Tesla will stop accepting payments in Bitcoin. CEO Elon Musk announced this via Twitter. Musk, who until recently was known as a strong supporter of the crypto currency, now expresses his doubts. The Bitcoin would have too great an impact on the environment.
Musk is particularly concerned about the use of fossil fuels in mining the digital currency and facilitating transactions. Most cryptocurrency miners are in China, where coal-fired power plants are widely used to generate electricity. That’s why Tesla is not accepting payments in Bitcoin for the time being. It is a significant turnaround for the brand, which previously bought € 1.25 billion worth of Bitcoin and indicated that it will accept the crypto coin as a means of payment when purchasing a Tesla. The timing of the statement is also striking because Tesla made quite a profit in the first quarter of this year with the sale of Bitcoins.
Tesla, incidentally, is not completely turning its back on Bitcoin. According to Musk, crypto coins generally have a ‘promising future’, but this should not be at the expense of the environment. Therefore, Tesla will not sell any Bitcoins it currently owns and the automaker will not use it for transactions until the digital currency becomes more sustainable. Tesla is currently looking at other crypto coins that “use less than 1 percent of Bitcoin’s energy.”
The value of bitcoin was hit hard by the news. The price of the world’s most famous crypto coin fell sharply, causing more than $ 300 billion in bitcoin’s market value to be lost. The Tesla share fell by more than 4.4 percent.