Elon Musk Dismisses Bitcoin, Announces Tesla Will Accept DOGE for ‘Merch’

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has been named Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year”. During an interview with the publication, crypto-enthusiast said that meme-based Dogecoin is much better than Bitcoin for everyday payments. As per the multi-billionaire, Bitcoin, which is the world’s most valued cryptocurrency, is popular among investors because each token currently stores large amounts of fiat currency. For daily purchases, however, Musk says Dogecoin makes for a more favourable choice. He later tweeted to announce that Tesla will be accepting DOGE payments.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin was trading at around $50,553 (roughly Rs. 38 lakh), while the announcement about Tesla accepting Dogecoin payments for ‘merchandise’ had DOGE price up by around 20 percent at $0.21 (roughly Rs. 16) per token.

The billionaire was known to have been in the process of integrating DOGE payments with Tesla car purchases under the pseudo name “SHIBA”. The company had already begun accepting Bitcoin payments earlier.

“Bitcoin is not a good substitute for transactional currency. Even though it was created as a silly joke, Dogecoin is better suited for transactions. The total transaction flow that you do with Dogecoin, like transactions per day, is much higher potential than Bitcoin,” Musk said during the Time’s interview.

The verified Twitter account of the Dogecoin posted a clipping of Musk’s interview, thanking the tech mogul for “dropping some straight facts” about the dog-coin.

Musk’s endorsement of Dogecoin is everything but new.

Earlier this month, the 50-year-old global business tycoon had hyped up Dogecoin against Ether, which is the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain. Ether is also the second most valued cryptocurrency in terms of valuation, currently trading at $4,039 (roughly Rs. 3 lakh) per token, as per the Gadgets 360 crypto price tracker.

In October, the Tesla CEO had called Dogecoin “the people’s crypto”.

Recently, US-based movie theatre chain AMC Theatres listed DOGE as an official payment option for gift card purchases.