While speaking at a conference on Wednesday, Tesla‘s Founder and CEO mentioned that the electric vehicle company will most likely accept Bitcoin as means of payment again, once the company completes an analysis on the amount of renewable energy used to mine the currency.
Elon Musk first announced that Tesla would accept Bitcoin in exchange for its electric vehicles earlier this year. The announcement, coupled with other factors, made the price of Bitcoin surge hitting an all-time high of $65,000.
A few months after the announcement, Tesla called it quits with Bitcoin. According to Elon Musk, Tesla’s decision to stop accepting Bitcoin was birthed out of environmental concerns as the mining process was detrimental to the environment. The price of Bitcoin plummeted as a result of this. Another major factor that sent the price of Bitcoin to the ground was the crackdown actions against miners by Chinese regulators. These actions have so far wiped more than $300 billion worth of cryptocurrency off the market. Since then, the price of Bitcoin has been fluctuating between $30,000 and $40,000, falling below $30,000 twice.
“I wanted a little bit more due diligence to confirm that the percentage of renewable energy usage is most likely at or above 50% and that there is a trend towards increasing that number, and if so Tesla would resume accepting Bitcoin” Musk said at the conference.
“Most likely the answer is that Tesla would resume accepting bitcoin”, he added.
Since the incident with Bitcoin, miners have been on the search for more sustainable ways to mine cryptocurrency, using renewable energy to mine is one of the options that have come up as useful to mitigate the effects that regular mining has. “Tesla’s mission is accelerating the advent of sustainable energy. We can’t be the company that does that and also not do appropriate diligence on the energy usage of bitcoin,” Musk said.
Tesla said it would keep its Bitcoin holdings after it stopped accepting Bitcoin and promised that in the future, as soon as there exists a sustainable way to mine the cryptocurrency, it would be accepted once again. Elon Musk mentioned during the conference that he personally owned Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin, apart from the Bitcoin that his companies Tesla and SpaceX owned.
“I might pump, but I don’t dump. I definitely do not believe in getting the price high and selling. I would like to see bitcoin succeed”, he said.
Bitcoin was up 8% at $32,160.16, while Ethereum network’s Ether surged 11.6% to $1,993.36. Tesla’s shares were down 0.8% at $655.30 in extended trading.
Ibhadojemu Lucky Emmanuel is a graduate of Education and Economics from the University of Benin. He has a passion for tech and business and has been writing professionally for over a period of five years. He's written across various topics and segments and knew tech-business was it when he first stumbled on it. He has a great passion for music and arts, and wants to visit as many countries as he can someday.
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