Tesla is allowing customers to buy select merchandise items using Dogecoin, according to the website and a tweet from CEO Elon Musk. You can now pick up the Cyberwhistle for 300 doge ($58), Giga Texas Belt Buckle for 835 doge ($161) and the Cyberquad for Kids at 12,020 doge or $2,320. According to the store, Dogecoin is now the only way to buy those items as a cash option is no longer showing.
Musk has been interested in Dogecoin of late, having discussed in May the potential “efficiency” of the cryptocurrency compared to Bitcoin. Then in December, he tweeted that the company would “make some merch buyable with Doge & see how it goes.” Following Musk’s announcement today, Dogecoin has gone up around 14 percent over the last 24 hours.
Tesla accepted Bitcoin as payment for its cars in February 2021, but halted the initiative less than two months later citing Bitcoin’s environmental impact. “Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels… but this cannot come at a great cost to the environment,” Musk said on Twitter at the time.
Dogecoin uses less power to mine, mainly because it’s worth less than Bitcoin. Musk said last year that he was working with Dogecoin’s devs to improve its efficiency, though there’s no clear way yet to do that without decreasing its value. That said, Block’s CEO Jack Dorsey just announced plans to build an open Bitcoin mining system that makes that particular cryptocurrency “more distributed and efficient.”
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