Elon Musk talks about Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and identity of Satoshi Nakamoto

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk expressed his thoughts on cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Dogecoin and talked about the identity of Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, in an interview with Lex Fridman.

Musk has been a long-time supporter of the memecoin Dogecoin. He stated, “Part of the reason why I think there is some merit to dogecoin, even though it was obviously created as a joke, is that it actually does have a much higher transaction volume capability than bitcoin.” “The cost of doing a transaction, the dogecoin fees are very low,” he added.

On the contrary, Musk once again stated, “Right now, if you want to do a Bitcoin transaction, the price of doing that transaction is very high, so you could not use it effectively for most things, and nor could it even scale to a high volume.” On knowing about the statement, many netizens took to Twitter to remind Musk of the Lightning network.

However, this is not the first time Musk has been in support of Dogecoin. During his “Person of the Year” interview with Time Magazine, Musk stated that Bitcoin is a better option as a store of value while Dogecoin is suited for payments. Earlier, this year, Musk also announced that Tesla Motors will be accepting DOGE as a payment option.

He opined, “I’m not saying that it’s the ideal system for a currency but I think it actually is just fundamentally better than anything else I’ve seen, just by accident.”

When asked about whether he is thinking of making Dogecoin the official currency of Mars, he stated, “I think Mars itself will need to have a different currency because you can’t synchronize due to the speed of light, or not easily.”

Musk was further asked that whether he is Satoshi Nakamoto as many people believe that he is. However, he quickly replied, “I’m not”. He was asked if he would tell the people he was so, he affirmed with a “yes.”

He shared the theory of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator. He explained, “You can look at the evolution of ideas before the launch of Bitcoin and see who wrote about those ideas. Obviously, I don’t know who created bitcoin for practical purposes.” “The evolution of ideas is pretty clear for that, and it seems as though Nick Szabo is probably more than anyone else responsible for the evolution of those ideas.”

“He claims not to be Nakamoto but I’m not sure that’s neither here nor there but he seems to be the one more responsible for the ideas behind Bitcoin than anyone else,” he added.