Bitcoin price jumps again after another tweet from Elon Musk

Elon Musk has set the price of Bitcoin racing again after a tweet suggesting his electric car company may one day accept it as payment again.

Tesla stopped accepting Bitcoin because of the huge environmental impact of mining the cryptocurrency.

But on Sunday, when Musk tweeted the company would reconsider once mining gets greener, the value of Bitcoin jumped by 11%.

‘When there’s confirmation of reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by miners with positive future trend, Tesla will resume allowing Bitcoin transactions,’ Musk tweeted.

Musk added that Tesla only sold about 10 per cent of its Bitcoin holdings (it bought $1.5bn worth in February) so it could confirm the cryptocurrency could be ‘liquidated easily without moving market.’

Bitcoin relies on computers, which rely on electricity, to exist.

The number of computers and the energy needed to power them is rising – the growing value of bitcoin is directly tied to the amount of energy it uses.

Energy usage trend over past few months is insane https://t.co/E6o9s87trw pic.twitter.com/bmv9wotwKe

Bitcoin miners unlock Bitcoins by solving complex, unique puzzles and, as the value of bitcoin goes up, the puzzles become increasingly more difficult and it requires more computer power to solve them.

Estimates on how much energy Bitcoin uses vary.

A 2019 study by researchers at the Technical University of Munich and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that, in late 2018, the entire bitcoin network was responsible for up to 22.9 million tons of CO2 per year – similar to a large Western city or an entire developing country like Sri Lanka.

Total global emissions of the greenhouse gas from the burning of fossil fuels were about 37 billion tons last year.

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