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Elon Musk, founder and chief engineer of SpaceX, speaks at the 2020 Satellite Conference and Exhibition on March 9, 2020 in Washington, DC. Musk answered a series of questions relating to SpaceX projects during his appearance at the conference.
Win McNamee | Getty Images
The price of Bitcoin fell on Friday morning after Elon Musk posted a tweet suggesting he fell in love with the world’s best cryptocurrency.
Billionaire Tesla’s CEO tweeted a meme about a couple breaking up with the male partner citing Linkin Park’s words, adding the hashtag #Bitcoin and a heartbroken emoji.
The cryptocurrency rallied slightly, but still remained in the red, after Square CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted Friday morning that the digital payments company was considering building a hardware wallet for Bitcoin.
Bitcoin was down 4.3% to $ 36,925.74 as of 4:03 p.m. ET on Friday, according to data from Coin Metrics. Other digital coins followed suit, with the No. 2 cryptocurrency ether dipping 3.6% to $ 2,694.92 and Dogecoin Musk’s favorite crypto dipping 1.7% to 38 cents.
Bitcoin has had a wild year, hitting a record high of over $ 64,000 in April, then dropping to almost $ 30,000 the following month. It is now over 40% of its all-time high, although up nearly 30% so far in 2021.
This isn’t the first time Musk’s crypto tweets have moved the market. In May, he said Tesla would stop accepting bitcoin as a payment method due to concerns about its energy consumption, reducing hundreds of billions of dollars in value across the crypto market in one. single day.
‘Irresponsible’
Some in the crypto industry have criticized Musk in the past for his articles on digital currencies. Musk frequently tweeted about the “joke” cryptocurrency dogecoin, for example, often causing wild moves in its price.
Following his latest bitcoin tweet, Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance, frowned. Binance is the world’s largest crypto exchange in terms of transaction volumes, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
“Tweets that hurt other people’s finances are not funny and irresponsible,” Zhao, known in crypto circles as “CZ,” tweeted Friday.
Musk’s Twitter posts also affected assets beyond crypto. Shares of Samsung Publishing, a major shareholder in the producer of “Baby Shark” on Wednesday soared after a tweet from Musk about the viral children’s song.
His tweets angered the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, which in 2018 accused Musk and his electric car company of committing securities fraud after the CEO tweeted that he would privatize the company and had “secure funding” for the deal.
This week, it emerged that the SEC allegedly berated Musk for allegedly violating the terms of a settlement agreement with the securities regulator. SEC officials pointed to a tweet in May last year in which Musk said the Tesla share price was “too high.”
What’s the next step for bitcoin?
In a new note this week, JPMorgan said institutional investors are not buying bitcoin’s decline and that suggested prices may fall further.
Supporters of Bitcoin view digital currency as a store of value similar to gold, arguing that it can serve as a hedge against inflation as central banks around the world step up stimulus measures in response to the crisis. coronavirus. But skeptics say bitcoin is a speculative bubble waiting to burst.
Thousands of bitcoin investors descended on Miami this week for a dedicated cryptocurrency conference. Miami Mayor Francis Suarez himself believes in bitcoin, telling CNBC on Thursday that the city is “actively considering” paying employees in crypto.
“I think crypto is just fake money,” Andrey Kostin, chairman of Russian bank VTB, told CNBC’s Hadley Gamble at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on Friday. “Someone is sitting in mining and mining somewhere like in the Middle Ages and then using them.”
“No government will accept it because it is not subject to any government regulation,” he added. “They can’t control it.”
Kostin alluded to several central bank initiatives to develop digital versions of the existing currency like the dollar, the euro, the Chinese yuan or, in Russia’s case, the ruble.
“It’s inevitable,” he said. “The whole world is moving towards a digital world. And currency is not excluded from this process.”
CNBC’s Hannah Miao contributed reporting.
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