Crypto’s price collision: Elon’s green move spotlights Bitcoin’s environmental impact

Technoking, or Cryptoking?... Elon Musk tweeted a bombshell on Wednesday: Tesla will no longer accept Bitcoin payment for cars. Then: as much as $365B was wiped from cryptocurrency market value (that loss = Mastercard's entire market cap). Elon is #concerned about Bitcoin's fuel-burning environmental impact (we covered that last month). That's a major reversal from the Technoking's previous stance:

• February: Tesla invested in $1.5B worth of Bitcoin, and started accepting it as payment for cars. Bitcoin soared on the news. Side note: is anyone actually buying Teslas with BTC?
• Wednesday: BTC payments = suspended. Tesla also won’t be selling any of its Bitcoin, but will only transact when “mining transitions to more sustainable energy.”
• Yesterday: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, Ripple, and other cryptocurrencies plunged.

The EV senses a disturbance... Tesla is worried about the rapidly rising use of fossil fuels (like: coal) for Bitcoin mining and transactions. Bitcoin is a sneaky carbon emitter, because powering it requires much more electricity than other cryptos. Bitcoin mining computers verify the legitimacy of blockchain transactions, making quintillions of attempts per second to solve increasingly complex equations (aka: major energy suck).

• Bitcoin alone accounts for 0.5% of global electricity consumption — more than entire countries like Argentina. A single BTC transaction generates the same amount of carbon as ~1M Visa transactions.
• In context: Bitcoin consumes 707 KWh of energy per transaction — that's 11X more than Ethereum, 38X more than Litecoin, and nearly 6,000X more than Doge. That's partly because the systems required to verify BTC transactions are more complex, and less energy-efficient.