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Bitcoin prices slumped 17% on Wednesday night, before recovering some of the losses, after Elon Musk tweeted that Tesla would suspend accepting the cryptocurrency as payment for its cars, due to environmental concerns.
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“We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emission of any fuel,” Musk said on Twitter
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The Tesla
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billionaire founder added that although “cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels” with a “promising future,” it shouldn’t “come at a great cost to the environment.” - Bitcoin quickly dropped after the tweet, from nearly $55,000 to $45,700, the lowest since early March, before edging back to more than $51,000 in Asian trading on Thursday.
- Tesla had announced on February 8 that it had bought $1.5 billion of bitcoins and would accept it as payment.
