Elon Musk says it's not possible to destroy crypto

Elon Musk doesn’t think the long-term role of cryptocurrency is the “second coming of the messiah”, but believes that it is aimed to reduce the power of centralized government which rankles other countries like China where cryptocurrency is banned.

According to Musk who is mostly positive about crypto, people should think of any form of money as a form of information. He believes the current system depends on a series of heterogeneous databases that aren’t real-time, but he hopes that crypto will reduce errors and latency and make the system more fair. "It is not possible to destroy crypto, but it is possible for governments to slow it down," he said.

The SpaceX and Tesla chief in an interview with PcMag, talked about space and how his main goal is not to fly himself to space but to open it up for humanity so that we can become a multi-planetary species. SpaxeX is already providing orbital space flight and transport of astronauts and cargo to the Internation Space Station. Musk says that the company uses the proceeds it earns from global internet revenue to create technology that would get humanity on to Mars and other places in space.

Starship is SpaceX’s next generation rocket, which will replace the current Falcon 9. With $15 million per flight, Musk is trying to economics work for a self-sustaining base on moon and Mars. Talking about potential Moon base, he said it would be “friggin cool” if they created a laboratory on there. In his interview he also seemed dismissive of suborbital flights which he believed took 100 times more energy and a special heat shield to get back.

Acknowledging that new technology is expensive Musk believes that going to Mars will become affordable someday and is also very vital to becoming a multi-planetary species. He hopes that we all can “pass this filter” soon, hopefully by the end of the century.

Conversing about self-driving cars, Musk says that transition to new technology is always difficult an bumpy. Tesla published its safety statistics, where there’s a factor of 10 differences between crashes per mile on Autopilot and miles driven manually. He says, “People are not great at driving these two-ton death machines. They get tired, drunk, or text, and cars crash”. Musk is concerned about the impact of electric vehicles on the grid which will double the demand of electricity, requiring new power distribution lines and bigger substations. He is positive however, with 40% annual growth of solar energy and similar growth in wind.