ПThe entrepreneur Elon Musk, known as the director of the leading electric car manufacturer Tesla, has once again shaken the digital currency markets.
This time, he posted a tweet announcing that Tesla would no longer accept bitcoin because of the harmful emissions associated with its maintenance. The news led to a lightning reaction from cryptocurrency traders, who began selling bitcoin en masse. Thus, within just 3 hours, its price collapsed by 14% from $54,600 to $47,000. Shortly after, the price started to rise again, but as of now, the value of a bitcoin is still over 10% lower than before Musk's tweet.
Thus, the market capitalization of bitcoin has collapsed by more than 105 billion dollars in just the last 12 hours.
In his tweet, Musk explains that Tesla is discontinuing the practice of accepting bitcoin when selling its cars. "We are concerned about the rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels, especially coal, in generating the electricity needed to support the bitcoin blockchain and to make transactions. Coal generates the most emissions of any fuel," Musk said in the announcement. He's likely referring to China's bitcoin "miners," which are powered by cheap electricity generated by local coal-fired power plants.
"Cryptocurrencies are a great idea and we believe they have a promising future, but it should not come at the expense of the environment. Tesla will not sell its bitcoin reserves. We will use them to conduct transactions as soon as the energy used to do so starts being from sustainable sources. We will also be looking to use cryptocurrencies that consume less than 1% of the energy required by bitcoin," Musk's tweet further said.
According to users, the major cryptocurrencies use the following kilowatt/hours on average per transaction:
Ripple (XPR) 0.0079
Dodgcoin 0.12
Cardano 0.5479
Lightcoin 15.5
Bitcoin cache - 18.957
Etherium 62.56
Bitcoin 707
Traditionally, over $50 billion worth of bitcoin buy/sell transactions are made in a single day. By comparison, all of Tesla's sales in the first three months of 2021 were for a much smaller amount - around $10 billion. There is no data on how many of these were made via bitcoin, but the lack of these transactions will not significantly impact cryptocurrency trading.
However, Musk's announcement may influence other institutions to make a similar decision, especially given the efforts of global companies to protect their reputations when it comes to climate change.
Tesla announced that it will accept bitcoin for sales in February and also revealed that it earned $101 million, representing ¼ of its net profit for the quarter, from bitcoin trading.
Source : www.manager.bg