Elon Musk: „Tesla has suspended vehicle purchases using bitcoin. We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for bitcoin mining and transactions.” Bitcoin drops below USD50,000.

In a tweet Wednesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the electric-car company is discontinuing bitcoin payments.

„Testa has suspended vehicle purchases using bitcoin. 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.

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.

Tesla will not be selling any bitcoin and we intend to use it for transactions as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy. We are also looking at other cryptocurrencies that use <1% of bitcoin’s energy/transaction,” said Elon Musk on twitter.

Bitcoin’s price is now down nearly 11,5% over the past 24 hours, after Musk’s tweet.

Tesla first announced it was accepting BTC for car payments starting in February. The announcement came in concert with a $1.5 billion investment in bitcoin as a treasury asset.