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Comment by lwhi | Hacker News Reader

I see this as market manipulation.

Tesla hasn't suddenly become aware of information not available when Tesla initially announced they'd accept bitcoin as payment.

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Absolutely. If anyone believes this bs they're just enabling and encouraging musk to continue manipulating markets as he pleases. People will now start praising his decision but make no mistake, I don't know what was the real reason behind it but sure as hell it wasn't climate change and the way musk goes about releasing information that is moving markets is contemtable

I wonder if Bitcoin investors will start to work out what all those regulations they avoided were for.

Very unlikely. For Bitcoin this is just another day. 10-20% drops should be expected by anyone who knows anything about crypto.

Much better for people to learn not to make investment decisions based on a single company.

No, of course not. Most big stakeholders in cryptocurrencies want a manipulable asset to invest in. A long circuituous route was taken to building one when regulation cut off the ability to do what they are doing with their coins.

I mean, the whole transacting without borders, and providing a transaction medium that is somewhat immune to geopolitical power projection by any one nation state looks great on paper; but it's also the type of idealistic tool frequuently used to get someone to part with their money.

As much of a raging contrarian as I am when it comes to Federal regulation a d interference in markets; the type of market activity surrounding crypto is a spot on copy paste of the types of scammy behavior the SEC was meant to rein in, even if the rulemaking (whether I like how it's done or not) hasn't caught up. It's also market activity that's producing no net positive societal value as far as I've heard of measuring being done to account for it. Businesses popped up to facilitate movement of coins, and conversion to fiat; but the externalities (regulatory escape, lost funds by people when scam exchanges walk off with everyone's assets, greased anti-money laundering mechanisms, environmental costs, brain drain)...

I know my viewpoint on it probably means about as much in the long run as a gnat fart, but it's just one of those things that seems like a solution looking for a problem, picking whatever problem looks most likely to gain momentum this week, and to hell with the problems caused as a result.

> I see this as market manipulation.

Absolutely. Any mention of cryptocurrency by Musk or his companies instantly reflects on the price and there's no way in hell Musk doesn't know that. Happened with Dogecoin like a week ago (after his SNL appearance), happening again.

I'm not suggesting anything here, but it doesn't seem outrageous to think that after the SNL appearance and all the dogecoin references that Tesla/Musk may have bought substantial amounts prior to that before the obvious shilling on live television.

If that's the case, he would not have expected it to crash.

i.e. This may be desperation to fix the quarterly results after the plan backfired.

Either market manipulation or incompetence, it's one of the two.

For someone who owns Tesla and a solar company, claiming that he didn't already knew that Bitcoin is a huge energy sink seems unlikely.

Tesla is a little more high profile, but they certainly aren't the first company to implement something, or take a action, where you from the outside question the environmental impact. Only to have the company reverse the same decision a while later, claiming a huge effort to help the environment.

Welcome to the world of BTC. This is quite average event to be honest, the dip isn't even that big.

As a one who survived through 70% dip around 2013(?), I totally agree.

I mean, he had all the data in front of him when he announced end of March 2020 that Covid will be gone by April 2020 so I don't know what to think of this erratic behavior.

He effectively got away with doing it on TSLA why not try it out on BTC and doge coin too?

Or maybe he sees something coming in crypo the rest of us don't (e.g. regulatory crackdown).

Well, they might saw the backslash in environmentalist community, that used to be their main supporters. That's imo a pretty big sudden information.

You don’t think they knew that going in?

I think a lot of people are aware that bitcoin transactions have an energy cost but haven’t sufficiently gone down the rabbit hole of quantifying exactly what that cost is.

A company as big as as TSLA has people on payroll to figure that out. If they don’t, then it’s still on them. You think this is WSB where I see a ticker, strike and expiry and I’m in with my life savings?

I think you're a touch over-optimistic if you think that all large companies always consider every possible ramification of every decision to its fullest extent prior to acting.

Personally I think Tesla's (and Elon's, and for that matter everyone's) involvement with cryptocurrency as a serious investment is moronic, driven almost entirely by sci-fi daydreaming rather than by actual principles. But my opinion doesn't matter to anyone else, so *shrug,* I guess.

It’s a typical pump-and-dump+market manipulation decision in an unregulated market so it is legal, and highly profitable. It’s not a bad investment, only a moral failing.

Given that they haven't pumped (if anything they stand accused of deflating, not pumping) and they haven't dumped (they still hold roughly 90% of their peak position) how do you figure that they performed a "pump and dump"?

...they might have seen... - Enggrish

*English

I'm pretty sure bitcoin's environmental concern was known before the announcement. It wasn't sudden information.

and Bitcoin is 100% market manipulation. Useless asset.

I would be amazed if the SEC doesnt start an investigation assuming one is not in flight.

Yeah, he's just enacting retribution on the SEC for the tweetsitter they appointed due to him ... manipulating the market. ($420 funding secured, anyone?)

Except the SEC is not directly harmed by market manipulation, the market participants they exist to protect are.

It was not marketing manipulation until now?

That is anarcho-capitalism to you. Even though I'm a libertarian leaning, I still think we should put a tax from CO2 emissions on crypto transactions. Something in range of 300$ per tonne of CO2. So with bitcoin emissions at 0.5T per transaction, it would be somewhere around 150$ per transaction. And to cash in on bitcoin you should be required to document the whole history of bitcoin you own.

> Something in range of 300$ per tonne of CO2.

Why so high, and why specifically for crypto transactions and not everything that generates CO2?

That's about the cost of removing CO2 at industrial scale today.

And yes, I'm supporter of overall carbon tax.

Preferably something like European Union Emission Trading Scheme [0] where at some point we can just ban unmitigated emissions into the atmosphere.

I have no issue with people spending as much resources on bitcoin or any other crypto as they want as long as they clean up after themselves.

Actually it should include the whole package of externalities - CO2, electronic waste pollution etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emission_Tradin...

100% pump and dump.

How would he benefit? There are no put-options in Bitcoin land.

Of course there are: https://www.deribit.com/main#/options?tab=BTC-28MAY21

Interesting. Any signs of a single party buying lots of them just before the announcement?

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