Tesla Dives Into Bitcoin Mining
Tesla has had its foot in the water with crypto since it joined the Doge meme party last year but now they are ready to play the game.
Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, has become a bit of an icon for in cryptocurrency and social media. On top of the fact that he was already known for his electric cars and Space X ventures, this has propelled him to the center of the millennial and Gen-Z gaze. There was even a point in time when he could move the cryptocurrency markets with a single tweet. Those days are long gone as everyone realizes he has tendencies to be a troll on the internet. Today; however, he is not trolling investors he is actually taking his crypto endeavors a step further. Tesla will now be running its own Bitcoin mining facility in Texas powered completely by solar power.
Tesla will not be in this alone as they are also teaming up with crypto powerhouse Block which is owned by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. The project is said to be a $12 million effort to prove that Bitcoin can be mined and fund a zero-emission power infrastructure.
The mining operation will be powered by Tesla's 3.8 megawatts (MW) solar photovoltaic energy facility and the company-s rechargeable battery storage system called Megapack, which is capable of storing 2 megawatt-hours (MWh).
Back in February of last year, Tesla had bought $1.5 Billion worth of Bitcoin but they faced some criticisms for this move. It has been rumored that Bitcoin mining was bad for the environment and that is a myth that Musk and Dorsey are out to prove with this move. The partnership between Tesla and Block happened in May of last year and it is assumed that these ideas have been in the works ever since. It is also worth noting that Tesla started accepting payments in Bitcoin last March as well but had quickly taken back that idea. This caused a bit of a market crash at the time which goes back to when he was able to influence pumps and dumps of the crypto market.
This will be interesting to see as even without Musk and Dorsey, Texas has become a hub in the US for Bitcoin mining. As a whole Bitcoin mining is being adopted with new methods across the world with the most interesting coming from El Salvador. They plan on powering their mining facility with their volcanos. This widespread change started when China banned mining in the country last march as well which led to many of the top operations packing their bags and looking for new homes. A lot of them have decided to set up shop in North America like the US and Canada as well as Central America. Mining Bitcoin will disappear eventually once the final token is unearthed but there is still a lot of time until that happens and a lot of new players in the space are starting to realize that. Tesla and Block will have an upper hand considering Tesla is a solar and electric giant but their names on it just make mining more mainstream.