Week in Review - Trying to fall back in love with bitcoin

Saturday, July 24, 2021 • By Lucas Matney

Hello friends, and welcome back to Week in Review!

Last week, I talked about Netflix’s gaming ambitions (there’s update from that down in Other Things). This week, I’m looking at whether there will ever be an “eco-friendly” future for crypto.

If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox from the newsletter page, and follow my tweets @lucasmtny.

The big thing

This week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Square/Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey got together for a little chat, during which Musk spent some time talking about how he’ll be happy to let people pay for Tesla cars with bitcoin, but only when the cryptocurrency can improve its eco-friendliness.

Whether bitcoin can ever be eco-friendly is an open question, I wrote up the news with my colleague Aria Alamalhodaei. In the article, I gave a little background on Bitcoin’s global energy footprint today:

Cryptocurrencies get a bad rap for energy usage because they do indeed use up an awful lot of energy, at least many of them do. Bitcoin and Ethereum, the space’s two biggest currencies, use a mechanism called proof-of-work to power their networks and mint new blocks of each currency. The “work” is solving complex cryptographic problems and miners do so by stringing together high-end graphics cards to tackle these problems. Major mining centers have thousands of GPUs running around the clock.

While Ethereum has already committed to transitioning away from proof-of-work to something called proof-of-stake, which vastly reduces energy usage, Bitcoin seems less likely to make this transition. So, becoming “eco-friendly” likely doesn’t mean making any major underlying changes to Bitcoin, but rather shifting what energy sources are powering those mining centers.

While Bitcoin’s global mining network does clearly lean on renewables, it’s pretty difficult to get exact insights on what the spread of renewables usage is given how, ahem, decentralized the grid is. What is clear is that it’s going to take some unprecedented transparency from the global network to even give Musk a starting point here to judge Bitcoin’s current or future “eco-friendliness,” and in all likelihood Musk will have a lot of wiggle room to make this decision based on anecdotal data whenever he wants.

While Dorsey is clearly a bona fide crypto acolyte, Musk seems to be less convinced of the future, though he clearly is invested in its success, with sizable holdings across his companies. Musk is making a good call with the environmental hardline now, but he’s certainly going to have to come out with some hard data if he wants to justify embracing bitcoin again.

Pushing the cryptocurrency market toward environmental mindedness is a clear positive, even if bitcoin never opts to make the transition to a more fundamentally eco-friendly proof itself.

Image Credits: Yichuan Cao/NurPhoto / Getty Images

Notice how remote work is still in the news?

Here are the TechCrunch news stories that especially caught my eye this week:

Netflix gets ready to enter the gaming space
Last week, I talked about Netflix’s prospects in the gaming world. Well, it turns out that take was prescient, because on an earnings call this week they dropped some more details on their gaming plans. They say they’re focused “primarily” on mobile-first and will be making games available for free to current subscribers.

Bezos’s billionaire space vacation is a success
Following Virgin founder Richard Branson’s flight to the edge of space last week, Blue Origin jettisoned its own billionaire founder to the heavens this past weekend. All went well.

Clubhouse exits beta
After a wild and lengthy beta period, anyone can create a Clubhouse account. This is a critical moment for the live audio social platform which has seemed to fall out of vogue in recent months among early adopters.

This tool tells you if NSO’s Pegasus spyware targeted your phone
There was a pretty wild story in The Washington Post last week highlighting the impact of Israeli NSO Group’s zero-click spyware. Now a tool is claiming to help users see if their phone’s were targeted. Unless you’re a foreign dissident or journalist covering political turmoil, you likely have nothing to worry about, but it’s always important to realize no technology is 100% secure.

Gopuff raises at $15 billion
Tech investors have been paying through the nose in recent months to get a piece of hot tech startups. This grocery delivery startup is the latest to hit a stratospheric value with its $15 billion valuation.

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Extra things

Some of my favorite reads from our Extra Crunch subscription service this week:

How we built an AI unicorn in 6 years
“In 2013, I was fortunate to get into artificial intelligence (more specifically, deep learning) six months before it blew up internationally. It started when I took a course on Coursera called ‘Machine learning with neural networks,’ by Geoffrey Hinton. It was like being love struck. Back then, to me AI was science fiction, like ‘The Terminator.’ “

3 critical customer support lessons
“There are many things I wish I knew when starting out with my small customer support team at RingCentral, but in the end, we figured it out. I’m going to share some critical lessons I learned along the way that I wish I had known at the outset, so that when it comes to scaling your own support team, you’ll have an idea of what to expect.“

What Robinhood’s crypto warnings mean for Coinbase
“Coinbase discussed rising and falling consumer interest in trading cryptos in its own IPO filings, for example. The now-public unicorn has lived through crypto ups and crypto downs. A decline in consumer interest in the next few months or quarters is not a huge deal, assuming one keeps a long enough perspective and the crypto-infused future that its fans expect comes to pass.”