Elon Musk, who has been manipulating the cryptocurrency market for months, has so far earned more than $200 billion dollars and continues playing games with… “air”, inflating Tesla’s profits. The “green” maneuver sank cryptocurrencies with temporary losses up to 365 billion dollars in the first half of the year. That’s a lot of dollars.
The polluting dimension of bitcoin was suddenly “discovered” by Elon Musk in order to make another maneuver that wiped hundreds of billions of dollars off the cryptocurrency market.
Tesla’s founder tweeted yesterday morning that his automaker will no longer be paid for the vehicles it sells with bitcoin.
That announcement plunged bitcoin up 17% lower, to below $50,000 for the first time since April 24.
At the same time, it led to a large fall in other cryptocurrencies, resulting in more than 365 billion dollars disappearing from the entire market within three hours.
The cryptocurrency market gradually recovered about half of those losses, but later bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies continued to retreat.
The Musk statement surprised several of his “followers.” Musk is one of the most ardent supporters of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
A few times in the past, it has soared in value with its websites and other interventions, while Tesla has invested $1.5 billion dollars in the company dollars in bitcoin.
Last February the car industry even announced that it would soon accept bitcoin as a means of payment for the cars it sells, inflating the value of the cryptocurrency by 20%.
Musk’s Environmental Concerns
Musk attributed his backflip- which angered several of his horse-faced fans – to his environmental concerns. Specifically in his anxiety about the “rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels in the mining and trading of bitcoin and especially coal, which has the worst emissions of pollutants than any other fuel” as he typically tweeted.
Bitcoin is created or “mined” by solving complex mathematical puzzles, a process performed by powerful computers and requiring huge amounts of electricity. The quantities of this energy are often densely larger than those consumed by entire countries and are mainly produced by the combustion of polluting fossil fuels.
This is Nothing New
However, this is nothing new. Long before Musk’s tweets and other moves that inflated the value of bitcoin, the planet knew that the cryptocurrency only green is not.
Cambridge University’s Alternative Finance Centre manages a Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index.
The index currently indicates that the cryptocurrency ‘mining’ process uses more electricity each year than Malaysia or Sweden and is close to Egypt’s annual consumption.
The possibility that Musk might… woke up now and saw that bitcoin is not green does not even convince his furious followers.
Above all, Musk is a ruthless speculator. When he launched his pompous announcements last February on the value of the cryptocurrency soaring, Musk was also aware of Cambridge’s data and that 70% of Bitcoin is mined today in China where user-miners usually use the cheapest to produce coal-based electricity.
But he has avoided it by luring into the unstable world of cryptocurrencies the poor little investors of the Internet who have him as their god. And he earned about $200 million. dollars, as he announced.
His recent maneuver is therefore probably nothing more than yet another move to influence and essentially manipulate the cryptocurrency market. Just like so many other times in the past…
