203
Any cypto advocate who has existed for more than 10 minutes is aware of the influence Elon Musk holds over the markets. Any tweet he puts out is immediately interpreted as either an extreme buy or sell signal, making any other analysis seem unnecessary, after all, a rocket is a rocket.
This has created massive amounts of volatility displayed in some small altcoins who happened to be on the recently in, of all possible coins, cumcoin. This was due to a tweet with just a few emojis and it sent the price of it through the roof. Are these massive rises due to people who believe that Elon's influence will legitimize a coin, or that simple speculation is at play? I believe the latter is more influential.
Apart from driving coins to the 'moon', Elon also has the ability to bring coins crashing back down to Earth. This was evident with his tweet about Tesla no longer accepting Bitcoin as a payment. Billions of dollars were wiped off the entire crypto markets value! This is even more irrational than speculators buying a coin he tweets about! How do people genuinely believe that the entire value of a currency is derived from just one individual! All this does is tarnish Bitcoins reputation, painting it as a simple method to gamble that may be even less respected than slot machines.
The ability for a single individual to control what is supposed to be a decentralized market, one that has no hub of control, is severely refuted by this one man.
Although he may not be able to directly steal your coins, he can very well completely destroy their value which is just as damaging. This is not a fault of the technology, it is merely the community that drives this bizarre way of valuing a currency.
The even more appalling part of this is that Musk and his family stand to gain financially from his market moving comments. His son owns Doge (which when revealed further caused the price to increase) and his comments infer that he does own some other cryptocurrencies. This makes sense as it would be bizarre for a man to exercise his immense power for no good reason. Call me a nutter, but there must be a reason behind his manipulations.
For comparison, imagine if the Prime Minister of Australia made a comment about the US dollar and then it changes 20% in value. This may not be a perfect comparison, but we all know that this would never happen as Australia has very little influence, if any, on the USD, and the financial community would simply laugh off the comments rather than react.
If Bitcoin wants to be a legitimate currency, one man can't control it's value, especially if this man has had absolutely no contribution to the development of the currency. It is already volatile enough and this hurts it as a form of payment enough as merchants don't like getting paid in a currency that moves multiple percentage points every day, it doesn't need some billionaire playing on Twitter to further increase this downfall.
Furthermore, if a currency wants to call itself decentralized, nobody should be able to influence the price of it to a significant degree. The only impact a rich person should have is through their personal supply and demand, and not the supply and demand that's created from naive hordes that follow their every move. This is not decentralization, and Musk could soon call himself the central bank of crypto with his influence over the prices.
Once again, this is a community issue, and I hope that we can rise above this speculative fever and remember that what we are buying is a currency, and not something that changes in price due to few characters relayed from a billionaires Twitter account to hordes of followers attempting to make a quick buck.
You can help create change by employing the sensible rationality displayed by others in the more traditional financial sectors. Yes, we may be trying to change their ways, but we can at least have the awareness to say there is stuff to learn from the past, such as not excessive gambling from the words of a man who isn't even a politician.
Stop the madness, stop listening to Musk
Until next time,
James Clarke
