Bitcoin Just Got Cancelled

What's up, Graham? It's Guys here. So, this is not the video I was planning to make today, but here we are. Tesla and Elon Musk just completely pulled the rug from underneath Bitcoin, and with one single tweet, $365 billion was lost from the entire cryptocurrency market in a matter of a few hours when Tesla announced they'll no longer be accepting Bitcoin as payment and will be transitioning to a more energy-efficient option instead.

Now, there's an even bigger concern that this could just be the beginning, as other businesses follow along, dumping Bitcoin in the process. Not to mention, in that tweet, Elon also said that he would be looking for cryptocurrency alternatives that use less than 1% of Bitcoin's energy usage. And of course, as you would expect, that's causing a lot of speculation to find the next undervalued cryptocurrency that might end up going up a lot in price, especially coming after his recent tweet asking customers whether or not they'd like Tesla to accept payment in Dogecoin.

Then we have his latest tweet saying that he's working with the Dogecoin development team to improve system transaction efficiency. Potentially promising. So, let's break this down, talk about exactly what's going on, look at the real implications this could have on the entire cryptocurrency market, and then finally, we could answer the age-old question: could Dogecoin be the solution that Elon Musk is looking for?

By the way, since Elon Musk crashed Bitcoin, it would mean a lot to me if you crash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. The best part about doing that is that it doesn't cost you any extra electrical usage to make that like button turn blue. As a thank you for doing that and helping me out, here's a picture in return of a baby hippo. So, thank you guys so much, and let's begin.

Now, all of this starts the morning of Monday, February 8th. In an SEC filing, Tesla announced that they moved $1.5 billion over to Bitcoin to, as they say, further diversify and maximize returns on our cash that's not required to maintain adequate operating liquidity. Or in other words, if Tesla has $1.199 billion sitting there in cash for a rainy day, they're going to put 88.3% of that into Bitcoin and then allow Bitcoin to be accepted as payment for their cars, which they could just keep and add on to that reserve.

What's interesting, though, is that prior to this announcement, Bitcoin was trading in the mid-$30,000 range. But right after this came out, Bitcoin immediately jumped 20%, breaking past its previous all-time high and soon after reaching almost $660,000. At the time, Kathy Wood spoke out and said that she was not surprised at all with that level of institutional investment because when you look at the correlation between Bitcoin's performance and every other asset class, it has the lowest correlation.

Meaning, if you buy Bitcoin, it's a way to further diversify your portfolio and increase your returns with lower risk. She also publicly said that other tech companies would soon start adopting Bitcoin as well, potentially as a hedge against inflation and a weakening US dollar. In addition to that, she said that this had the potential to reach as high as $500,000 if other large institutions allocated mid-single digit amounts to Bitcoin, similar to what Tesla has done.

But now, that might be a thing of the past. In April, after their announcement drove up the price, it was revealed that Tesla had sold $272 million worth of Bitcoin for a $100 million profit, meaning technically, Tesla made more money selling regulatory tax credits and flipping Bitcoin than they did selling cars. Now, Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports called him out on this, accusing him of pumping the coin and then selling it for a profit. But Elon Musk countered back to that and said he hadn't sold any of his own personal Bitcoin, and Tesla only sold 10% to prove liquidity of Bitcoin as an alternative to holding cash.

But whatever the reason, some investors have been worried that Elon Musk has the potential to move markets in either direction too quickly, and that was proven to be recently correct. The other night, it was announced that Tesla would no longer be accepting Bitcoin as payment due to environmental concerns, and the market immediately sold off, posing some new problems. One is, is Bitcoin actually as bad for the environment as we think it is? And number two, will this cause other companies to then follow along, further driving down the price?

Plus, right now, there's a lot of speculation about which coin could be the next replacement, with potentially Dogecoin being the next option. So, let's do the math behind this to figure out exactly what's going on and whether or not Dogecoin still has a chance at hitting a dollar.

Now, in terms of Bitcoin's energy consumption, technically, Elon Musk isn't wrong, and this has been a well-known side effect of Bitcoin for quite some time. But actually analyzing how much energy Bitcoin really uses is not an easy answer because the internet is littered with biased articles and sensationalized headlines that make it really difficult to tell what's fact and what's fiction. But I've spent the entire day trying to do research on this to find the truth, and this is what I found.

On the surface, the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance claims that Bitcoin consumes about 110 terawatt hours per year, which is over a half-percent of the global energy production and roughly equivalent to the annual energy draw of small countries like Malaysia or Sweden. But that might not be the entire picture because even though a half-percent seems like a lot of energy, when you compare it with the entire financial system or even the difficulties of mining gold, that might actually be an improvement.

One study conducted in 2019 found that 73% of Bitcoin mining was carbon neutral, making Bitcoin mining more renewables-driven than almost any other large-scale industry in the world. Now, another study came to a slightly different conclusion, saying that 39% of Bitcoin mining was driven by renewable energy. But even if we assume the lower number is correct, that's still more than twice the amount of the US energy consumption grid.

The other interesting idea that this research found was that unlike the current financial system, which draws energy from where the offices are physically located, Bitcoin could be mined from anywhere in the world, allowing it to take advantage of alternative energy sources like hydropower, which largely goes to waste in certain countries because it can't easily be transported through other regions. Another energy option for Bitcoin was flared natural gas, which goes to waste if it isn't used, and it's estimated that there's enough of it in the US alone to power the entire Bitcoin network while being able to use a resource that otherwise isn't fully utilized.

But on the other hand, we also have different sources that claim that Bitcoin's energy consumption has the potential to raise our planet's temperature by 2°C, which, if that happens, devastating would be an understatement. But others counter that by saying that over time, Bitcoin is going to be less reliant on carbon; the overwhelming majority of that energy consumption is coming from mining and not transactions, and that long-term, it's going to serve as a strong push to advance renewable technologies in wind, solar, and water energy.

Of course, critics of that say that Bitcoin miners don't just use energy when there's a surplus on the grid, and that once they're turned on, they run non-stop, creating a baseline of demand even during times of shortages. And honestly, that's very true. It's also true that when you compare it with a digital payment processing method like Visa, it's significantly more energy-intensive, but not necessarily when you account for office spaces, air conditioning, and other energy uses for having to sustain their 19,500 employees.

Another article argued that gold was significantly worse for the planet, with mining operations using 132 terawatt hours per year, including toxic waste, landscape destruction, acid mine drainage, and mercury production. In terms of the big picture, though, the Gold Carbon Project found that the world produced 34 billion metric tons of carbon emissions in 2020, which is 620 times more than what Bitcoin is estimated to generate.

But the fact still remains objectively: Bitcoin does use a lot of energy, and while it's nearly impossible to quantify exactly how much when you add up everything across the board, it appears to use about 20% more power than the entire banking system. And let's be real, that's a lot. Now, maybe that number could be lower if 73% of that energy consumption is generated through renewable resources, but even assuming that is accurate, that's still a lot of energy consumption for one cryptocurrency.

I got to say this portion of the video was incredibly difficult to research because a lot of the information you see online is uncredited or from a source that might not be reliable or accurate. Plus, all of this data could really be spun in such a way to whatever narrative you want to believe in. Like, if you have a vested interest in Bitcoin succeeding, say it uses less energy than the banking system. And if you want to shut it down, just say it uses more energy than Argentina without any further context or comparisons.

From everything that I have looked at, probably the most objective research that I have found came from a Harvard University thesis paper on the sustainability of Bitcoin mining, which could pretty accurately be summed up with: it's not necessarily burning down the planet, but the negative consequences should be considered. The whole thing just ended with more research needs to be done and we can't come to an accurate conclusion without more information.

And really, that's the best answer that I could come to myself, even after a full day of research looking up everything I could. But you know what? Enough of that. Let's get back to Elon Musk. He just recently tweeted if his customers would want Tesla to accept Dogecoin, and then shortly afterward, he said he had a promising talk with the development team, which kind of makes you wonder how much energy that uses and could it actually be a contender for Tesla.

Well, truth be told, there's not a lot of research done from very verifiable sources with accurate information, and calculating Dogecoin's energy consumption is extremely difficult to nail down because it piggybacks off the Litecoin network. But there is this image floating around that may or may not be accurate showing that it uses less than 1% of Bitcoin's energy consumption, exactly as Elon wanted.

The counter to this, however, is that this number may not be entirely accurate since it does draw energy from the Litecoin network, and more demand would cause that number to increase far beyond what it currently is if it continues to grow. Ethereum also uses a significant amount of power, be it 90% less than Bitcoin, although even the creator of Ethereum acknowledges that sustainability is an issue and over time they want to cut down energy consumption 99% with Ethereum 2.0.

Besides that, now it's just become this internet frenzy to try to find energy-efficient cryptocurrencies that could match what Elon Musk is looking for. One of those, which I just so happened to mention a few days ago, is Nano. This is a coin that used to trade for a penny, surged as high as $37, and crashed back down to a dollar until just recently when it took off as an energy-efficient coin with nearly instantaneous transactions, and suddenly it hit a high of $17 after his tweet. Cardano also surged to nearly $2 with the expectation that it might also fit the bill for Elon Musk.

But I have to say, at this point, trying to speculate on the next Bitcoin is really just pure gambling, and I would highly recommend against it as far as what I think of this and what could happen to the entire cryptocurrency markets. Here's my take: I'll be honest, it's concerning to see how quickly Elon Musk embraced Bitcoin, and then just three months later he announced that they would be scaling back due to energy issues.

To me, I'm not so concerned about Tesla not selling their cars with Bitcoin because the way I saw it, that was just a bit of a gimmicky concept. And even though it's a cool idea, I highly doubt a lot of people were going and buying Teslas with Bitcoin beyond just a novelty. The bigger implication here is Tesla publicly denouncing Bitcoin because of its high energy consumption, which is a move that I think other businesses might follow.

The way I see it, Tesla is very much an industry leader in the sense that what they do, others copy. So, if Tesla has a problem with Bitcoin, then most likely others will as well, and that is where we could see this having a negative effect throughout the cryptocurrency market.

Now, he isn't wrong that Bitcoin uses a lot of energy, but that's not new information, and I highly doubt that he went into this blindly without a full understanding of how the industry works and the impact this is going to have on the environment. Of course, everyone makes mistakes, and maybe he underestimated how quickly the energy consumption would increase once he announced that Tesla would hold its reserves in Bitcoin.

But either way, it's not a good look for Tesla to backtrack so quickly because either he knew about it and just changed his mind, or he didn't fully do the research ahead of time. The fact is, Bitcoin does use a significant amount of energy, but more research needs to be done to determine exactly where that energy is coming from and compare it to the other full aspects of the banking systems to get a true one-to-one comparison. Like, to be fair, we can't just say that the energy consumption of one Bitcoin is equivalent to 453,000 Visa transactions without taking into account the full carbon footprint of everything involved in Visa, from their offices to air conditioning to manufacturing of cards and so on—not just the transactions themselves.

Now, I say this not to dismiss the negative impact Bitcoin could have on the environment, but instead to come up with real numbers that we could actually work with to create a more sustainable future. On the bright side, though, this is going to highlight potential issues of not only Bitcoin but the entire cryptocurrency market and serve as a huge push towards more sustainable energy, of which Tesla has a vested interest in solar and battery technology.

I would like to see a continued push towards more sustainable energy, and this would be a great catalyst to get us in that direction. But there are going to be obstacles that need to be overcome along the way—not only for Bitcoin but also for the health of the planet.

Now, financially, in the short term, absolutely this could be a negative impact for Bitcoin if other companies take the stance that it's bad for the environment, but in its place, more sustainable options will come to light, and long-term, I think the market will find a way to adjust.

Now, as for Elon Musk and his choices, I'm not sure how much of this is like a genius chess move for the greater good or how much of this is just impulsive thinking out loud on Twitter without fully thinking it through. But by now, we should really come to expect that from him, and every single day there's going to be something else that keeps us on our toes. So, from an entertainment point of view, Elon Musk checks that box.

But I wouldn't be speculating on anything based on his tweets, and this is really the perfect example of how Elon Musk can giveth and taketh away with 280 characters or less. So, with that said, you guys, thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate it! As always, make sure to destroy the like button, subscribe button, and notification bell. Also, feel free to add me on Instagram. I post it pretty much daily, so if you want to be a part of it there, feel free to add me there.

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