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Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

The first time I heard about this "XChat" was through a screenshot of Musk's tweet where he said it has "bitcoin style" encryption. Honestly, it was obvious just from reading that, that Musk has absolutely no idea what he's talking about when it comes to cryptography, and that nobody he has talked to on the development team has any clue either.

That doesn't mean that we know for sure that the team doesn't have cryptography experts, but ... I have my doubts. Surely we'd have heard details by now if that was the case.

(I mean "Bitcoin style"! The most important part of encrypted chat is confidentiality, and no part of Bitcoin's architecture even ATTEMPTS to ensure confidentiality! Everything's permanently stored in plaintext on the public ledger FFS!!!!)

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It sounds like an offhand comment that we shouldn’t read much into.

Bitcoin’s creator demonstrated an impressive mastery of cryptography—- it was made to be extremely resilient (including to quantum computing) and no one has ever broken it despite billions of dollars being on the line. Maybe Musk meant to say that he thinks his product will be similarly resilient.

He might also mean that the secp256k1 elliptic curve (which Bitcoin uses) is also used by their product in some way, such as for a key exchange.

You can read anything with the assumption that the writer is an absolute idiot, but I’d give the world’s richest man more credit than that.

> You can read anything with the assumption that the writer is an absolute idiot, but I’d give the world’s richest man more credit than that.

Before the pandemic, I would've said similar, even despite some of his errors of judgement.

Since then, and the trend started earlier, it has become difficult to ignore that (1) he responds poorly to experts contradicting him, and (2) outside his actual domains of expertise (rockets and sales/motivational pitches*) he's just as much of a noob as everyone other opinionated loudmouth on the internet.

* the latter of which is, IMO, one of the two big reasons Tesla share price is 10x to 30x what it should be, and that in turn is why he's the richest man on the planet.

The other is that surviving the stock shorters probably burned people off shorting that stock, so the market is mostly now mostly just the exhuberent optimists unbalanced by doubters.

> he's just as much of a noob as everyone other opinionated loudmouth on the internet.

That would be a step ahead of most of the ultra wealthy, in my humble experience. Family money seems to do nothing positive for critical thinking skills or practical experience.

At best, he brings technical ideas. Not implementation.

He implements implementation.

The world's richest man was caught cheating at video games via hiring people to play for him for the sake of cred. I don't think I would give him anything.

You're right that he cheated (in some sense), but I don't think "caught" is the right word since he admitted it when he was asked point-blank. He paid someone to level up his character before he played it, not to stream in his name and pretend to be him.

Paying someone to level your character is officially against Blizzard's rules in all of their games, but their lack of enforcement reveals that they don't care as long as the monthly payments clear. World of Warcraft is overrun with people selling gold and boosts-- given that they're openly advertising this in Stormwind, it wouldn't be a stretch to call it de-facto legal (or at least decriminalized). Heck, Blizzard is selling gold and level boosts on its own website! [1]

[1] https://us.shop.battle.net/en-us/family/world-of-warcraft

He argued that he was top of the ladder and a top hardcore player in Path of Exile. The rest of your argument is just an excuse for someone lying directly to your face. The only reason why he didn't get banned from Path of Exile (as he should've been) is because he's rich and now tied with the US government.

I thought they didn’t ban him, because they are preoccupied with PoE2..

Uh, theres way more evidence musk is a moron than anything else.

Musk is a salesman.

Using crypto as a phrase makes it more interesting for journalists, gives them something to pad their articles with.

You say musk has no idea, but he has too talent working for him and they will explain stuff.

He will then think of the PR and Sales angle and adjust the product/press releases accordingly.

You think Elon Musk doesn’t know what he’s talking about? Sorry, you might disagree with his politics, but the assertion that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about it absurd.

"with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon." - Musk

He then invested in OpenAI, is still trying to make FSD a thing, wants humans and AI to merge via Neuralink, made humanoid robots, and made grok because he parted ways with OpenAI.

If he knows what he's talking about in general, this combination makes him a demonolater.

Given how often (and for how long) he keeps saying FSD is just around the corner — and how poorly recieved have been TBC's tunnels, Neuralink's research, grok, Twitter's changes under Musk, Optimus, Cybertruck, his comments when sharing a video of him attempting to play high-leveled characters in some video games — I have every reason to think he doesn't know much outside of rockets and sales/motivational speeches.

I don't even need to reference the salutes, supporting AfD, DOGE etc. as examples here.

He's made many comments that betray the fact that he's absolutely clueless in many areas, even those he should be knowledgeable in.

This is just the latest example.

> You think Elon Musk doesn’t know what he’s talking about?

Correct

Elon Musk doesnt know what he is talking about, when he strays away from business to pretend he is technical.

Doing so, is a business tactic. We know he is full of shit, but it gives him some kind of status in front of other business people.

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