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Tesla boss Elon Musk has let the world know that he will not be supporting Bitcoin given the energy concerns surrounding it, but will be putting even more of his weight behind Dogecoin. To that end, Musk says he’s working with developers to make Dogecoin environmentally friendly.
In the past few months, the eccentric billionaire has increased his support for Dogecoin and declared himself the “DogeFather. According to him, the joke coin is his favorite crypto asset.
Tesla & Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/YSswJmVZhP
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 12, 2021
He has spent a lot of time tweeting about it and even recently spoke about it on CNBC’s comedy show ‘Saturday Night Live.’ This concentrated effort has seen Dogecoin gain even greater prominence, and it currently occupies the fifth spot on the crypto charts.
This might be the moment the “people’s crypto,” as it is famously called, may have been waiting for. DOGE consumes less energy than Bitcoin in comparison, BTC transactions gulp 770KWh, while Ethereum takes 62.56KWH, Litecoin uses 18.522KWh, and DOGE leads the rear with just 0.12KWh.
Given its low energy density, this may be what Musk needs to keep Tesla’s crypto policy running. Musk himself has made this even easier. He has been in contact with part-time developers of the joke coin as far back as 2019.
He is also asking crypto whales to give up their DOGE holdings. Musk has made his demands even more palatable as he has promised to pay them off if they decide to sell. But this may not help him to legitimise the Bitcoin knock-off.
Low Energy Consumption and DOGE Payments
One way he can get the ball rolling is by selling the energy benefits of DOGE, which presently goes for a meagre 1.0512 MWh of electricity annually. With the world calling for the reduction of carbon footprint, this could be a huge selling point.
His rocket business SpaceX could also become a major piece in the DOGE puzzle. An announcement last week by Musk of a Falcon 9 rocket named DOGE-1, paid for with the joke coin, could go a long way in refining it as an industrial value transmitter.
As noted by Tom Ochinero of SpaceX, DOGE could end up facilitating interplanetary commerce. This disclosure saw DOGE rise above the 50 cents mark, and this could play to its favor.
Bitcoin made its name partly from the narrative of it being a store of value. This is driven mainly by its hard cap limit of just 21 million BTC ever to be mined.
DOGE has no maximum supply, which leads many crypto investors to refuse to take the joke coin seriously. A limit could eventually help the once-disregarded digital coin become the people’s currency.
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