Raoul Pal Calls Out Bitcoin Maxis For Their Role In The Market Downturn
As markets reel from the latest Elon Musk Bitcoin FUD, the CEO of Real Vision, Raoul Pal, said BTC maximalists are in part culpable due to their blinkered view.
“The biggest impediment to BTC adoption are bitcoin maximalists. Few understand this.
Be more open. Don’t try to ram your points home. Support people and don’t be tribal and never be abusive and insulting if someone doesn’t share your BTC only views. It’s a big world out there.“
Speculation Mounts That Musk Has Dumped His Bitcoin
Last week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced his firm would no longer accept Bitcoin as payment. He said the environmental damage caused by coal-dependent miners was behind the decision.
Markets tanked on the news with over $400 billion wiped from the total crypto market cap. This resulted in a 13% drop for Bitcoin on the day, forming a daily close of $49.3k.
Buyers stepped in, stabilizing the market over the next few days. But the weekend saw further sell-offs.
Musk replied “Indeed” to a tweet that mentioned the hate being directed towards him during this period.
The tweet by @CryptoWhale spoke about Tesla selling their remaining Bitcoin holdings. It also said such a reaction is justified considering the attacks he has endured.
Bitcoiners are going to slap themselves next quarter when they find out Tesla dumped the rest of their #Bitcoin holdings.
With the amount of hate @elonmusk is getting, I wouldn’t blame him…
— Mr. Whale (@CryptoWhale) May 16, 2021
Musk’s response of “indeed” leaves the door wide open on what he agreed with. CNBC speculates that Musk was hinting that Tesla has already sold their remaining Bitcoin holdings.
Fred Wilson, a founding partner at Union Square Ventures, commented on the situation by saying he believes Musk is manipulating the market.
“He’s playing games. It is hard to take anyone who does that seriously. I’ve lost enormous respect for him over the last year because of it.”
Wilson later added that he still respects Musk’s achievements, but not his tweets.
China Controls The Hashing Power
Adding to the fallout, Musk said the Bitcoin network is controlled mainly by a select group of big mining firms in a now-deleted tweet. He also spoke of a natural disaster at a coal mine in Xinjiang, northwestern China, which significantly dropped the Bitcoin hashrate.
“Bitcoin is actually highly centralized, with supermajority controlled by handful of big mining (aka hashing) companies.
A single coal mine in Xinjiang flooded, almost killing miners, and Bitcoin hash rate dropped 35%. Sound decentralized to you?”
Estimates put 65% of Bitcoin’s hashing power coming from China, with the USA and Russia in joint second, accounting for 7% of the hashing power each. With four out of five of the biggest mining pools being based in China, exposure to political risk is high.
The above is not new information, but coming from Elon Musk is much harder to gloss over.
As Pal said, there’s more to crypto than just Bitcoin. BTC maxis are not helping their cause by denying that.
Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com