Tesla and Elon Musk end Bitcoin payments and sales.
The 49-year-old entrepreneur also provided the reason.
Palo Alto / California - Elon Musk and Tesla are considered pioneers in the field of manufacturing environmentally friendly electric cars.
At the same time, the 49-year-old entrepreneur is also an avowed fan of rather less environmentally friendly crypto currencies such as Bitcoin.
A discrepancy that has been discussed again and again in the past, especially on the Internet.
Musk's company Tesla invested a whopping $ 1.5 billion in Bitcoin in February.
Tesla sold 272 million of these within the first fiscal quarter and was able to enjoy gains of 101 million dollars and thus significantly improved business figures.
That is now over again, Elon Musk announced this very surprisingly on Twitter.
Tesla is leaving the Bitcoin business - Elon Musk informs on Twitter
At the end of March of this year it sounded very different. At that time, Elon Musk tweeted briefly: “You can now buy a Tesla with Bitcoin.” Less than two months later, there was a somewhat longer explanation that takes all of this back. Accordingly, Tesla has discontinued the option of buying a car using Bitcoin. The e-car builder is also currently ruling out the sale of Bitcoin shares. The reason - the poor environmental balance of the cryptocurrency.
According to calculations by Cambridge University, so-called mining - i.e. the production of bitcoins using large data centers - currently consumes around 151.16 terawatt hours (TWh) per year.
The Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index is regularly updated on the university's website.
The annual electricity demand of the cryptocurrency is ahead of the demand of entire countries.
Due to the location of the data centers, the high power consumption in the production of bitcoins is particularly problematic from an ecological point of view.
According to the University of Cambridge, most of the centers are spread across Asia.
The share of fossil fuels is still high in Asia.
Bitcoin: Musk describes increase in energy consumption as "insane"
In the statement that Musk published on Twitter, this is precisely the reason for the withdrawal from the Bitcoin business: "We are concerned about the rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for mining Bitcoin and the transactions involved, especially of coal, which has the worst emissions of all fuels. ”He also described the increase in Bitcoin energy consumption over the past few months, which can be viewed on the website of the University of Cambridge, as“ insane ”. Musk's tweet caused the Bitcoin price to collapse briefly by several thousand dollars. At the same time, however, Musk emphasized the “promising future” of the cryptocurrency.
The high energy requirement is due to the production, the so-called mining of bitcoins.
In order to prevent double spending of digital money, the inventor of Bitcoin established a process that is based on the "miners" and their high-performance computers solving mathematical problems.
Cryptocurrency: Greener alternatives with Peercoin, Nxt and Blackcoin
Not all cryptocurrencies consume as much energy as Bitcoin, as reported by the dpa news agency. Accordingly, smaller cryptocurrencies such as Peercoin, Blackcoin and Nxt work with a different method in which the possession of high-performance computers is less important. A majority of the "miners" within the Bitcoin community reject this more environmentally friendly process, however, because they have already invested a lot of money in their technology. Nevertheless, Musk announced on Twitter that Tesla will from now on look at cryptocurrencies whose energy consumption is less than one percent of Bitcoin consumption.
(live via dpa)