As Tesla CEO Elon Musk previously hinted, following a request for this as well as a $1.5 billion Tesla investment in bitcoin, you can now buy a Tesla using bitcoin — in the US at least. (Hat tip to Sawyer Merritt.) This is not a joke. I just took this screenshot a moment ago:
Go ahead and pick a Tesla to order and have a look for yourself if you don’t believe me.
Though, note that the option isn’t available everywhere.
seems like not all can see the option of bitcoin yet(neither can I on US site). But it's there in source code. pic.twitter.com/r1ta8POi2n
— Nikhil Chaudhary #TeslaIndia🇮🇳 (@NCBirbhan) March 24, 2021
I haven’t confirmed whether you can buy a Tesla solar power system or Powerwall with bitcoin yet. The online form still requires that you put in a credit card to provide a $100 down payment after putting in some very basic info about your home in order to move forward, but I presume that if you get past that stage and fully confirm an installation, Tesla would be willing to take your final payment in bitcoin.
Naturally, having invested a sizable chunk of its cash into bitcoin, it’s not surprising to see Tesla open up Tesla purchases using bitcoin. How much will this option be used? How much will it stimulate interest in and use of bitcoin? Who the heck knows?
Personally, I’ll say that I am not excited about this. For one, there are serious environmental issues with bitcoin — and they’re not a joke, not insignificant, and not at all necessary. Secondly, bitcoin is just like the first iteration of many things — inefficient, clunky, slow, and stupid. There are now much better options in this field. If Tesla wants to get into cryptocurrency, fine, cool, great — but choose a decent cryptocurrency! For a deeper look at what bitcoin is and why it’s unlikely to be the leader in the cryptocurrency market for very long, read “How Does Bitcoin Work? What Is Bitcoin Mining? What Is Bitcoin Backed By?”
Anyway, it’s after 3:00am here and I just had to quickly cover this because it’s breaking news and quite significant, so I’ll close this out and leave it to you readers to carry on the conversation for now and debate whether this is great, good, cool, lame, stupid, or completely moronic.
Also, you can explore more of our coverage on bitcoin or Tesla if you want to see other news and analyses on these topics.
Updates: Elon Musk has now tweeted about this as well. Here are his new tweets on the topic:
Tesla is using only internal & open source software & operates Bitcoin nodes directly.
Bitcoin paid to Tesla will be retained as Bitcoin, not converted to fiat currency.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2021
Pay by Bitcoin capability available outside US later this year
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2021
Full disclosure: I’m a Tesla [NASDAQ:TSLA] shareholder. However, I offer no investment advice of any kind, and neither does anyone else here at CleanTechnica. I do not own cryptocurrency of any sort.
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