Tesla CEO Elon Musk is at it again, tweeting about bitcoin and helping give the cryptocurrency a temporary boost.
The price of bitcoin rose nearly $2,000 per coin Monday afternoon immediately after Musk tweeted, “Spoke with North American Bitcoin miners. They committed to publish current & planned renewable usage & to ask miners WW to do so. Potentially promising.”
Musk has previously raised concerns about the energy usage of bitcoin mining and its impact on the environment, even citing it as a reason that Tesla stopped accepting bitcoin as payment for its cars.
Within minutes, the price of the crypto climbed to just below $40,000 per coin, up from around $38,000 per coin before the tweet, according to data from Coinbase.
Microstrategy CEO Michael Saylor also helped the rise by following up Musk’s tweet, saying that he hosted a meeting between Musk and a handful of bitcoin miners that led to the formation of the Bitcoin Mining Council “to promote energy usage transparency & accelerate sustainability initiatives worldwide.”
Equipment at the data centre of BitRiver company providing services for cryptocurrency mining in the city of Bratsk in Irkutsk Region, Russia.REUTERS
But bitcoin’s gains from these tweets didn’t last long,