In a move rocking the crypto market, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has announced that his company has stopped accepting Bitcoin payments for its products.
“We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel,” he tweeted. “Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at a great cost to the environment.”
Just three months ago, Tesla confirmed the purchase of $1.5 million worth of bitcoin as part of the company’s investment strategy. The company doesn’t plan to sell any of the Bitcoin, but instead intends to use the currency “for transactions as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy.”
“We are also looking at other cryptocurrencies that use < 1% of Bitcoin’s energy/transaction,” Elon added.
According to a recent study by the University of Cambridge, Bitcoin mining uses the same amount of energy as the Netherlands used in 2019.
“It is really by design that Bitcoin consumes that much electricity,” Michel Rauchs, researcher at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, told the BBC this year. “This is not something that will change in the future unless the Bitcoin price is going to significantly go down.”
Well…we’ll see what happens with all this.
