Musk's government money is a drop in the bucket compared to what gas, energy, military industrial, etc companies receive. In Musk's case, taxpayers are getting a good deal. The half billion loan Tesla received is already paid back with interest, and it accelerated production of the model s and created many jobs. If you look up the details of other government money his companies received, you will see it's quite reasonable.

Correction; batteries are expected to get about 5-10% better every year, so it would probably take several years before one could upgrade a model 3 to have 300 mile range.

If I could afford a Model S I'd buy it. The highest performance model can even go 0-60mph in 2.8 seconds with a G force higher than gravity. I'm waiting for model 3 which should come late 2017 or early 2018 if they are on schedule, at 35k USD (before incentives and savings from gas and maintenance). Range will be less, around 200 miles, but more than enough for me, and they are building superchargers all over the world for when taking a longer trip (takes 30 or 45 min to charge most of the way back up, so need kill some time having lunch etc). Batteries are expected to get about 10-15% better every year, so you could buy a new battery after a few years to eventually have a 300+ mile range. This wouldn't be cheap though, its a very large heavy battery pack that makes up a significant part of the cost of the car, something like 10-20k USD (but I presume cost of batteries will go down, especially with Tesla more than doubling the worlds production of lithium batteries with their Gigafactory).

Mom and Granddad wont need to (knowingly) use bitcoin to use something like this.

The software that handles the bitcoin microtransactions (the browser, plugin, whatever) can be built on top of Bitcoin without exposing it to the user. It can have a very simple UI.

If you DO have any bitcoin, you can load it into the software yourself, and for example each one bitcoin appears in the UI as 1,000,000 "microbits" or "[amount in local currency]" or whatever the UI wants or allows you to call them. (However if its displayed in local currency, the value would fluctuate as bitcoin market value changes).

If you are Mom or Granddad, you may not know what a bitcoin is, you just know that you need to get some "microbits" to pay for stuff. You use the link they provide to enter your credit card number (or even purchase a key from somewhere else that you can enter), and they sell you "microbits" and make some profit from you.

If the website owner is a Mom or Granddad, they can use the same type of software to collect their microtransactions from you, and pay a fee to get a check mailed to them. If they know anything about Bitcoin, they will collect their bitcoin in the wallet of their choice.

Why do you believe Silk Road had anything to do with CP, hitmen, illegal weapons, or slavery? None of those were allowed. Nobody would pay a large fee to be able to sell on silk road, just to break the rules and have their account closed by moderators before they were even visible. Other than illegal drugs, you could maybe argue about fake IDs, stolen/hacked Netflix logins, and legal commercial pornsite rips being unethical to sell however.

Even if you're a perfect driver, there are many examples where a red light camera can put you in a dangerous situation because others are bad at driving;

Distracted person in front of you is texting, eating, etc. As they are near the intersection, light just turns yellow as they look up, and they don't know its only been yellow for a tenth of a second. They know this intersection has a camera, and decide to slam on the brakes rather than (relatively safely) going thru the beginning of the red light and risk getting a ticket.

You keep a safe distance, and have time to quickly stop without rear ending the car in front of you.

The impatient person behind you sees the light turn yellow and knows they should be able to make it through barely before it turns red, and accelerates a bit to make sure they don't hit the start of the red light.

You've done nothing wrong but get rear ended.

Red light cameras can at least make distracted and impatient drivers more dangerous to you than they would be without the fear of a ticket.