Did you hear about Elon Musk’s concerns about Bitcoin mining, green energy, and the environment? Of course you did. Did it seem suspicious to you that Tesla apparently invested billions of Dollars in BTC before researching this very surface topic? Of course it did. Because it doesn’t make any sense.
Well, former NewsBTC and current OKEx Insights writer, Rick D, uncovered an April tweet that proves that Elon had been thinking about the subject. Not only that, he agreed with Jack Dorsey when he made this statement: “Bitcoin incentivizes renewable energy.” Talk about a smoking gun.
Here's Elon agreeing that BTC creates a powerful incentive to develop green energy infrastructure…
But why let a little thing like the truth get in the way of some tasty tax breaks, amirite? https://t.co/gflK0cXUla
— 𝕭𝖆𝖙𝖍𝖆𝖓𝖌 (Bathang.lens) (@0xBathang) May 13, 2021
With the “tasty tax breaks,” Rick is referring to the rumor that Tesla is among the few companies applying to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for credits under the Renewable Fuel Standard. The report says:
Tesla Inc is seeking to enter the multi-billion dollar U.S. renewable credit market, hoping to profit from the Biden administration’s march toward new zero-emission goals, two sources familiar with the matter said.
BTC price chart on HitBTC | Source: BTC/USDT on TradingView.com
Related Reading | Elon Musk Doubles Down On Bitcoin Energy Concerns
What did Jack Dorsey say about renewable energy?
The Bitcoin Clean Energy Initiative is a program created by Square, the company in which Jack Dorsey serves as CEO. In conjunction with Ark Invest, they produced a concise whitepaper titled “Bitcoin is Key to an Abundant, Clean Energy Future,” that concludes:
Our model demonstrates that integrated bitcoin mining could transfigure intermittent power resources into baseload-capable generation stations. It suggests that the addition of Bitcoin mining into power developers’ toolboxes should increase the overall addressable market for renewable and intermittent power sources. All else equal, with bitcoin mining, renewable energy could provision a large percentage of any locality’s power economically.
This is not the only use case that links Bitcoin to clean energy. Here at Bitcoinist, we reported about miners in Canada that are using natural gas to fuel their operation. This gas was not profitable enough to sell or transport, therefore they used to just flare it into the atmosphere.
With the new solution, this will no longer be the case, as the companies can install Bitcoin mining gear and use the gas to mine the coins. With more of the natural gas being used for powering mining farms, there will be a major reduction of carbon dioxide emissions from gas and oil exploration, which ultimately leads to greener mining.
Other related and already covered projects in the Bitcoin clean-mining space include MoonLite, WePower, and the Green Bitcoin mining pool.
Related Reading | Michael Saylor Breaks It Down: The PoW Architecture Is A Masterpiece Of Engineering
Green energy powered mining rig
Investor and notorious Bitcoin podcaster Anthony Pompliano presents another theory. In a recent TV interview about the subject in everyone’s tongues, he said:
Elon Musk owns billions of dollars of bitcoin.
He isn’t selling because of this inaccurate energy narrative.
Don’t watch what they say, just watch what they do with their money. pic.twitter.com/pFk27O3nzr
— Pomp 🌪 (@APompliano) May 13, 2021
Is this whole fiasco the rollout for a Tesla renewable power mining hardware? Or are they just going for the “tasty tax breaks”? We’ll have to wait and see.
One thing’s for sure, however, for Elon this is more about money than about the environment.
Photo by Chelsea on Unsplash - Charts by TradingView