Musk tweet drives down Bitcoin value

TESLA is to stop accepting Bitcoin as a payment for its electric cars, due to climate change concerns about the cryptocurrency.

The value of a Bitcoin fell five per cent to £36,883 after the firm’s billionaire boss Elon Musk tweeted the news, backtracking on a pledge in February that customers could use them.

The units of virtual money are created, or ‘mined’, by using super-computers to solve complex mathematical puzzles, which requires enormous amounts of electricity. Bitcoin generates 22.9million tons of CO2 per year, giving it a carbon footprint to match a large western city or a developing country such as Sri Lanka, a

2019 US study found.

Mr Musk (pictured), who also owns space transportation company SpaceX, wrote: ‘ We are concerned about rapid increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel.’ He added the cryptocurrency is a ‘good idea on many levels’ but its promise cannot come at a ‘great cost to the environment’. However, he said Tesla will not be selling the £1.76billion of Bitcoin it owns following a recent investment.

The currency’s mysterious original creators capped the number of coins at 21million – and around 18.5million have been mined so far.

The number of computers being used to unlock the remaining ones is increasing – and many of the miners are in China where coal power stations remain widely used.