The price of the largest cryptocurrency in the world Bitcoin dropped as Elon Musk took a U Turn, announcing that Tesla will not accept bitcoin as payment. The move had a drastic impact on the market cap and value of Bitcoin as the price dropped 17% and $365.85 billion were wiped off from the overall market cap.

Background

Earlier in March, Tesla firm owner Elon Musk announced that the electric vehicle company will be accepting Bitcoin as a payment for its cars. After that announcement, Bitcoin had soared 4.17% and its value was $56,178. The company had prior to that also announced that it had invested $1.5 billion in Bitcoin.

Details

On Wednesday, Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk took to Twitter and said “rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions” is a concern for him and his company. And thus, Tesla will not be accepting Bitcoin as payment. “Tesla has suspended vehicles purchasing using bitcoin,” wrote Musk in his tweet.

“We are concerned about rapidly using our fossil fuels or Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel,” the statement said. It was further stated that, “cryptocurrency is a good idea on so many levels and we believe that it has a promising future, but this cannot come at a great cost to the environment.”

The cryptocurrency bull from Silicon Valley, Mr. Elon Musk also said that his company will not be selling any bitcoin it had invested. Further the company will be considering to divert its energy on cryptocurrencies that use less than 1% of bitcoin’s energy.

It should be noted that all cryptocurrencies are “mined” when extremely high-powered computers compete with similarly powered computers to solve complex mathematical problems. Due to this, mining for cryptocurrency remains an extremely energy intensive process.

After Musk’s announcement Bitcoin dropped to as low as 15% to be placed just more than $46,000. At the time of writing this article, Bitcoin was down 11% and was priced at $50,194. Ethereum that was seeing sharp rises in the past few weeks also fell due to the fact that it works in tandem with bitcoin. Ethereum dropped 10% and was priced at $3,820.

Earlier this year, Bitcoin has seen more tremendous highs than disastrous lows. The cryptocurrency reached new heights when Tesla announced that it had bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin. This move was one of the biggest catalysts in bitcoin’s rally.

The steady rise continued when major financial institutes like Mastercard, Bank of New York and several more introduce plans that would make it easier for people to trade cryptocurrencies or invest in them. To give you a perspective as to just how much Bitcoin has risen in a while, Bitcoin was trading at $28,768 by the end of 2020 and touched the $65,000 mark in April 2021.

After Elon Musk announced that Tesla will not be accepting Bitcoin as payment for its vehicles, Twitter was flooded with hilarious memes. Here are some of the best of those memes: