The CEO of General Motors (GM) has not ruled out that the company may accept bitcoin as a means of payment.
In fact, Mary Barra, during an interview on CNBC‘s Squawk on the Street programme, with particular reference to electric vehicles, responded in this way to a question regarding the possible acceptance of bitcoin as a means of payment, akin to Tesla:
“There’s nothing that precludes us from doing that. We will be driven by our customers. Certainly, we want to make the whole buying and ownership experience as easy as possible. We will follow their lead”.
Therefore, according to these statements, the company would be willing to accept BTC in payment if such a request came directly from the market, i.e. from a significant portion of their customers.
Bitcoin, GM vs Tesla
On the other hand, Tesla, the company run by Elon Musk, announced in February that it would soon start accepting payments in bitcoin, and in March it actually started accepting them.
However, in May it suspended them, due to the fact that it had decided out of the blue that it did not consider bitcoin to be an environmentally sustainable payment system. Finally, in June Elon Musk declared that the company is ready to reactivate them if it can be proven that at least 50% of the energy consumed by bitcoin mining comes from renewable sources.
This turn of events, however, has led many to assume that Tesla’s BTC payments have not been very successful, as the company has very quickly, and very easily, renounced them, making excuses based on information that was already widely known long before it decided to invest in bitcoin.
Therefore, since GM’s decision depends on the demands of their customers, it is also possible to assume that these might be too few to justify such an initiative.
Surely GMN does not have the same concerns about bitcoin’s energy consumption as Tesla does, because the narrative around the two brands is historically very different.
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