Guess what? Yesterday Tesla announced that the company will no longer accept car purchases with Bitcoin.
Who's surprised?
But it's not this fact, that pisses me off. Businessmen buy Bitcoin, sell Bitcoin, fine, do whatever you want with it, but the most annoying thing about this is how he still wants to seem all warm and fuzzy.
Elon Musk explained this decision on Twitter, stating that the company's concern is with the ecological aspect of Bitcoin mining and transactions:
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Tesla has suspended vehicle purchases using Bitcoin. We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel.
Like hell you are! Didn't know about that fact when made a purchase worth $1.5B?
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Concerns about bitcoin's energy demands have been around since the very beginning, with crypto pioneer Hal Finney tweeting about potential future CO2 emissions on 27 January 2009 – just two weeks after receiving the first ever bitcoin transaction from the cryptocurrency's pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/bitcoin-bad-environment-mining-cryptocurrency-b1846773.html
And this, in fact, is a total bs, because of all currencies cryptocurrencies are considered to be rather eco-friendly as compared to the fiat system. Why? Because paper money production and running banks...surprise-surprise - require huge energy consumption.
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The estimated global production costs of paper currency in 2014 were 5 terawatts per year and 10 billion liters of water. While the banking system alone is even consuming more energy than the Bitcoin network, bankings energy costs are calculated around 100 terawatts per year. This is almost double that of Bitcoin. Indeed, banks need to run a lot of servers, branches and ATMs to keep their system accessible to the public.
Source: https://www.ledger.com/energy-consumption-crypto-vs-fiat
Your thoughts on this? Are cryptocurrencies, and, in particular, Bitcoin, that harming to the environment when compared to cash? Or is this just an excuse for screwing people over?