The American electric vehicle company’s CEO, Elon Musk announced on Wednesday to suspend vehicle purchases using bitcoin, because of the rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for bitcoin mining.
The growing energy consumption and the environmental impacts of Bitcoin raise concerns about accepting it as a payment for Tesla. The announcement resulted in a fall in the digital currency by over 5 percent.
When the currency was originally launched, this process was not so energy-intensive and was capable to carry out on an average computer. The more currency it mined and today a computer is made available to solve a series of complex algorithms before naming it as a Bitcoin.
Here’s the Musk full announcement, “Tesla has suspended vehicle purchases using Bitcoin. 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. Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at great cost to the environment. Tesla will not be selling any Bitcoin and we intend to use it 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.”
Now that Musk decided not to accept Bitcoin for vehicle purchases, he specified to hold the plan of selling the bitcoin and would look into other cryptocurrencies that require less energy for transactions.
Tesla revealed that it bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin and it may invest in other cryptocurrencies in the future. Besides, Tesla has shown its support for cryptocurrency including bitcoin and dogecoin, skyrocketing in recent months.
