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Elon Musk Says Tesla To Accept Dogecoin As Payment For Merchandise
Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, has announced that customers can now purchase certain items using Dogecoin.
According to Business Insider, Dogecoin is up 16 percent to around $0.20 as a result of the news.
Musk first announced the initiative on Twitter on December 14th, when he stated that the company would “see how it goes” with the cryptocurrency payment option.
It’s unclear when or if Tesla will accept Dogecoin as payment for its vehicles, which Musk has previously stated is his favorite cryptocurrency.
The initiative appears to be supported outside of the United States, with the S3XY Mug available for purchase with Dogecoin from the UK Tesla store for 150 doge (approximately $29).
As of this writing, Dogecoin appears to be the only way to purchase certain items, as their traditional payment icons have vanished.
Support for Dogecoin purchases comes just months after Tesla began accepting Bitcoin for car purchases, only to discontinue the practice 49 days later due to concerns about the use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining.
“Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels, and we believe it has a promising future,” Elon Musk stated in a statement.
According to TRG Datacenters research, Dogecoin currently does not consume anywhere near the same amount of energy per transaction as Bitcoin. However, as digital currency economist Alex de Vries explained in May, Dogecoin is still an energy-intensive proof-of-work cryptocurrency. Its lower energy consumption per transaction is largely due to the fact that it is currently a less valuable asset than Bitcoin.
Musk, for one, stated in May that he was collaborating with Dogecoin developers to “improve system transaction efficiency.”
He hasn’t been shy about expressing his support for the cryptocurrency, which began as a joke based on the Doge meme. “A lot of people I talked to on the Tesla assembly lines or building rockets at SpaceX own Doge,” Musk told CNBC in October. “They aren’t financial experts or Silicon Valley techies.” That’s why I decided to back Doge; it felt like the crypto for the people.” Another of Elon Musk’s companies, SpaceX, began accepting Dogecoin payments in May and plans to send a satellite named DOGE-1 to the Moon next year.
