On Wednesday (March 24), within roughly five hours of Elon Musk announcing on Twitter that Tesla is now accepting (in the U.S.) Bitcoin as a means of payment, the Bitcoin price had surged from $54,785 (at 7:01 UTC) $57,044 (at 12.11 UTC), which is currently its intraday high.
Currently (i.e. as of 12:58 UTC on March 24), according to data by CryptoCompare, Bitcoin is trading around $56,883, up 3.19% in the past 24-hour period; as for the year-to-date (YTD) period, Bitcoin is up 96.33%.
This is how Tesla Co-Founder and CEO Elon Musk announced that Bitcoin now accepts Bitcoin payments for its cars and rather than converting them immediately to dollars (like nearly all merchants do), it will HODL the BTC it earns in this way, just like the BTC that it plans to buy for its corporate treasury on a regular basis from its quarterly profits.
Binance Co-Founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao (aka “CZ”) was delighted with Tesla’s move that he tweeted that he was considering buying a Tesla even though he doesn’t have a driver’s license anymore:
“I don’t even have a valid driver license any more. But may have to buy a Tesla just for the cause.“
One person that was a lot less happy than CZ with Musk and Tesla was gold bug and Bitcoin permabear Peter Schiff, who said that this was nothing more than a barter transaction and that Tesla is still not using Bitcoin as a unit of account:
On-chain analyst Ali Martinez said earlier today that data from Glassnode suggests that Bitcoin might be on the verge of surging to new all-time highs:
As for Bitcoin miners, there are at least two popular crypto analysts who are saying today that according to on-chain data it appears that miners are currently in accumulation mode and not selling their inventory because they are expecting higher Bitcoin prices in the short-term.
The first uses data from ByteTree:
The second uses data from Glassnode:
Featured Image by “SnapLaunch” via Pixabay.com
The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.
