Elon Musk Crashed The Bitcoin Price And Proposed A Radical Dogecoin Upgrade To Beat Bitcoin ‘Hands Down’ And Become The ‘Currency Of Earth’

Bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices across the board have struggled this week since a sell-off sparked by Tesla TSLA -1.1% billionaire Elon Musk and ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin helped wipe $300 billion from the market.

The bitcoin price has lost more than 20% over the last seven days, dragging down the wider crypto market. Dogecoin, the "joke" meme-based cryptocurrency that's recently rocketed into the crypto top five by value, has also lost ground (even with a surprise Coinbase bombshell).

Now, Musk, the self-appointed technoking of Tesla who was once voted dogecoin's CEO, has indicated Tesla might have sold more of its bitcoin holdings and proposed a radical dogecoin upgrade that he claims is "needed [for dogecoin] to become the currency of Earth"—and will mean it beats bitcoin "hands down."

"Ideally, doge speeds up block time 10X, increases block size 10X and drops fee 100X. Then it wins hands down," Musk said via Twitter in response to a post made by a dogecoin fan account.

"For those bad at math, 100X higher transaction volume with 100X lower fees means total fees earned stay same," Musk added. "Low fees and high volume are needed to become currency of Earth."

The proposal is similar to one previously made by some bitcoin developers and enthusiasts that culminated in the bitcoin network splitting in 2017, leading to the creation of bitcoin cash, a so-called "fork" of bitcoin that is better suited to a far larger number of smaller transactions.

"The 10,000 alts tried all manner laughable physics and comp sci failed things," Adam Back, a crypto pioneer and chief executive of bitcoin development company Blockstream, replied to Musk. "There are multiple issues with large blocks. Bitcoin has at this point the most hyper-optimized, algorithmically and hand tuned assembler fastest ECDSA [Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm] signature verification code for a reason."

Later, Musk indicated Tesla might sell the remainder of its more than $1 billion worth of bitcoin it bought earlier this year. Tesla has already sold some of bitcoin but claimed it was only to test market liquidity.

"Bitcoiners are going to slap themselves next quarter when they find out Tesla dumped the rest of their bitcoin holdings," posted an anonymous cryptocurrency Twitter account with the handle CryptoWhale. "With the amount of hate Elon Musk is getting, I wouldn’t blame him."

"Indeed," Musk replied, sending the bitcoin price sharply lower. The dogecoin price, which Musk's tweets had pushed higher over the weekend, also fell back.

Musk, who said in February none of his dogecoin-related posts should be taken seriously, had already boosted the dogecoin price this week with a Twitter poll asking whether Tesla should accept dogecoin as payment—shortly before sending shockwaves through the bitcoin and cryptocurrency community with the surprise cessation of customers’ use of bitcoin to buy Tesla cars.