Once again, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has caused a lot of movement in the crypto markets. This time he sent the key currency Bitcoin on a downward trend with a tweet. The US electric car manufacturer Tesla will no longer accept cryptocurrency, Bitcoin as payment due to environmental concerns.
The company made this decision because of the rapidly increasing consumption of fossil fuels for the production of and transactions with Bitcoins.
Above all, it is worrying that a lot of coal electricity is used for this. Tesla wants to look around for cryptocurrencies that require less than one percent of the energy that Bitcoin requires for a transaction.
Although Tesla invested a considerable sum of $1.33 billion in Bitcoin on February 8 and, according to its latest quarterly report, achieved a profit of more than $100 million just from the sale of 10 percent of its BTC shares. And Tesla had only started accepting bitcoins to buy electric cars in March.
Musk’s tweet dropped the price of Bitcoin by about 15 percent. While the reserve currency was quoted at around $55,000 shortly before, the asset plummeted to as much as $47,000 in just a few hours.
Musk made it clear that he basically remains an advocate of the industry: “Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels, and we believe in a promising future, but this cannot be at the expense of the environment,” he said in his statement. According to Musk, Tesla no longer wants to trade Bitcoin as long as the energy balance has not improved significantly.
Bitcoin has long been criticized by environmentalists because of its high energy requirements for mining. Individual transactions also require a lot of energy.
According to Digiconomist’s Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, the energy demand of the cryptocurrency is currently in the order of magnitude of the whole of the Netherlands. The annual CO2 emissions are the same as those of Singapore.
