On Wednesday evening, Tesla’s Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk tweeted that Tesla to discontinue accepting Bitcoin Payments for purchasing its Tesla vehicles.
The reason for discontinuing Bitcoins as payment is excessive energy consumption in the mining of crypto-currency, Elon Musk said.
This announcement comes shortly after Tesla announced its earnings on April 26th during which the company had said it made small profit on the crypto-currency in the quarter after it sold 10% of a $1.5 billion position it holds in Bitcoin.
After Musk’s tweet, a quick decline in the price of Bitcoin was observed. The price of the crypto dropped from USD 54,602.77 to USD 52.147.82.
Elon Musk in his tweet said,
Tesla has discontinued the vehicle purchases using Bitcoin as a payment mode. We are really worried about the increasing usage of fossils for mining and transaction purposes. Coal in particular has the worst emission level for any fuel. He further said that cryptocurrency is a great idea on several levels and believes that it has a promising future; however, it can’t come at a cost to the environment. Tesla won’t be selling any of the Bitcoin and we aim to utilize it for transactions as soon as mining switches to more sustainable energy. Moreover, we are looking for alternatives to cryptocurrencies that utilize less than 1% of Bitcoin’s energy/ transaction.
Creating Bitcoin on the blockchain will require desktop computers with fairly high specs to crunch the blocks that are being added to the blockchain. The mining operation has long been considered a fairly energy-intensive task.
The company’s CFO, Zachary Kirkhorn, who has been labeled as the ‘Master of Coin‘ by the electric car-making company, commented to Wall Street analysts that
We do believe long term in the value of Bitcoin. Hence, we aim to hold what we have long-term and proceed to acquire Bitcoin from transactions from our clients as they buy vehicles.
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