What the Blxck?! | Elon Musk & Tesla End Bitcoin Payments
Topic at a Glance…
· Elon Musk & Tesla announced on Wednesday that the electric car manufacturer would no longer be accepting Bitcoin as payment for its vehicles
· Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin offloaded more than $1 billion of meme-coins, including the sky-rocketing Shiba Inu Token ($SHIB)
· The entire cryptocurrency market saw a capitalization retraction of around $300 billion following dual punches from Musk & Buterin
Cryptocurrencies and tokenized values took a tumble on Wednesday following power moves by Tesla’s Elon Musk and Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin. A loss of confidence by a small percentage of the market led to a flash crash in about 90 minutes, taking down nearly every project. A quick recoup took place as auto-buy orders began to engage as the price of Bitcoin hit around $47,500.
Elon Shifts His Weight
Elon Musk released a statement on his Twitter page on behalf of Tesla, noting that the company would no longer be accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment for their vehicles. He did, however, state that Tesla would not be selling its position in the world’s largest cryptocurrency.
The environmental rationale noted by Tesla in the statement seems to fly in the face of a December 2019 report from CoinShares that reported that about 73% of Bitcoin’s energy consumption is actually carbon neutral. This is due to the usage of incredibly cheap hydropower in the mining hubs of southwest China and Scandinavia.
Though the flash crash took the price of Bitcoin down to around $47,500, the price did quickly rebound to around $50,000. This is in line with the suggestion by technical analysts that there is support around the $48,000; however, they also suggest that there could be resistance at about the $52,000 level. The claim is due to the price line’s fall beneath the 100 hourly simple moving average.
Vitalik Gets Charitable
Providing a double-dose of hardship for the cryptocurrency market, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin made moves that forced a flash-collapse for the meme-coins. He sent 50 trillion SHIB tokens, worth $1.2B at the time of sending, to the India Covid Relief Fund, as well as other dog meme-coins Dogelon, mwDOGE, and OURSHIB. He also sent about $413 million in AKITA to the Ethereum fundraising platform, Gitcoin.
The shifting of the SHIB tokens seemingly caused a rift in sentiment noted in our last piece. The Dogecoin copycat had lost nearly 50% in market capitalization at the time of writing.
In yet another lesson in the volatility of this new marketplace, many new participants have likely lost many of their precious satoshis. Many now-veterans learned these lessons back in 2014 and 2018, and it would be beneficial for each and every hobbyist to help soothe the sores of anxiety caused by the industry. HODL the line!
