Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla is “most likely” going to resume taking Bitcoin payment after some due diligence on the improvements in the energy mix used to mine the cryptocurrency.
Over the last year, Tesla has been delving deep into the cryptocurrency world at different levels. Earlier this year, Tesla invested $1.5 billion in Bitcoin.
Shortly after, the automaker started accepting the cryptocurrency as payment on new vehicles.
Later, CEO Elon Musk even talked about the potential of Tesla starting to accept Dogecoin as payment for its vehicles.
However, a few days later, Tesla took a step back with crypto by removing the Bitcoin payment option.
The company noted concerns over the energy needs of the Bitcoin network:
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.
This is a concern that many Tesla community members shared when Tesla first announced its Bitcoin investment, and many were angered by the fact that the company didn’t think about it in the first place.
At the time, Tesla noted that they were not selling their stake in Bitcoin, and that they planned to resume taking Bitcoin payments once the network shows a higher mix of renewable energy.
During a talk at the B Word conference today, Musk said that there have been improvements already and Tesla will do more due diligence to confirm, but he expects the automaker will resume accepting crypto payment:
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 toward increasing that number, and if so Tesla would resume accepting bitcoin. Most likely the answer is that Tesla would resume accepting bitcoin.
The CEO also confirmed that he has a significant personal investment into bitcoin on top of Tesla’s investment and he has smaller Ethereum and Dogecoin holdings.
Electrek’s Take
I think it’s funny that Tesla got roasted for not doing that due diligence about Bitcoin’s energy use in the first place, but that might actually have had a very positive impact.
It put a big spotlight on the issue that wouldn’t have happened if Tesla wouldn’t have gotten in and out like they did.
Elon also talked about other ways to improve power consumption like the potential of using cryptominers as space heaters, which is actually what I do. I have three cryptominers that I strategically place around my house to heat it up during the winter.
They are powered by cheap hydropower and reduce my electric heating needs.
If you are interested in getting into crypto, my two favorite ways are Coinbase and crypto.com. With the latter, you can even spend your crypto through a regular Visa debit card. You can use my referral code (44sqxfg7zh) at crypto.com, and we each get $50 worth of crypto.
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Author: Fred Lambert
Source: Electrek
