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Buterin: ‘Elon Musk’s Influence on Crypto Prices Won’t Last Forever’

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Ethereum

Mining Proof-of-stake Proof-of-work

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Tim Alper

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Tim Alper

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Tim Alper is a British journalist and features writer who has worked at Cryptonews.com since 2018. He has written for media outlets such as the BBC, the Guardian, and Chosun Ilbo. He has also worked...

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Last updated:

June 25, 2023

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The Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin has claimed that the crypto markets will learn their lesson from the latest price crash – and stop hanging on every word tweeted by the Tesla chief Elon Musk.

In a video interview with CNN, Buterin pointed out that Musk tweeting about the crypto space “is something that the crypto space has only been introduced to for the first time literally last year and this year.”

He added,

“I think it’s reasonable to expect a bit of craziness. But I do think that the markets will learn. Elon is not going to have this influence forever.”

He said the markets will “build up an immune system over time,” although he conceded that prices have been “vulnerable” to disruptive events.

But Buterin dismissed the idea that Musk’s bitcoin (BTC)– and dogecoin (DOGE)-related activity was motivated by malice, stating:

“The fact that he is a 100-plus billionaire and he runs Tesla and SpaceX and all these things do not change the fact that ultimately [Musk] is a human. And humans get excited about dog coins. That’s just a thing that humans get excited about. I don’t think that Elon has a kind of malevolent intent in any of this.”

The Ethereum mastermind also had his say on regulatory issues, claiming that it is “important to listen to regulators to try to do our best to address concerns.” He said that regulation was “always a concern,” but ruled out the likelihood of a concerted government effort to ban crypto, saying that “it just seems much harder and much less realistic to do anything like that” as “governments can’t completely take [protocols] down.”

However, he added that governments “do have a lot of power to make it more painful to participate in the crypto sector” and that relationships between regulators and crypto players risked becoming “more confrontational than it needs to be.”

And Buterin weighed in on the proof-of-stake (PoS) versus proof-of-work (PoW) debate, that has been under the spotlight in recent weeks.

Ethereum is set to make the PoS switch, and Buterin added that the network would “go from consuming the same energy as a medium-sized country to consuming the same energy as a village.”

And environmental concerns over PoW “are real,” Buterin claimed.

“The resource consumption is definitely huge. It’s not the sort of thing that is going to break the world by itself, but it’s definitely a significant downside,” he said.

And he opined that unless Bitcoin made a similar shift, it could run the risk of being overtaken by other protocols: