Elon Musk - Page 2 of 14

Tesla starts using in-car camera for Autopilot driver monitoring

Tesla is starting to use the camera above the rear-view mirror in the Model 3 and Model Y to help make sure people pay attention to the road while using Autopilot, the company’s advanced driver assistance system.

Until now, the main way Tesla’s cars measure driver attention is through torque sensors in the steering wheel that look for resistance — a crude way of ensuring drivers keep their hands on the wheel. If it doesn’t register enough feedback, the car performs a series of escalating visual and audible warnings.

The change comes after regulators and safety experts spent years begging Tesla to add better driver monitoring to its cars. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has even admitted that crashes involving Autopilot stem from complacency. But he previously rejected his own engineers’ calls to add more robust driver monitoring to the company’s cars. Musk said at the time that the tech was “ineffective.” Companies like General Motors and Ford currently sell cars with camera-based eye-tracking systems that are meant to make sure drivers pay attention while using hands-free driving features.

A Twitter user who says they just took delivery of a new Model Y posted an image Thursday that shows software release notes describing the new safety feature:

The cabin camera above your rearview mirror can now detect and alert driver inattentiveness while Autopilot is engaged. Camera data does not leave the car itself, which means the system cannot save or transmit information unless data sharing is enabled.

In subsequent tweets, the Model Y owner said the steering wheel sensor alerts were still active.

Electrek has also seen the release notes.

Model S and Model X vehicles made before 2021 do not have a cabin camera, though the redesigned versions announced in January (which have still not shipped) are supposed to have them.

Tesla doesn’t define the term “driver inattentiveness” that it uses in the release notes, or what happens if it decides someone isn’t paying sufficient attention. Earlier this year, hacker @greentheonly and an accomplice were able to tease out what a work-in-progress version of the camera-based driver monitoring system could see. It was particularly good at noticing when the driver looked down at a phone, though it struggled in low light.

The in-car camera was pretty much benign in the early going with the Model 3 and Model Y, though Tesla started using it to make sure that drivers in the beta test of its “Full Self-Driving” version of Autopilot were paying attention to the road. Musk said in March that Tesla removed some beta testers from the program because they “did not pay sufficient attention.”

The addition of camera-based driver monitoring feature also follows a fresh wave of scrutiny on Autopilot, which rose up after a pair of fatal crashes where it initially appeared the driver assistance system may have been involved — though, in one case, officials walked back the claim that Autopilot was active, and in the other, an early report from the National Transportation Safety Board made it seem unlikely that the system was in use. There have also been a number of recently documented cases of social media users posting videos that show them fooling Autopilot into thinking someone is still in the driver’s seat.

A company wants to build a massive solar project in Montana — of course it’s for crypto

A company looking to build a massive solar project in Butte, Montana claims it would provide 300MW of renewable power and cost $250 million, Gizmodo reported. That’s according to Madison River Equity LLC, whose parent company also manages cryptomining outfit Atlas Power. As Gizmodo reports, Madison would build the solar array, then sell it to Atlas, which hopes to use it to power its cryptocurrency mining operations. If the solar farm, dubbed the Basin Creek Solar Project, is actually built, it could be one of the largest in the US, but it raises questions about the impact of such projects, and about crypto’s impact on energy.

While the project would theoretically allow Atlas’ mining and other data center operations to run on renewable power, there are arguments that green energy doesn’t actually make crypto itself green. There’s still the problem of e-waste that’s generated when hardware is no longer profitable, and the question of what will happen if there isn’t enough solar power available to fuel the mining operation. And while the massive solar project does seem to be in line with the goals of some (including Elon Musk) in the crypto community who are trying to move away from fossil-fuel powered mining operations, it also shows the problems that can crop up when trying to create a green energy project, especially one that will be run by a company focusing on crypto.

According to the Montana Standard, the Butte-Silver Bow zoning board recently turned down another energy project that was also looking to use residential land, citing nearby residents’ aesthetic concerns. The Standard’s report also includes similar concerns from Butte residents about ruined views regarding the Basin Creek Solar Project.

There are also some community members concerned about whether the extra electricity generated will actually benefit Butte, or if it will be sold elsewhere. Add to that the allegedly colorful past of Atlas Power’s owners — the company used to be called CryptoWatt — and it’s understandable why residents would be wary.

At the moment, the fate of the Basin Creek Solar Project (and possibly the fate of Atlas Energy’s mining expansion) seem to be in the hands of the Butte-Silver Bow zoning board, which will meet on June 17th to discuss whether to allow the solar array to be built on what is currently private land.

The Boring Company tests its ‘Teslas in Tunnels’ system in Las Vegas

Elon Musk’s Boring Company started shuttling passengers through the twin tunnels it built underneath the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) this week, as part of a test to get the system ready for its full debut in June.

Videos, images, and accounts shared around the internet by the people who showed up for the test offer the most coherent glimpse yet at Musk’s solution for traversing the LVCC campus. It is quite literally just Teslas being driven through two 0.8-mile tunnels — a far cry from the autonomous sled-and-shuttle ideas that Musk once proposed for The Boring Company.

There are three stops to the “LVCC Loop” system. The stations at either end are above ground, while the one in the middle is at the same 30-foot depth as the tunnels. The Boring Company used a few dozen Tesla vehicles — including Model 3 sedans, and Model Y and Model X SUVs — during the test. While the company has talked about making riders call for cars using an app, the test only required them to walk up to the next available car. Test riders then hopped in, went to one of the other two stations, and repeated. It appears most riders got between seven or eight to a dozen rides during the test.

Schlepping from one end of the LVCC campus is no quick feat on foot, especially after the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) recently added a whole new wing. Taxi lines and ride-hailing wait times are notoriously long, too. So any solution that makes it easier to get around the grounds will likely appeal to convention-goers, even if the amenity cost the LVCVA $52.5 million ($48.6 million of which went to The Boring Company).

The Boring Company says the Loop will ultimately turn a 45-minute walk into a two-minute ride, though it’s not down to that level of efficiency yet (hence the test). In one video, one of the test riders said they had to wait about three to five minutes for a few of the rides, though even with a top speed of around 40 miles per hour, trips between stations appear to have taken about a minute to a minute-and-a-half.

One of the things increasing that total travel time was the underground station. There were times when test riders pulled into the station only to run into some congestion. The drivers have to maneuver around other parked Teslas, people getting in and out, and cars queueing up to reenter the tunnels. It’s a tight fit.

There was also just some general confusion as people got used to how the system worked. Passengers were being constantly reminded to leave the doors open when exiting the vehicle to speed up the transition to the next ride. One person got bonked on the head by one of the Model X’s Falcon Wing doors.

The big question with The Boring Company’s efforts in Las Vegas is pretty much the same as it always is with Musk’s ideas: how will it scale? The company says it wants to eventually transport 4,400 people per hour through the LVCC Loop’s tunnels, though TechCrunch discovered documents late last year that seem to show it will only be able to transport 1,200. Beyond the LVCC Loop, The Boring Company wants to build a massive tunnel system that runs under the whole city, including the Las Vegas Strip and the airport. It claims this massively scaled-up version of its underground highway will be able to handle a little more than 50,000 passengers per hour.

The Boring Company has claimed it plans to allow a max speed of 150 miles per hour in these tunnels but has limited speeds during the tests so far. And while the goal is to ultimately have the Teslas drive themselves, the system will rely on human drivers for the foreseeable future.

Reaching that top speed is one of the key things The Boring Company says sets its “Teslas in Tunnels” idea apart from, say, a subway system. (Another is cost, which we’ve seen the company tout in its most recent proposal in Miami.) It likely won’t be attainable unless the company is able to automate the driving, as the tunnels are too tight for a human driver to continuously (and carefully) navigate at such high speeds — another thing that was obvious from videos of the test.

Tesla will store Chinese car data locally, following government fears about spying

Tesla says it’s established a data center in China to store and process information produced by its vehicles locally. The announcement, made on Weibo, comes as the US carmaker faces pressure from Chinese authorities over fears its cars could be used for spying.

“Car data security is very important,” said Tesla (via Google Translate). “All data generated from the sales of vehicles in the Chinese mainland market will be stored in China.”

Reports from The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg said Tesla’s cars have been banned from Chinese military sites, and that “military staff and employees of key state-owned companies” are prohibited from owning the vehicles. Chinese authorities were reportedly concerned that the exterior cameras on the cars could be used to collect sensitive data and send it back to the US.

Elon Musk responded by saying if this was true it would be the end of the company in China. “There’s a very strong incentive for us to be very confidential with any information,” said Musk in March. “If Tesla used cars to spy in China or anywhere, we will get shut down.”

Tesla certainly needs to keep China happy to ensure the company’s future growth. China is the world’s largest market for electric vehicles — around three to four times the size of the the US. Tesla sold 147,445 cars in China last year, according to Reuters, accounting for 30 percent of global sales.

Last month, the Chinese government published draft rules outlining its concerns with data-collection by smart vehicles. The rules state that data about roads, buildings, and terrain should not leave the country, and that customers should have to consent to data collection. Tesla expressed support for the rules through social media accounts in China.

Tesla is already shipping cars without radar sensors

Tesla has stopped building forward-facing radar sensors into its Model 3 sedans and Model Y SUVs in North America, after CEO Elon Musk publicly expressed a desire to rely on cameras to power the company’s advanced driver assistance system, Autopilot.

Tesla has been developing the vision-based version of Autopilot during the limited beta test of its “Full Self-Driving” software. But it’s not completely done making sure Autopilot works without the radar sensor, though, as it is limiting or disabling some features on these vehicles for an indefinite amount of time. Autosteer — the Autopilot feature that can keep a Tesla centered in a lane, even around curves — will only be usable at 75 miles per hour and below. Tesla is also only making it available at an (unspecified) longer minimum following distance to any cars in front.

The company says Smart Summon — which lets a driver “summon” their Tesla from outside the car, even in a crowded parking lot — “may be disabled at delivery,” along with the Emergency Lane Departure Avoidance feature. Tesla says it will start restoring these features “[i]n the weeks ahead” in a sequence of over-the-air software updates.

Tesla is not currently removing the radar sensor from its more expensive models, the Model S sedan or Model X SUV. The company says it is initially focusing on making the Model 3 and Model Y reliant on the exclusively vision-based system because it sells far more of them. “Transitioning them to Tesla Vision first allows us to analyze a large volume of real-world data in a short amount of time, which ultimately speeds up the roll-out of features based on Tesla Vision,” the company writes.

Tesla didn’t offer any more information about when it would stop building radar sensors in the Model S and Model X, or the vehicles it’s building in China. The company actually stopped making the Model S and Model X in the first quarter of 2021 as it readied a new version of each vehicle. Those redesigned versions have been delayed, though a launch event for the new Model S is scheduled for next week.

Radar sensors are common in many modern passenger cars, trucks, and SUVs. They’re used to help detect fast-approaching objects, even in poor visibility, and are one of the sensors that power safety features like automatic emergency braking. While modern cars also pull data from other sensors — including cameras — to power these features, automakers like to have multiple types to make sure that there’s redundancy. If one type of sensor fails or can’t perform in a certain situation, there’s always a backup.

Musk has, somewhat famously, spent years saying he didn’t think laser-based lidar sensors were necessary to develop semi- and fully autonomous vehicles. But he recently started talking a lot more about switching Tesla to a vision-based system that mainly relied on the eight cameras embedded in each car (and 12 ultrasonic sensors) as well as a neural network processing of the real-time feeds they generate. In April, the company wrote in a press release that “a vision-only system is ultimately all that is needed for full autonomy.”

“Our AI-based software architecture has been increasingly reliant on cameras, to the point where radar is becoming unnecessary earlier than expected,” Tesla wrote. The company said at the time that it was “nearly ready to switch the US market to Tesla Vision.”

Elon Musk and Bitcoin miners say they want to address crypto’s sustainability problem

MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor tweeted Monday that after a weekend meeting with Tesla CEO Elon Musk and “leading Bitcoin miners in North America,” the group has agreed to form a Bitcoin Mining Council, “to promote energy usage transparency [and] accelerate sustainability initiatives worldwide.”

Musk tweeted earlier in the day that the group “committed to publish current & planned renewable usage & to ask miners WW to do so. Potentially promising.” According to Saylor, the group included representatives from Argo Blockchain, Blockcap, Core Scientific, Galaxy Digital, Hive Blockchain Technologies, Hut 8 Mining, Marathon Digital Holdings, and Riot Blockchain.

Yesterday I was pleased to host a meeting between @elonmusk & the leading Bitcoin miners in North America. The miners have agreed to form the Bitcoin Mining Council to promote energy usage transparency & accelerate sustainability initiatives worldwide. https://t.co/EHgLZ9zvDK

— Michael Saylor (@michael_saylor) May 24, 2021

Emails to each of the companies Saylor referenced were not immediately returned Monday, but a spokesperson from Galaxy confirmed to Bloomberg that a representative participated in the call. Several other of the companies mentioned tweeted their support for the plan. Hut 8 Mining confirmed it was part of the discussions Saylor referenced, tweeting that it would “educate the market that sustainable mining is possible and a priority.”

Argo Blockchain CEO Peter Wall tweeted “as a founding member of the Bitcoin Mining Council, Argo will push hard for sustainable mining and more transparency. This is the way!” Merrick Okamoto, executive chairman at Marathon Digital Holdings tweeted the company would do its part “to contribute to sustainable mining and transparency.”

While Tesla began accepting Bitcoin as payment for vehicles in March, Musk reversed that position earlier this month, as he expressed concern for the environment. “Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at great cost to the environment,” Musk tweeted. Since then he’s made note several times of cryptocurrency’s sustainability problem.

Bitcoin mining uses a significant amount of electricity, using as much annually as the Netherlands, according to one estimate. That’s at odds with Tesla’s stated mission to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” Specifics about how the miners planned to tackle Bitcoin’s environmental issues — whether through making changes to the blockchain or using carbon offsetting measures as large corporations do — weren’t available Monday.

Elon Musk called lidar a ‘crutch,’ but now Tesla is reportedly testing Luminar’s laser sensors

A Tesla Model Y was photographed in Florida sporting rooftop lidar sensors made by buzzy sensor manufacturer Luminar. The sighting caused a bit of a stir among Tesla watchers, given Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s well-established disdain for the laser sensors commonly used by autonomous vehicle companies to create 3D maps of their environment.

Even more notably, Tesla has reportedly entered a partnership with Luminar to use lidar for “testing and developing,” according to Bloomberg. What exactly this partnership entails we don’t know for sure — neither company is commenting. But it could point to some shortcomings in the technology Tesla is using to power its “Full Self-Driving” driver assist feature.

The vehicle was spotted last week in Palm Beach, Florida, by Grayson Brulte, a consultant for the AV industry who lives in the area. After Brulte tweeted the photos of the Model Y with a rooftop rack of lidar sensors on May 20th, Luminar’s stock surged to its highest level yet. (The Florida-based company recently went public after being acquired by a “blank check” special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.)

Luminar sold the lidar to Tesla as part of an agreement between the two companies, according to Bloomberg. Also, the Model Y was sporting a manufacturer’s license plate that is registered to Tesla in California. The same plate has been spotted on other Tesla vehicles, including a prototype of the Cybertruck.

It’s unlikely that Tesla will reverse its position on lidar based on a single vehicle. As Guidehouse’s Sam Abuelsamid told Bloomberg, it’s more likely that Tesla is using Luminar’s lidar to validate its Full Self-Driving feature. But it’s still a noteworthy development given Musk’s vocal animosity toward the sensor. In a 2018 earnings call, Musk said, “In my view, it’s a crutch that will drive companies to a local maximum that they will find very hard to get out of.” He added, “Perhaps I am wrong, and I will look like a fool. But I am quite certain that I am not.”

Then a year later, he called lidar “a fool’s errand” during a presentation on Tesla’s efforts to build fully autonomous vehicles. “[A]nyone relying on LIDAR is doomed,” he added. “Doomed. Expensive sensors that are unnecessary. It’s like having a whole bunch of expensive appendices… you’ll see.”

Musk said Tesla is trying to tackle a much bigger problem: passive optical recognition. This is why Tesla is banking on cameras as the key piece of hardware for autonomous vehicles. With their ever-increasing pixel resolution and the low price point, camera sensors are seen as indispensable for advanced driver assistance systems (like Tesla’s Autopilot) and fully autonomous systems. For Tesla, cameras are everything.

Musk also walked back some of those comments in recent months. In a chat on Clubhouse, Musk admitted to “talking smack” about lidar but noted that SpaceX — his other company — has developed its own versions of the laser sensors to assist the Dragon capsule. In a recent earnings call, Musk spoke about moving away from using radar, stating, “We believe that a vision-only system is ultimately all that is needed for full autonomy.”

Luminar, which is based in Florida, went public last year via a reverse merger with a SPAC. That merger valued the company at approximately $2.9 billion in “implied pro forma enterprise value,” with an equity value of $3.4 billion at closing. Luminar is also working with Pony.ai, Airbus, Volvo, Audi, and Toyota Research Institute.

Tesla Model S Plaid ‘delivery event’ confirmed for June 3rd

Tesla’s ultra-fast Model S Plaid, which the company has been teasing since 2019, is finally ready for its public debut. The company will hold a “delivery event” on June 3rd at its factory in Fremont, California, CEO Elon Musk tweeted Thursday — though it’s unclear when Tesla actually plans on delivering the vehicle to customers. And there’s still no word on when we can expect to see Plaid versions of the Model X.

The Model S Plaid, which is a step above Tesla’s Ludicrous trim level, can sprint from 0–60 mph in less than two seconds and reach speeds of up to 200 mph, Musk says. It will have a range of 520 miles, which is well above Tesla’s highest range models, and it will retail for $139,990. Musk says it will be the “fastest production car ever.”

Tesla Model S Plaid delivery event

June 3 at our California factory

Fastest production car ever

0 to 60mph in under 2 secs

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 20, 2021

The Plaid Model S made its debut at Laguna Seca raceway in 2019, where it lapped the famous California road course in just 1 minute and 36 seconds.

The Plaid powertrain is being offered as part of Tesla’s broader refresh for the Model S and X, with new exterior designs and simplified interiors. It’s the first major refresh for both vehicles since their release in 2012 and 2015, respectively.

A delivery event in June but no word on actual customer deliveries could indicate another delay for Tesla’s speediest EVs. Customers who ordered the Plaid Model S in January were originally told to expect deliveries to begin in April, according to InsideEVs. The company later said that those dates were being pushed to July.

Of course, Tesla is not inured to the challenges facing the entire auto industry, including supply chain problems and a global semiconductor chip shortage. In an April earnings call, Musk said deliveries of the refreshed Model S should begin “shortly” without specifying an exact date.

According to Tesla’s website, Plaid Model S deliveries are expected “August-September,” while Plaid Model X won’t reach customers until “January-February” 2022. Plaid Plus versions of both vehicles, with the extended 520 miles of range, aren’t expected until “mid-2022.”

Elon Musk impersonators have stolen more than $2 million in cryptocurrency since October

Consumers lost over $2 million in cryptocurrency to scammers impersonating Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk over the last six months, the Federal Trade Commission reported Monday.

“Promises of guaranteed huge returns or claims that your cryptocurrency will be multiplied are always scams,” the commission said in its Monday report.

For years, scammers have posed as Musk in order to fraud social media users out of cryptocurrency. They use deceptive tactics on sites like Twitter, often using the same avatar images as Musk’s own account and slightly misspelling his username. Pretending to be Musk, the scammers will ask victims to send currency to a specific wallet address in exchange for receiving a larger payment in return. The scams violate Twitter’s policy against deceptive accounts, but moderators have struggled to rein in the activity, and it remains prevalent on the platform.

The $2 million figure was revealed in a larger report on cryptocurrency published by the FTC on Monday. Since last October, consumers reported losing more than $80 million in cryptocurrency scams, increasing “more than ten-fold year-over-year,” the commission said. Consumers lose around $1,900 through these scams on average.

Musk himself was a target in one of the largest Twitter bitcoin scams last summer. In one of the largest breaches in Twitter history, attackers compromised accounts belonging to Musk, President Barack Obama, President Joe Biden, Bill Gates, and even Apple to promote a bitcoin scam. The attackers received nearly $120,000 from the scam that forced Twitter to block all verified users from posting new tweets for several hours.

From Texas to Hawaii: SpaceX plans first orbital Starship test

SpaceX plans to have its first Starship test flight to orbit launch from Texas and splash down off the coast of an island in Hawaii, according to a document the company filed with the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday. The orbital flight test would mark the first time SpaceX stacks both elements of its massive Starship system together, the next key development step in its attempt to build a rocket that could one day land on Mars.

As outlined in the document, a super heavy booster stage will launch Starship from SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas, facilities and separate in midair nearly three minutes into flight. About five minutes later, that booster stage will return back to Earth and splash down in the Gulf of Mexico — or as SpaceX puts it: it will “perform a partial return and land in the Gulf of Mexico approximately 20 miles from the shore.”

Meanwhile, Starship (the top half of the entire rocket system) will continue into orbit, nearly completing a full trip around Earth before plunging back through the atmosphere over Hawaii roughly 90 minutes after launching from Texas. Starship will aim to nail a “powered, targeted landing” on the ocean about 62 miles off the northwest coast of Kauai, the state’s northernmost island.

A Starship prototype in March carries out its complex landing-flip maneuver before attempting to land — a technique similar to how it would land off the coast of Hawaii.

SpaceX

The document didn’t name a specific date for Starship’s orbital flight. CEO Elon Musk and SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell have said it could happen by the end of 2021, but an email that accompanied Thursday’s filing indicated it could happen any time in the next year, before March 1st, 2022. That email also says the maximum altitude for Starship is 72 miles — an extremely low orbital altitude sitting just north of the boundary between space and Earth’s atmosphere.

SpaceX’s Starship system is the centerpiece of Musk’s goal to enable routine interplanetary travel. The system, designed to send humans and up to 100 tons of cargo to the Moon and Mars, recently won a $2.9 billion contract to serve as NASA’s first ride to the Moon carrying astronauts since 1972. SpaceX has launched five high-altitude Starship prototypes from its south Texas rocket facilities since December, nailing a successful landing on its fifth test flight earlier this month. A few more of those suborbital “hop” tests are planned in the next month or so.

Whenever it happens, the orbital test will demonstrate Starship maneuvers that can’t be simulated using computers, SpaceX says in the document. “SpaceX intends to collect as much data as possible during flight to quantify entry dynamics and better understand what the vehicle experiences in a flight regime that is extremely difficult to accurately predict or replicate computationally.” The flight data gleaned from Starship’s test “will anchor any changes in vehicle design… and build better models for us to use in our internal simulations,” SpaceX said.

Musk has envisioned using Starship for rapid orbit-based transportation between any two cities on Earth, an ambitious (or pretty wild) idea called point-to-point travel. A Starship trip (Startrip?) between New York and London, for example, would take an hour. The 90-minute trip from Texas to Hawaii somewhat mirrors the idea, though it’s just a test, and it’s been a while since SpaceX or Musk have discussed any updates on point-to-point travel plans.

With its new Moon lander contract from NASA — which has stirred quite a bit of FOMO in the space industry, likely to NASA’s ire — SpaceX is racing to test Starship for deep-space missions with a deadline to put humans on the lunar surface by 2024.

Renewable energy won’t make Elon Musk love bitcoin again

Elon Musk shouldn’t hold his breath waiting for bitcoin to become environmentally friendly enough for Tesla to take it as payment. Musk announced yesterday that Tesla was walking away from the cryptocurrency because of the fossil fuels used for bitcoin mining and transactions. In the announcement, he left the door open for Tesla to accept bitcoin again if mining the cryptocurrency eventually runs on “more sustainable energy.” But some experts caution that renewable energy is not a silver bullet for bitcoin’s sustainability problem.

The Verge spoke with Alex de Vries, a digital currency economist who has consistently called out bitcoin’s growing greenhouse gas emissions. He runs the blog Digiconomist, which keeps a running tab on bitcoin’s estimated energy use and emissions. While some other researchers and blockchain enthusiasts have been more optimistic about the potential for renewable energy to slash bitcoin’s emissions, de Vries has published papers arguing that the climate calculations just don’t add up. The Verge spoke with de Vries about why he’s still skeptical about bitcoin going green through renewables, other ways the cryptocurrency could cut its pollution, and how bitcoin compares to alternatives like Dogecoin.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Did you have any reaction to the news in February that Tesla was going to accept bitcoin for payments?

I was shocked at the time because bitcoin isn’t an ESG-friendly currency. We know that a big part of the mining is done by using Chinese coal; that’s something that isn’t new information. Mining itself is a really big lottery where the machines that are participating are just generating useless computations all the time so they’re literally wasting resources for making new blocks for this blockchain. It’s really weird that a company that has a mission statement that involves decarbonizing the planet gets involved with a currency that ultimately involves the waste of natural resources, specifically fossil fuels.

The bitcoin network is responsible for 55 million metric tons of CO2 annually, which is as much as a nation like Singapore. Ironically, it’s also more than the entire estimated net gains from deploying electric vehicles.

What was your reaction to yesterday’s news that Elon decided to backtrack on that?

Well, my initial response was better late than never.

In his statement, Elon Musk says that they’re doing this because of an increasing amount of fossil fuels used for bitcoin mining. Now in all honesty, there hasn’t been that much change. Let’s be real, Tesla announced that it would accept bitcoin two months ago, and not that much has changed since then. The total amount of resources going into the network has gone up by a bit, but we already knew that was primarily Chinese coal.

It’s interesting that Musk says Tesla will go back to bitcoin “as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy.” Do you think that can happen? Why or why not?

In all honesty, it makes no sense.

In the past few years, miners have only been getting renewables from the south of China, that has been their only major source of renewables. And it doesn’t last. It lasts for only four months a year and because the production is seasonal.

That’s the problem with renewable energy sources in general: they can’t provide these machines with 24/7 power all year long. For example, it was recently argued that miners could be using solar power for bitcoin mining, which sounds like a great idea. But if you read what should happen to do that, bitcoin miners would need to be shut down during half the day in order to make that work.

That makes no sense if you’re an investor in these machines, because you’re paying a whole lot of money for a device that the moment you get, it starts becoming obsolete. If you miss out on half a day, you’re missing out on a level of income that’s just never going to come back. You want to have these machines running 24/7 if you want to maximize your profit, which is a lot easier if you’re running on Chinese coal than if you’re running on solar power for half a day — so there’s no real incentive to do that.

You published a paper that argued that renewable energy will not solve bitcoin’s sustainability problem — can you walk me through why?

A big amount of bitcoin miners can always cause problems no matter what type of energy they’re using. It can lead to outages if mining becomes really popular in the particular spot. What also might be happening is that you’re using renewable energy that you could have used a different way to clean up the grid elsewhere.

Even if, hypothetically speaking, this whole network was running on renewable energy. Still, it doesn’t solve the sustainability issues of bitcoin. Bitcoin uses excessive amounts of hardware. You have a bunch of specialized equipment that can only do bitcoin mining. The moment they become unprofitable, there’s nothing you can do with them. You can’t repurpose them, you can’t use them as a home computer. It’s trash. And they don’t last very long, on average maybe one and a half years. So you’ve got millions of devices that are becoming obsolete extremely fast. That just results in a big pile of electronic waste down the line. It’s already the case that a single bitcoin transaction is equivalent to throwing away an iPhone 12 mini in terms of materials, that’s already how bad it is.

Are there better solutions to bitcoin’s sustainability problem?

The good thing is that Elon Musk did mention the alternative cryptocurrencies that don’t have the same environmental impact. This is a very important point because the energy consumption issue in bitcoin relates to the proof of work algorithm. That is a specific part of the bitcoin software that is not necessarily present in alternative cryptocurrencies because there’s different ways to do the block creation process. In bitcoin, it depends on computational power, but there are alternatives. Proof of stake is the most popular one.

The second largest cryptocurrency of the moment, Ethereum, is right now running proof of work but is planning to change that to proof of stake. What that does is it makes the block creation process depend on wealth, rather than computational power, so there’s no incentive to have energy-hungry specialized hardware. That fixes both the energy need, as well as the hardware need. If you have something running on proof of stake, it wouldn’t even be 0.1 percent of the energy needed to run bitcoin.

If Ethereum can turn to proof of stake, theoretically, so can bitcoin, which would actually fix the environmental issues. But so far there has been no move inside the community to make such things happen.

Musk has also talked up Dogecoin in the past. How does Dogecoin compare to bitcoin? Do you see it becoming as bad for the climate as bitcoin?

The thing is, if something runs on proof of work, which is the case in Dogecoin, then it’s just as bad as bitcoin. The impact that Dogecoin has currently is a lot smaller than bitcoin, but that’s because the value of Dogecoin is a lot less and these things are directly related with each other. That’s kind of been the essence of my work over the past few years. There is a direct relationship between the value of these assets, how much money is being earned by the miners, and how much they’re spending on electricity. Very simply said, the more valuable an asset, the more money will be made by miners, the more they will spend on resources like hardware and energy. So, the fact that Dogecoin has a smaller impact than bitcoin is just because the value is a lot less, but if they were the same size, the impact would be equally bad.

We’ve already started to see the value of bitcoin drop after Musk’s announcement. Are we starting to see emissions or energy use fall as well?

No. The price has gone down by maybe 15 percent. That does reduce the potential future emissions of the network. But it doesn’t reduce today’s emissions because, right now, bitcoin mining is extremely profitable. As it stands, the network’s impact will still continue to increase, unless the price goes down by a lot more.

How much more would it take to see a decline in emissions?

I wrote about that in a paper recently. The current price is still around $50,000 per coin today, although I haven’t checked it for the past hour. Below $30,000, that’s where the current energy consumption would start to go down, so it has a long way to go. That’s kind of the bottom line.

Tesla stops taking Bitcoin for vehicle purchases, citing environmental harm

Tesla has stopped accepting bitcoin as payment for its cars out of concern that it will contribute to greater consumption of fossil fuels, according to a statement CEO Elon Musk tweeted Wednesday. Tesla had only just started accepting bitcoin in late March.

Musk also said that Tesla will no longer sell any more of the $1.5 billion stash of bitcoin it purchased earlier this year. Tesla sold some of that bitcoin in the first quarter of 2021, which wound up helping pad the company’s quarterly profit figures.

Tesla says it would resume accepting bitcoin (and would consider selling more of it) once the process of mining bitcoin “transitions to more sustainable energy,” according to the statement. The company is also “looking at other cryptocurrencies that use <1% of Bitcoin’s energy/transaction.” As of this writing, Tesla’s website indicates it will still accept Bitcoin for transactions.

“Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at great cost to the environment,” Musk’s statement reads.

Bitcoin uses up as much electricity annually as the Netherlands, according to one estimate. All that energy comes with a huge carbon footprint. And there’s no simple fix because the blockchain that the cryptocurrency is built on is purposely energy inefficient. That clashes with Tesla’s mission to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”

Musk has also hyped another cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, which Tesla has not invested in. Musk has called Dogecoin, which was invented as a joke to satirize bitcoin, his favorite cryptocurrency and “the people’s crypto.” The cryptocurrency’s worth plunged after Musk called it a “hustle” on Saturday Night Live. Bitcoin’s value has similarly plunged about 4 percent after today’s Musk tweet, to $52,593.46 at 6:21PM ET from $54,829.14 at 6:06PM, according to Coindesk.

With reporting by Justine Calma and Elizabeth Lopatto

Proposed bill aims to toss a new wrench in NASA’s Moon lander plan

A senior lawmaker proposed a controversial piece of legislation on Wednesday that directs NASA to pick a second company to build the agency’s next Moon landers — in addition to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which was awarded a $2.9 billion NASA contract to build a lander earlier this year. The bill hasn’t passed the full Senate yet, but it marks a new front in an ongoing effort to overturn or rejig NASA’s decision. It also sets up the first political challenge for NASA’s new administrator, former Sen. Bill Nelson.

NASA’s choice of SpaceX last month to build the agency’s first lunar lander since 1972 spawned a wave of opposition from some lawmakers and the two losing companies in the running: Jeff Bezos’ space firm Blue Origin and Dynetics. Those companies lodged formal protests against NASA’s decision, triggering a procedural pause on SpaceX’s new contract. Among other things, the protests maintain that NASA should have picked two firms instead of one.

Amid a lobbying effort from Blue Origin, those calls have found their way into a NASA authorization bill, proposed as an amendment to the Endless Frontier Act by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee overseeing NASA. Cantwell represents Blue Origin’s home state of Washington. Under Cantwell’s language, NASA would be required to reopen the competition within 30 days and allow it to use $10 billion of its budget to pick a second lunar lander provider.

Before choosing SpaceX, NASA had been expected to pick two companies, a strategy that guaranteed a backup in case one lander fell behind. But the agency went only with SpaceX — its bid was half of Blue Origin’s — after funding shortfalls from Congress. “It was in NASA’s best interest, along with the budget that was there, for us to award to one,” NASA’s human spaceflight chief, Kathy Lueders, who led the decision to pick SpaceX, said last month.

Simply adding another company to build NASA’s Moon lander, as proposed in Cantwell’s amendment, could run afoul of the existing agreements with SpaceX, agency officials say. “It’s not as simple as picking the next in line,” says one person familiar with the process, speaking anonymously to chat frankly about legal matters. Going through the long and protracted process of picking another company would also endanger NASA’s rush to get to the Moon by 2024, agency staff say. (Blue Origin argues the opposite: that not picking a second company risks the 2024 goal.)

NASA declined to comment on the bill, citing the ongoing litigation from Blue Origin and Dynetics’ protests.

Blue Origin argues NASA can simply add another company, and it’s well within the agency’s ability to do so legally. That’s because, company employees say, SpaceX’s award falls under a kind of research and development category of government contracting that would permit another player to join, unlike more legally rigid contract programs for routine transportation services.

It’s unclear what specific legal jargon could (or could not) permit NASA to pick another company to develop a lunar lander alongside SpaceX. But Cantwell’s proposed amendment aims to assert a straightforward solution.

SpaceX’s $2.9 billion award is for two flights to the Moon using Starship, the company’s fully reusable rocket system that’s still under development in Texas. The first mission would require Starship to make an uncrewed lunar landing, followed by another landing carrying astronauts.

You can now buy NFTs on eBay, and ‘blockchain-driven collectibles’ are coming soon

eBay is now allowing NFTs to be sold on its platform, making the digital collectibles available side by side with physical ones. Whether you’re looking for a physical Dogecoin replica or a digital representation of Elon Musk holding Doge, eBay is apparently now the place to get both.

At the moment, eBay wants to make sure that NFTs are listed by trusted sellers, and only in certain categories like trading cards, music, entertainment, and art. The company does say, though, that it hopes to expand its policies and tools in the future to allow more categories after it’s gathered feedback from the community with the current crop of NFTs.

The first result when searching “NFT” on eBay, to the surprise of no one.

The blog post also mentions future updates to allow “blockchain-driven collectables,” though it doesn’t expand on what that means outside of NFTs.

eBay’s CEO said earlier this month that the company would be open to accepting cryptocurrencies in the future, but at the moment the NFTs being sold on the platform seem to be using its standard payment system linked to a credit card or PayPal account.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is literally launching a Dogecoin-funded satellite to the Moon

SpaceX is now accepting Dogecoin, and it’ll be paid exclusively in the cryptocurrency to launch an upcoming satellite named DOGE-1 to — yes — the Moon.

The DOGE-1 is a cubesat meant to acquire “lunar-spatial intelligence” using onboard cameras and sensors. It’s being sent and paid for by a company named Geometric Energy Corporation, and it’ll be flown up on a Falcon 9 rocket in the first quarter of 2022.

Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that started out as a goofy meme and is now a somewhat more valuable goofy meme, has been on the rise lately, with enough trading around spikes in the currency to cause crashes of the trading app Robinhood. Elon Musk is the coin’s highest profile supporter, tweeting Dogecoin memes, referring to himself as the “Dogefather,” and hyping it up (sort of) on Saturday Night Live. Investors like to talk about sending Dogecoin’s value “to the Moon,” thus, we’re getting this silly stunt about sending a satellite named DOGE-1 paid to Musk’s company in Dogecoin to the Moon.

SpaceX is going to put a literal Dogecoin on the literal moon

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2021

Given all that, SpaceX includes in the announcement the exact quote one might assume Musk mandated the company include: “We’re excited to launch DOGE-1 to the Moon!” said SpaceX vice president of commercial sales Tom Ochinero.

It’s a spot of good news for Dogecoin, which has had a tough week. After spiking in price, falling around a Robinhood crash, and spiking again in anticipation of Musk’s SNL appearance, the cryptocurrency crashed overnight following a segment in which Musk joked about Dogecoin being a “hustle.”

The announcement seems to be designed to fight back against that narrative. Ochinero says the partnership sets “the foundation for interplanetary commerce.” And Geometric Energy Corporation’s CEO says the transaction “solidified DOGE as a unit of account for lunar business in the space sector.” The press release goes on to say that Dogecoin is “sophisticated enough to finance a commercial Moon mission in full” and that it’ll be used for all lunar business between the two companies. (Musk’s other company, Tesla, recently started accepting car purchases in Bitcoin.)

The Verge has reached out to SpaceX and Geometric Energy Corporation for more information on the planned launch.

So assuming all goes according to plan, Dogecoin will help send DOGE-1 to the Moon next year. Will that also send Dogecoin to the Moon? It probably depends on how much the parties involved continue to hype it. As Musk’s SNL character admits, “Yeah, it’s a hustle.”