Bitcoin is still falling in price.
Angela Lang / CNET
Bitcoin reached the milestone of a $ 1 trillion market capitalization last week. However, it appears that a tweet from Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, a few words of warning from the Minister of Finance, Janet Yellen, and remarks from Microsoft, co-founder Bill Gates, are rapidly dropping its value.
The popular crypto-currency fell to just over $ 47,000 on Tuesday after breaking the $ 58,000 mark on Sunday afternoon. Musk tweeted on Saturday that “BTC & ETH look a lot lol,” referring to Bitcoin and the digital currency Ethereum. Musk’s tweet was part of a response to a tweet by Peter Schiff, chief market strategist for the brokerage firm Euro Pacific Capital, on the value of Bitcoin against gold-backed currency.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Gates gives his thoughts on Bitcoin and the idea that it could be so dramatically influenced by a tweet from Musk.
“I’m not clumsy about Bitcoin,” he said. “If you have less money than Elon, you probably need to be careful.”
Gates also expressed concern about Bitcoin’s massive energy use, similar to a point Yellen made during the DealBook conference on Monday. She noted how the amount of energy used for the transactions is ‘staggering’.
“I do not think Bitcoin is widely used as a transaction mechanism,” she told CNBC. “To the extent that it is used, I fear it is often for illegal financing. It is an extremely inefficient way of conducting transactions, and the amount of energy consumed to process the transactions is staggering.”
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, such as Dogecoin, require a lot of computing power to execute people. These heavy computer calculations, also known as mining, require a lot of power – more than the country Argentina.
For most of 2020, Bitcoin rose from its low of just $ 5,000 in April to jump past $ 29,000 by the end of the year.