Earlier this year, Tesla started accepting Bitcoin as a payment method for its cars but after a few days, the company stopped doing so, citing concerns about the environmental impact of using cryptocurrency.
Now, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla says that the company will likely start accepting bitcoin for vehicle purchases again. At the B-Word conference, which was hosted by the Crypto Council for Innovation, he said: “It looks like bitcoin is shifting a lot more toward renewables and a bunch of the heavy-duty coal plants that were being used…have been shut down, especially in China.”
He further added that he wanted to do a little more due diligence to confirm that the percentage of renewable energy usage is most likely at or above 50 percent and that there is a trend toward increasing that number. He also said that if this continues, then Tesla will most likely resume accepting bitcoin.
In the month of May, when the company stopped taking bitcoin as payment, the company issued a statement and said that it would start accepting bitcoin payments once the process of mining bitcoin “transitions to more sustainable energy.” It also added that the company is also “looking at other cryptocurrencies that use <1% of Bitcoin’s energy/transaction.”
For those who are unaware, mining cryptocurrency involves computers competing against other machines to solve complex mathematical puzzles, which is an energy-intensive process. Estimate claims that bitcoin mining takes up about the same amount of energy annually as the Netherlands.
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