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Earlier this month,Elon Musk’s Tesla announced it had bought$1.5 billion worth of bitcoinand would be allowing customers to purchase vehicles with the digital currency.
“I do at this point think Bitcoin is a good thing. I’m late to the party, but I am a supporter of bitcoin,” Musk — whobriefly became the world’s wealthiest personin November — recently said on the audio chat app, Clubhouse,CNNreported.
So what exactly is Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, anyway?
Elon Musk.Jeff Vespa/WireImage
Bitcoin — and other cryptocurrencies like Litecoin and Dogecoin — isn’t tied to a country and is nearly completely digital, making it different than other major currencies, like the U.S. dollar. There is no central body or person that “owns” the bitcoin network.
But outside of its purchasing power, people have collected Bitcoin in the hopes it would increase in value, and as Tuesday showed, that has largely been the case as of late.
“With Bitcoin breaking $50,000 a coin, I believe we’re reaching an inflection point where Bitcoin is essentially becoming the reserve currency of the internet,” Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink, recently toldFOX Business.
According toBBC, there are three ways to get Bitcoin for yourself: buying bitcoin with traditional currencies, accepting bitcoin as payment for a product and “mining” the coin using computers.
In order to keep the Bitcoin economy working, people can set up computers to help process transactions. Every once in a while, the network will toss a bitcoin to the user in exchange for the service, which is known as mining.
While bitcoin is making mainstream progress, there are still many companies that aren’t ready to embrace cryptocurrency. AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson recently toldYahoo Financethat his dealerships would not be accepting Bitcoin anytime soon.
“I am absolutely astounded and amazed at what Bitcoin is worth today,” he said. “I don’t know where it’s going and what it all means.”
“So I can’t help there, other than to say look what I do,” Jackson continued. “I don’t anticipate us [AutoNation] accepting Bitcoin, and we really haven’t had hardly any customers suggest that we accept bitcoin. So we are good with the U.S. currency.”
source: people.com
