On Saturday (May 15), Tesla and Space X CEO Elon Musk explained why he is working with Dogecoin ($DOGE) developers to improve the meme-based cryptoasset and listed what improvement he hopes they will be able to achieve.
As you probably already know, on May 12, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shocked the world by complaining about Bitcoin mining’s high usage of fossil fuels and saying that for this reason Tesla would not be accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment until “mining transitions to more sustainable energy.”
The following day, perhaps to calm down the crypto community, Musk said that he was still a strong believer in crypto.
On the same day, he revealed that has been working with Dogecoin developers to reduce the power consumption of mining of the meme-based cryptocurrency.
In fact, as Decrypt reported on May 14, according to Ross Nicoll, one of the part-time Dogecoin developers Decrypt talked to, Musk “started talking to the developers in 2019, he has ‘encouraged them to improve the higher transaction throughput,’ provided ‘lots of advice and input,’ and shared his vast Rolodex of contacts.”
Nicoll also said (1) that the dev team he is part of is hoping to reuce Dogecoin’s power consumption; (2) Musk has been with Dogecoin’s dev team since April 2019 (when he said that Dogecoinmight be his favortie cryptocurrency); and (3) that Musk had offered to fund the team, but his offer of financial support had been rejected (just as with offers they had received from other wealthy potential backers).
Yesterday, Dogecoin supporter “@itsALLrisky” said on Twitter explained why he thinks that Dogecoin, which Musk has referred to as “people’s crypto”, is better than Bitcoin. Musk said Dogecoin would beat Bitcoin “hands down” if its developers made three improvements: 10X faster block production time, 10X larger block size, and 100X lower transaction fees.
When someone asked Musk why not just create a new ideal cryptocurrency instead of trying to improve Dogecoin. Musk gave the very surprising answer that it’s because it would be a “big pain in the neck” to create (and presumably make popular) a new cryptocurrency from scratch.
Musk’s answer is especially interesting when you consider that Dogecoin co-creator Billy Markus says it took him just two hours to write the software for Dogecoin.
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