Elon Musk has been in the news for his recent tweets on cryptocurrency and the effect they have had on its prices. On Monday, hours after the prices of Bitcoin was trading at its lowest in three months at around $43,000 at 8.54 AM IST, Musk tweeted that Tesla had not sold any Bitcoin.
On May 13, Musk had tweeted that Tesla had stopped accepting Bitcoin to purchase its vehicles due to climate concerns. He had said Tesla will not be using any Bitcoin and we intend to use it for transaction as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy.
Musk said Tesla was looking at other cryptocurrencies that use 1 percent of Bicoin's energy/transition. This was contradictory to what Tesla said a few months ago. In February, Tesla had revealed it had bought Bitcoin worth $1.5 billion. It had said it 'would soon' accept it as a form of payment for cars. That statement had sent Bitcoin shooting higher, sparking heavy trading in cryptocurrencies and caused exchanges like Coinbase, Gemini, Binance to experience technical issues.
On May 16, it appeared from his tweets that Musk favoured Dogecoin over other cryptocurrencies. He tweeted: “Ideally, Doge speeds up block time 10X, increases block size 10X & drops fee 100X. Then it wins hands down,” he said on Twitter.
On May 11, Musk put out a question to his followers asking them if they wanted Tesla to use Doge to buy Tesla.
The price of Dogecoin jumped after Musk's tweet. According to Coindesk, the price currently stands at $0.723573, witnessing a 25.77 percent jump in 24 hours after Musk tweeted about it.
Referring to the origins of Dogecoin which was invented as a joke, Musk said:. “Dogecoin was created to make fun of cryptocurrency. Fate loves ironies. The currency that was invented as a joke becomes the real currency,” Musk said.
