Tesla’s U-turn crashes Bitcoin by 12%

Bitcoin’s value has reportedly dropped by about 12 per cent, following a tweet from Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Tesla, Elon Musk.

The CEO had tweeted that his company would no longer be taking bitcoin as payment for cars, causing its price to tumble and taking other major currencies with it.

“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,” Musk tweeted.

Bitcoin had been trading around $54,600 just before Musk’s post. The cryptocurrency dropped as far as $47,000 after he did. But it is now reportedly back around $51,350 at press time.

This further explained that bitcoin was down more than 10 per cent over the last 24 hours.

The Tesla CEO, by the tweet, reversed the earlier decision the company announced to accept bitcoin payments from customers for its cars.

Bitcoin involves data ‘mining’ to solve complex mathematical puzzles, an activity, which is said to be energy sapping and heavily reliant on electricity generated by fossil fuels, notably coal, in China, which accounts for the majority of bitcoin mining activity.

In February this year, Tesla purchased $1.5bn worth of bitcoin and said it would become the first major carmaker to accept the cryptocurrency as a form of payment.

Some analysts said at the time that by accepting bitcoin as a form of payment, Tesla was unleashing the first major consumer experiment in not just bitcoin but cryptocurrency as a whole.

Ehime Alex
Ehime Alex
Ehime Alex reports the Capital Market, Energy, and ICT. He is a skilled webmaster and digital media enthusiast.

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