According to a statement issued by Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday, the company has stopped accepting bitcoin as payment for its cars due to concerns that it would lead to increased use of fossil fuels. In late March, Tesla had just recently begun accepting bitcoin.Tesla's $1.5 billion bitcoin hoard, which Musk bought earlier this year, will no longer be sold, according to Musk.In the first quarter of 2021, Tesla sold some of that bitcoin, which helped boost the company's quarterly profit estimates.According to the announcement, Tesla says it will resume accepting bitcoin (and consider selling more of it) once the mining process “transitions to more renewable energy.” “We are also looking at other cryptocurrencies that use less than 1% of Bitcoin's energy/transaction,” the company says. Tesla's website suggests that it will continue to accept Bitcoin for purchases as of this writing. “Cryptocurrency is a good concept on many levels, and we believe it has a bright future,” Musk writes, “but it cannot come at the expense of the environment.” According to one calculation, Bitcoin consumes as much energy as the Netherlands each year. All of the energy has a significant carbon footprint.
Ok, let's think about this for a second. So we consume as much energy as the country of Netherlands to provide instant transfers and real-time banking to 8 billion people on the planet with a mobile phone in their pocket, many of which have never had a bank account in their lives and are still storing cash under their mattresses. And in many cases, that's cash that is losing value over time. Sound like a damn good trade to me.
Has anyone compared that to the legacy banking system? All those buildings and data-centers don't run on good intentions...
I don't think many people who are too dirt-poor to have access to even a bank account are in any position to fool around with cryptocurrency. Actually, there are many good services providing free or very low-cost banking, payments and transfers - e.g. M-Pesa in Africa, Alipay and Wechat in China, Mercado Pago in LatAm. Even in the USA we have Venmo, Paypal, Zelle, and in a couple years we'll finally have the Fedwire successor. As far as payments and transfers go, crypto is an inferior clunky solution to what's very close to being a solved problem.
"Dear Sir, can you please provide us with a government ID and a utility bill no longer than 3 months old...oh, you're a resident of a country that implies increased due diligence, Sir? Well in that case we need the documents to be notarially certifies. Thanks for your business, Sir."
Bitcoin transaction fees to buy a cup of coffee today: around 6 USD. Bitcoin transaction fees to buy a cup of coffee on April 24, 2021: around 30 USD. Source: https://www.bitcoinfees.info/ Is Dogecoin or Bitcoin a hustle?
Digital assets firm Galaxy Digital has published a report claiming that Bitcoin is more than twice as green as the international banking system. https://decrypt.co/71116/galaxy-digital-claims-banks-use-over-double-energy-bitcoin