It is illogical for Tesla to truly care about alternative energy, sustainability, carbon reduction, and neutrality and still be so closely associated with Bitcoin, whose system doesn’t have a built-in mechanism to constraint energy consumption.
This is according to Cardano’s founder and Ethereum’s co-founder Charles Hoskinson. Speaking on a podcast hosted by AI research scientist Lex Fridman, Hoskinson said that it is no longer about glorifying bitcoin in a cult-like fashion.
“Energy is a critical point for me with Tesla, because they assert to be an alternative energy company. Unless they can make the case that somehow the proliferation of bitcoin is legitimately going to proliferate battery solar and wind or other things, then it is probably good for them to just focus on the most energy efficient energy cryptocurrency possible.”
Cardano and Ethereum are better than Bitcoin, according to Charles, since they support practical infrastructural development on their networks, regardless of whether they are based on the POW or POS consensus algorithms.
Bitcoin Maximalists Should Listen To Reason
On June 13th, Elon Musk said that upon confirmation of reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by miners with a positive future trend, Tesla would consider resuming Bitcoin transactions.
In the meantime, however, Tesla is looking into other alternatives, raising speculations as to whether Dogecoin will be the first option due to its advanced relationship with CEO Elon Musk.
Making a case for Cardano, Hoskinson said that it is a functioning alternative with over a million users and a market cap of $50 billion, a factor that bitcoin maximalists should consider, before damning all alternative ecosystems to Bitcoin.
In addition to alarming energy consumption rates, the bitcoin network is the most difficult network to scale upon, a factor that has necessitated the innovation of other, better mechanisms, such as Ethereum (second generation blockchain technology) and Cardano (third generation.)
However, when it comes to innovating on PoW, there is always 30% more energy consumption and its expenses have to be covered first by the developers and later by the ecosystem’s participants.
Square Will Soon Require To Carry Other Cryptos Too
While responding to a question about whether he’d like to see Cardano on CashApp, Hoskinson said that it’s about what markets want at the end of the day that will drive such decisions, for business-oriented people like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey.
He emphasized that any publicly traded company has, among other functions (for its shareholders), three primary roles, which are to maximize utility, sustainability, and value. These factors make it absolutely no sense to run such a company as a maximalist, as is the case with Square.
“You want transaction volume, that’s how you make your damn money. Coinbase was the same way-they were very maximalist in the beginning. Very quickly they started realizing, hey we’re losing a lot of money, if we want an IPO we kind of need to be a bit more diverse.”
Therefore, it is no longer about comparing a blockchain network based on whether it is based on the proof of work or proof of stake consensus algorithms but on other more important factors like network security, scalability, and utility.
“So that’s my point to Jack, you’re a business guy, why are you bidding all your eggs on one crazy model that’s a cult, step away and realize that it does something, it is a tool.”
