as not having a well-grounded understanding of the crypto asset.
His recent tweet once again triggered such reactions. While responding to a question posed to him about the possibility of Dogecoin (DOGE) becoming more “practical and efficient” than Bitcoin’s Lightning Network by solving the problem of scaling on its base layer 1, Musk responded that it was possible. He said:
“Possibly. Bitcoin was conceived at a time of relatively low bandwidth & high latency. If both continue to improve substantially, we will reach a point when no second layer is needed.”
Musk first made similar comments back in July during the B-Word conference when he was on a panel with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood. He criticized the fixed Bitcoin block size of 1 megabyte (1MB) as being outmoded because it was conceived at a time when the internet was still very slow, adding that this was one of the reasons he thinks “Bitcoin by itself simply can’t scale to be the monetary system for the world at base layer” therefore, there was “some merit to something that has a higher max transaction rate, and lower transaction cost” – referring to Dogecoin.
At the time, the remark infuriated most bitcoiners and made him lose their regard. They pointed out that keeping the Bitcoin block size slender ensured that the network would only become more decentralized as technology advances. Proponents pointed out that it was not inconceivable that in the future, Bitcoin nodes would become more commonplace and even smartphones could eventually be able to store and verify Bitcoin transactions, thereby acting as nodes.
His reiteration of the same sentiment has once again made pundits remark that the billionaire while being a visionary in other fields, may never fully understand Bitcoin.
In fact, Bitcoiners argue that there are still a lot of misconceptions out there about Bitcoin among supporters and skeptics alike. Proponents have noted that even governments do not fully understand the structure of Bitcoin, hence there was a need for the enlightened to spread the light to others.
Regardless, the sentiment remains that everyone, whether they understand the tenets that Bitcoin stands for or not, is important to the network as their involvement is still likely to advance the industry.
