Tesla has announced the halting of all car purchases using Bitcoin in a bid to cut back on the rising fossil energy consumption concerns that come with mining and performing transactions using BTC.
The electric car manufacturing giant made this announcement on Wednesday, barely two months after it had begun accepting tesla payments, through the official Twitter handle of The Technoking of Tesla, Elon Musk, with a note that read:
“Tesla has suspended vehicle purchases using Bitcoin. We are concerned about the rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel.
Cryptocurrency good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at a great cost to the environment.”
The announcement represents a walk-back for Tesla which was heavily criticized a few months ago for investing over $1.5billion in an energy-intensive climate -degenerating coin like BTC while claiming to be at the forefront of global climate change.
So is Tesla Permanently Ditching Crypto?
Well, according to the announcement, Tesla is not ditching crypto. It adds in its announcement that: “Tesla will not be selling any of its bitcoins and we need to use it for transactions as soon as mining transitions to a sustainable energy.”
This appears to be simply ironic as it means that the company will now convert all its bitcoin reserves to long-term assets and hopefully reap profits off it while waiting for a cleaner energy transition. Not to forget that the process of profiting by holding bitcoins still involves the use of significant energy like the one Tesla is basing as its reason for halting BTC payments.
Will Dogecoin Replace Bitcoin At Tesla?
Earlier last week after making a special appearance at the SNL show, Elon announced that his pet-project coin, Dogecoin, will now be used to fund SpaceX travel in the coming years. He also chaired a Twitter poll asking Dogecoin users if Tesla should start accepting DOGE as payment for electric cars. This ill-timed rejection of BTC might just be a sign that Elon is looking to create an avenue to transition to Dogecoin. The remainder part of the announcement corroborates this logic:
“We are also looking at other cryptocurrencies that use <1% of Bitcoin’s energy/transaction” Elon adds.
Dogecoin fits the description perfectly and the adoption of the meme-based coin by Tesla could see it finally become pegged to a reasonable source of value. Dogecoin has risen on the wings of hype for so long and even Elon knows that it is not sustainable but rather dangerous in the long run, if a credible meaningful purpose is not found for the coin.
