Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin says there's no malevolent intent behind Elon Musk's support for dogecoin
- Elon Musk's influence over the crypto market won't last forever, Vitalik Buterin said.
- He doesn't think the Tesla billionaire's support for dogecoin has any disagreeable purpose.
- Ether's nosedive this week means Buterin may have lost his crypto billionaire status.
Vitalik Buterin, the 27-year-old co-creator of Ethereum, told CNN this week that he doesn't think Elon Musk's tweets promoting dogecoin are suspicious.
"Elon Musk tweeting is something that the crypto space has only been introduced to for the first time literally last year and this year," Buterin said. "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."
Musk has turned the spotlight on dogecoin after hinting that the meme-inspired cryptocurrency could be used to make payments towards Tesla. On Thursday, he tweeted "how much is that Doge in the window?" along with an image of what appeared to look like a one-dollar bill with the meme-famous Shiba Inu dog.
"The fact that he is a 100-plus billionaire, and he runs Tesla and SpaceX and all these things doesn't change the fact that ultimately he's a human - and humans get excited about dog coins. That's just a thing that humans get excited about," Buterin told CNN. "I don't think that Elon has a kind of malevolent intent in any of this."
The crypto market plummeted this week after Tesla halted bitcoin payments. Bitcoin fell as much as $30,000, while Ethereum's ether and dogecoin lost more than 30% each.
Ether's decline to around $2,708 per coin means Buterin may have lost his status as the youngest crypto billionaire for now. His Ether address, which he disclosed on Twitter in 2018, showed a balance of about $888 million as of Friday, down from around $1.1 billion on Wednesday.
But he isn't fazed by the dramatic sell-off, and even acknowledged the market could be in a bubble. According to the entrepreneur, it's "notoriously hard to predict" when bubbles could burst. "It could have ended already," he said. "It could end months from now."
On bitcoin's energy concerns, Buterin said resource consumption is huge. "It's not the sort of thing that's going to break the world by itself, but it's definitely a significant downside."
He thinks the crypto community will call for a transition to a less energy-intensive technology, or expects bitcoin to get left behind if it sticks to the way it's currently produced.