Dogecoin Best Suited As A Transactional Currency Over Bitcoin, Asserts Elon Musk ⋆

Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and CEO of Tesla, still takes Dogecoin very seriously despite its meme status. Speaking on the Full Send Podcast Friday, the Billionaire reaffirmed his support for DOGE, terming it as a fun and easy-to-use cryptocurrency. 

“I’m mainly supporting Doge, frankly, because I think Doge has the memes and dogs, and it seems to have a sense of humour and doesn’t take itself too seriously.” Said Musk when asked what he thought about the future of crypto.

Musk, 51, praised the cryptocurrency’s use cases, particularly noting that its transactional capacity overshadowed that of Bitcoin. “I think, actually weirdly, even though Doge was just designed to be like this ridiculous joke currency, the actual total transactional throughput capability of Doge is much higher than bitcoin.”

According to him, while Dogecoin transactions are completed in 60 seconds, Bitcoin takes approximately 10 minutes, an undesirable count for the world’s largest cryptocurrency. He further added that, unlike bitcoin’s capped supply of 21 million coins, Dogecoin’s inflationary feature, which allows 5 billion coins to be created annually, was crucial to the coin being a transactional currency.

“The fact that there are five billion dollars created every year is actually good for using it as a transactional currency.” Musk added.

Musk started as an ardent supporter of Bitcoin, with Tesla buying a $1.5 billion stash in 2021 and launching payments for Tesla cars with BTC. He would later drop the cryptocurrency claiming that its mining operations were dangerous to the environment and ban payments in it.

Since then, he has shifted ground, becoming a die-hard supporter of Doge on his social accounts and securing himself “The Dogefather” title. Tesla, SpaceX and The Boring Company- a subways construction services company based in Las Vegas- have also started accepting Dogecoin for merchandise in the past year with Musk’s blessings.

Recently, Tesla disclosed that it had sold 75% of its Bitcoin holdings,  with Musk stating that the company also held Dogecoin and had not sold any of those holdings. “We have not sold any of our Dogecoin; we still have it,” Musk had said in a quarterly investor call last month.  Elon has also disclosed that he holds some Doge in personal wallets and plans to continue purchasing more.

In the last seventeen or so months, however, Musk’s endorsements have not had much of an effect on the meme coin, with its price dropping by over 90% since May 2021. DOGE was trading at $0.06825 after a 1.77% drawdown in the past 24 hours.