Tesla owner Elon Musk has announced that the electric-car maker will no longer be accepting bitcoin in exchange for its vehicles due to the cryptocurrency's contribution to climate change.
The U-turn comes after Tesla purchased $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin in February and announced that it would start accepting payments in the cryptocurrency in March.
"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," Musk wrote on Twitter.
"Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at great cost to the environment."
Top image: data from Cambridge University's Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index. Above: Elon Musk said Tesla would no longer accept the cryptocurrency The Bitcoin network guzzles up more energy per year than the entire country of Sweden.
The Tesla founder shared a graph from the Cambridge University's Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, showing an increase in estimated bitcoin energy consumption from 114 to 148 terawatt-hours from January to May.
The university's estimates for the theoretical upper bound usage dramatically increased in the same period, from 224 terawatt-hours to 515 terawatt-hours.
The currency's energy consumption is due to its underlying algorithm, which means that every time a new bitcoin goes into circulation and every time a trade is made, thousands of compu...