Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable

[Artful Dodger]

From Tesla's 2020 10-K, here are final P&D numbers for autos, and plans & priorities:

Overview and 2020 Highlights:

• In 2020, we produced 509,737 vehicles and delivered 499,647 vehicles
• We are currently focused on:
  • increasing vehicle production and capacity,
  • developing and ramping our battery cell technology,
  • increasing the affordability of our vehicles,
  • expanding our global infrastructure and
  • introducing our next vehicles

Note that veh. prod. #s are unchanged from the P&D press release on Jan 2, 2021 while veh. deliveries were revised upward by 97 units from the previous estimate of 499,550.

Cheers!

 

[printf42]

My take on BTC investment:

• I don’t invest in BTC, because I don’t know enough of it to form my opinion whether it’s a good investment or not.
• I trust Tesla to be frugal and careful when they invest/spend money.
• Like it or not, Tesla is already investing with the cash balance, be it overnight loan, holding foreign currency longer than necessary, or buy raw materials. Even if they just hold it all cash in USD, that’s still investing in USD.
• All investments has risks, as long as it’s liquid enough with reasonable long term risk, I am fine with them experiment and diversify.
• So, I won’t speculate or pay attention to any impact of BTC to TSLA, since the position is so tiny relative to the company cash flow. I suspect Euro or JPY exchange rate would have more impact, on that matter.

 

[MikeAtkinson]

'Invisible killer': fossil fuels caused 8.7m deaths globally in 2018, research finds

Air pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil was responsible for 8.7m deaths globally in 2018, a staggering one in five of all people who died that year, new research has found.

10% of deaths in Europe and US, 30% in eastern Asia caused by air pollution, particularly PM 2.5

 

[Scuttlebutt]

Random thoughts from a late-Boomer who does not invest in Bitcoin as of now.

Bitcoin manufacture is wasteful and too often uses dirty energy. The process seems to be very inefficient.

Digital currency is useful here and perhaps more so on Mars but has its drawbacks that if addressed might:
1) Increase transaction speed.
2) Manufacture coins in a cleaner, less energy-dense manner.
3) have security protocols in place that make it harder to use for fraudulent purposes, ie. money laundering, etc. There may be many more improvements needed that I am too uneducated to see?

Tesla has cheap and clean power.
Tesla has DOJO/AI/AutoBidder.

Is Elon perhaps thinking of improving Digital currency? Starting his own currency? Backed by (what will be) the largest company in the world, the odd Billionaire or three, and an army of loyal fans?

How many of us would invest a portion of our gains in an Elon-created currency??

Am I way off here, or is anyone else thinking along these lines as well?

* EDIT for clarity.

 

[Carl Raymond]

There is no per transaction energy cost. Bitcoin security through mining secures all past transactions and maintains the existence of the network. It would be the same whether any transactions were done or not.

Only the first passenger to board the plane should be charged for fuel. The fuel cost for the remaining passengers is zero, because the plane was going anyway.

 

[Pezpunk]

2) Manufacture coins in a cleaner, less energy-dense manner.

this is a very hard problem to solve. the energy usage bottleneck is very much by design, as the primary gate to bitcoin generation. it might be literally impossible to come up with algorithms that can't be sped up through the use of additional resources.

3) have security protocols in place that make it harder to use for fraudulent purposes, ie. money laundering, etc. There may be many more improvements needed that I am too uneducated to see?

That's mostly a myth, and in the future the LAST thing you will want to use for nefarious purposes is Bitcoin -- it is in fact the most easily-traceable currency in the world. There is a public, infallible record of every transaction. If you want to commit a crime, use cash.

Tesla has cheap and clean power.
Tesla has DOJO/AI/AutoBidder.
Is Elon perhaps thinking of improving Digital currency? Starting his own currency? Backed by (what will be) the largest company in the world, the odd Billionaire or three, and an army of loyal fans?
How many of us would invest a portion of our gains in an Elon-created currency??
Am I way off here, or is anyone else thinking along these lines as well?

i hope Tesla doesn't go in that direction. I'd prefer it stay focused on the mission at hand. I don't think "because it makes a lot of money" is, in and of itself, a good enough reason for Tesla to do something.

 

[j6Lpi429@3j]

Banks and ATMs consume a lot of energy also.

Sure. I use an online bank (monzo) I get statements on my phone. AFAIK they have zero ATMs and zero premises. Why are we suddenly pretending every bank is like a bank from 1930 in order to justify the energy use of btc? This is the kind of rhetoric that TSLAQ use when they pretend all supercharging energy comes from coal. It just reinforces my belief that crypto has become a cult, that its supporters cannot look at objectively.
I remain convinced this is a BAD move by Tesla, and seriously hurts their environmental credentials, which until now were untouchable.

 

[zzziii]

Read the full story here: Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

 

[FS_FRA]

What worries me the most, is if Elon miss places one of his prenups and loses half his company.

You're assuming he has prenups

 

[OrthoSurg]

A friend convinced me to open a GBTC position 2 weeks ago of GBTC at $31. I was looking at the ARK report on it and was waiting for a dip, I was conservative and put an initial investment of 0.5% of my portfolio. Didn’t expect to be almost 1% 2 weeks after.

Interesting that it is growing faster than my TSLA.
Now, I had classified GTBC in my speculative category and allocating assets accordingly. Now, I don’t know when to change it in the growing profitable asset category... there are no metrics to rely upon

 

[jbcarioca]

...

I am not indicting Mr Musk for this. I am saying that I do not have the answers to resolve that above discrepancy...

First, I am not an expert regarding cryptocurrencies.
Second, I have used Blockchain and have recommending the use of Blockchain.

So, in my opinion the value of Blockchain far surpasses that of Bitcoin. There is almost no widely available secure and portable database today. So long as the password is sufficiently arcane and complex the data on a thumb drive is both transportable and secure. There are almost limitless uses for that technology. As Bitcoin finders know if you haven't the password you have no data so have a useless thumb drive.

Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company etc do have uses for Blockchain, many of them.

So a couple Billion US$ worth of Bitcoin is a perfectly good way to adapt to using Blockchain. Still, Blockchain, not Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, is the story IMHO:
Blockchain Technologies Course | MIT Sloan Online Program | GetSmarter
Blockchain.com - The Most Trusted Crypto Company
check: "Blockchain Data is in Our DNA"\
check: Blockchain.com - The Most Trusted Crypto Company

Cryptocurrencies are all the rage and have been for a while. However, the real story is the 'wallet' not 'what is in it'. NOT an endorsement of CapitalOne, BTW.

Once again, distributed data security is the really big story, not the specific application that spawned it.

Elon Musk knows that, so he's popularizing the notion of cryptocurrencies because that is the fastest way to assess the technology. He does not always disclose what the first principle he's considering might actually be.

As usual, this is my opinion. I do not attempt to represent reality in this post, just my view of reality. An appropriate caution, IMHO, for those who misunderstand the world of Cryptocurrency custodians.

 

[jbcarioca]

...Just imagine every Tesla, Starlink satellite, SpaceX component, factory element all quite secure easily accessible IF you have the access mechanisms, but even then quite elegantly trackable.

Just don't forget the high latency. This technology is great for security horrible for speed. Solutions do exist for the institutional versions, but none are fast.

 

[canoemore]

Random thoughts from a late-Boomer who does not invest in Bitcoin as of now.

Bitcoin manufacture is wasteful and too often uses dirty energy. The process seems to be very inefficient.

Digital currency is useful here and perhaps more so on Mars but has its drawbacks that if addressed might:
1) Increase transaction speed.
2) Manufacture coins in a cleaner, less energy-dense manner.
3) have security protocols in place that make it harder to use for fraudulent purposes, ie. money laundering, etc. There may be many more improvements needed that I am too uneducated to see?

Tesla has cheap and clean power.
Tesla has DOJO/AI/AutoBidder.

Is Elon perhaps thinking of improving Digital currency? Starting his own currency? Backed by (what will be) the largest company in the world, the odd Billionaire or three, and an army of loyal fans?

How many of us would invest a portion of our gains in an Elon-created currency??

Am I way off here, or is anyone else thinking along these lines as well?

* EDIT for clarity.

I think you bring up good points. Something I'm fuzzy on is how Tesla's purchase of Bitcoin advances an effort to create their own digital currency or improve Bitcoin itself. Is the idea that they gain valuable experience using it? Identify strengths and weaknesses to address in a future bespoke cryptocurrency?

 

[Nocturnal]

You are missing the ridiculously large carbon footprint of bitcoin...

Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index - Digiconomist

So far 18 million coins have been mined of a total capped at 21 million, but the system keeps halving the coins minted per block, so the pollution per coin keeps rising. A conspiracy theorist would say that bitcoin was invented by the energy industry to prop up demand.

Per coin it's up, per equivalent dollar value and per transaction it's far less. Rob's idea that the carbon capture grant might be associated with this movie makes sense to me as well.

Opponents of crypto focus on all the negative externalities while ignoring the negative externalities of the other options (dollars, gold etc.). How many millions have suffered or died as part of schemes to keep USD or other currencies at the top? How many child miners have died over the years finding gold etc.?

3a. Regarding the mining of Bitcoins: Do I misunderstand, or - leaving aside the "joke" Dogecoin - are there not multiple cryptocurrencies competing with Bitcoin, for which each one has its own ultimate # to be discovered? Concurrently, is (is not) it the case that even though the ultimate amount of Bitcoins reasonably shortly will be reached, will not the mining grind of the other cryptos continue for much, much longer?

3b. Regarding the mining: Regardless of whether 3a is so or not so, it remains the case that of all the world's "hard" currencies/currency proxies like gold, cryptocurrencies are the one for which the SOLE input is energy. Gold...silver...diamonds already exist on the planet and elsewhere in the solar system, yet they take manual and mechanical labor to extract, and societal developments (towns, other ancillary services and so forth) to support such efforts, and ecological alterations (a very large number of which most certainly are considered deleterious to the environment, but so be it) occur as a result of these processes. Not so with Bitcoin, if one disregards the purchasing of processors.

The rest are called "alt coins" for a reason. They have value in that people speculate they may become the next bitcoin. Once Bitcoin is truly embraced then almost all of those will fall away and will be disregarded. The only ones that will remain will be those with unique functionality. Bitcoin will be the store of value coin. Ethereum (which I also own) is being used to develop applications and exchanges. There may be a few others that have other specific uses but this massive mining and speculation boom is all about getting into the coin that will dominate as a store of value. So I expect the value of most of the rest to utterly collapse once BTC goes fully mainstream.

 

[lascavarian]

So a couple Billion US$ worth of Bitcoin is a perfectly good way to adapt to using Blockchain. Still, Blockchain, not Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, is the story IMHO:

Strongly agree that blockchain is the larger part of the story.

 

[jbcarioca]

...the LAST thing you will want to use for nefarious purposes is Bitcoin -- it is in fact the most easily-traceable currency in the world. There is a public, infallible record of every transaction. If you want to commit a crime, use cash...

Wow! The first poster here who actually knows what Blockchain is. There is a reason why the most security conscious entities around the world are flocking to Blockchain and a handful of [mostly Israeli] advanced data security providers.

Bitcoin is very secure.To find out for yourself, lose your authentication trail.
Biometrics come close, but several layers are required and it's not as adaptable to institutional application.

Tesla knows, of that we may be certain.

 

[Scuttlebutt]

I think you bring up good points. Something I'm fuzzy on is how Tesla's purchase of Bitcoin advances an effort to create their own digital currency or improve Bitcoin itself. Is the idea that they gain valuable experience using it? Identify strengths and weaknesses to address in a future bespoke cryptocurrency?

Yes. That's what I am thinking, too.

Elon has stated that he was "Late to the Party" His mind was elsewhere (as it should be) Perhaps he had a conversation that changed the way he looked at blockchain-crypto?
Elon will need Trillions to speed the development on Mars and carbon capture funding here on earth. Crypto profits get him there quicker. Improving what's come before is in his DNA.

 

[john94si]

View attachment 635165
starlink available in Bay Area, Ca.
Shipping in 2-4 weeks.
Down side is currently coverage is 50-150mbps latency 20-40 and states “potential for brief periods of no service”
Install kit was $597. Free delivery.
Monthly fee of $99

Anyone know if I can take it with me on RV trips? Or will it only work at my service address.

Only service address which keeps me from ordering

 

[durkie]

Opponents of crypto focus on all the negative externalities while ignoring the negative externalities of the other options (dollars, gold etc.). How many millions have suffered or died as part of schemes to keep USD or other currencies at the top? How many child miners have died over the years finding gold etc.?

This comparison makes no sense to me. Any of the externalities you mention with gold or other currencies would of course be hugely problematic if those currencies use/extraction required people to die. But they don't.

Bitcoin consumes huge amounts of resources -by design-.

Also surprised at how little mention Tether has received here as a real shadow hanging over BTC.

 

[jbcarioca]

It could work for subscription services. It would be too slow for anything time critical though. This is my main problem with bitcoin, it’s not build for speed and you have to pay extra to go to the front of the line. How Long Bitcoin Transactions Take (2021 Updated)

Even then, in the technologies for interbank transactions bank transfers are near-instant, even in the US. No Blockchain-based transition will be 'fast' in monetary terms. The system was designed to be community-based without 'a central processor' so authentication si very time consuming. Very secure and very slow. Buying a car is easy, but the payment probably should be done at off-peak times to avoid high fees and slow processing, which do run in tandem.