Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced late Tuesday that it is now possible to buy Tesla vehicles in the U.S. with bitcoin.
The automaker last month revealed that it had bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin and that it would soon start accepting the world’s most popular cryptocurrency as a form of payment.
“You can now buy a Tesla with Bitcoin,” tweeted Musk, who was officially made the “Technoking of Tesla” this month.
A support page on Tesla’s website explains how customers can pay for a Tesla using the digital currency. The company’s electric vehicles typically cost between $37,990 and $124,000 before tax.
People outside the U.S. will be able to buy a Tesla with bitcoin “later this year,” Musk said, without specifying which countries.
In order to accept the payment, Musk said Tesla is using “internal” and “open source software.”
He added that Tesla “operates bitcoin nodes directly.” Nodes are computers on bitcoin’s network that work to verify transactions and avoid the cryptocurrency from being spent twice.
Musk embraces bitcoin
Tesla’s image as an environmentally-friendly car company sits at odds with the bitcoin network’s colossal carbon footprint. Researchers at the University of Cambridge found that it uses more electricity on an annual basis than the whole of Argentina. A 2018 paper published in Nature, arguably the most prestigious academic journal in the world, found that bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2 degrees Celsius.
Despite its poor environmental…
