Electric carmaker Tesla is to return to accepting bitcoin as a form of payment, CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday, as quoted by ‘Reuters’.
Musk’s comments at the ‘B Word’ conference came after Tesla said in May that it would stop accepting bitcoin as a form of payment for car purchases, less than two months after the company began the process.
Musk explained that he wants to confirm “that the percentage of renewable energy use is sitting at 50% or more and that there is a trend towards increasing that number,” referring to the energy used to mine bitcoin. “If that is the case Tesla will go back to accepting bitcoins,” he added.
The use of bitcoin to purchase Tesla’s electric vehicles has highlighted a dichotomy between Musk’s reputation as an environmentalist and the use of his popularity and stature as one of the world’s richest people to support cryptocurrencies.
Some Tesla investors, along with environmentalists, have been increasingly critical of the way bitcoin is “mined”, using large amounts of electricity generated by fossil fuels.
On the issue, Musk noted that “Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. We can’t be the company that does that and not do due diligence on bitcoin energy use.” The Tesla creator added that he owned bitcoins, ethereum and dogecoin.
In addition to Tesla, on 9 June, El Salvador became the first country to recognise bitcoin as a legal tender. El Salvador’s law defined that the exchange rate between bitcoin and the dollar will be set “freely by the market” and will not be subject to capital gains taxes like other currencies.
