Tesla CEO could again be behind the 10% drop in bitcoin price after hinting that the company may be planning to dump BTC in reserves this quarter.
May 17, 2021, | AtoZ Markets – After Elon Musk announced last week that Tesla would no longer accept Bitcoin payments for its luxury cars, the price of BTC nosedived roughly 17% in 24 hours.
Bitcoin hadn’t managed to fully recover before Elon sent out another tweet hinting that Tesla may be dumping some of its BTC holdings.
"Indeed," Musk responded to a post on May 16 that suggested Tesla could sell its BTC holdings this quarter.
Indeed
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 16, 2021
Musk's popularity in the crypto community was already declining due to his criticism of Bitcoin's energy efficiency and therefore Tesla's suspension of BTC payments for vehicle purchases. This response further fueled the reactions of many prominent figures in crypto.
Peter McCormack, the host of the What Bitcoin Did broadcast, said that Musk's BTC criticism was "extremely ignorant", while his support for Dogecoin made him "the perfect troll".
1/ Dear @elonmusk. The perfect troll is one where people don't know whether it is a troll or not. Your recent poorly informed criticism of #bicoin + support for Doge may be the perfect troll...or you might actually believe this (God I hope not).
— Peter McCormack 🏴☠️ (@PeterMcCormack) May 16, 2021
The Tesla CEO of criticism about this "Such discussions, directing me completely Doge" he made a statement.
Yearn Finance developer 'banteg' suggested that Elon Musk plans to support Dogecoin against Bitcoin, first inflating the price of the cryptocurrency and then selling it.
The DOGE price has fallen 32% since May 8, when it hit its peak price of $0.73. The coin had begun to lose value rapidly since Elon Musk's appearance on Saturday Night Live.
On the other hand, Musk claimed that he understood money better than crypto analysts, as he previously held a managerial position at PayPal:
“Hey crypto 'experts', have you heard of something called PayPal? Perhaps I know how money works better than you do.”
Michael Saylor, CEO of Microstrategy, pointed out the differences between PayPal and Bitcoin: “The world needs more of a decentralized, secure and deflationary store of value like Bitcoin than the more centralized, less secure and inflationary value storage tool you mentioned.”
Even PayPal Engineer Daniel Brain highlighted Bitcoin's advantages over PayPal.
Even at PayPal, we understand the difference between a settlement layer and a transactional layer. 🙂
— Daniel Brain (@bluepnume) May 16, 2021
Having lost nearly 10% in the last 24 hours, BTC is trading at $45,300 as of the time of writing this article.
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