Bitcoin Eyes USD 40K Amid Musk Statement, Taproot Confirmation

The most popular cryptocurrency, bitcoin (BTC), almost touched USD 40,000 today as Tesla‘s Elon Musk send a positive message, while activation of an important Bitcoin upgrade was confirmed.

Monday morning (UTC time), BTC surpassed USD 39,800 before correcting lower. At 03:31 UTC, it trades at USD 38,952 and is up by 11% in a day and almost 9% in a week, trimming its monthly losses to less than 22%.

BTC is the best performing major cryptoasset today, as other tokens from the top 10 list are up by 4%-8%.

The rally has accelerated after Musk said that Tesla will resume supporting BTC payments “when there’s confirmation of reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by miners with positive future trend.”

About 75% of miners use some kind of renewable energy, Cambridge studies show, while renewables account for less than 40% of the total energy used.

A month ago, Musk announced that Tesla suspended vehicle purchases using BTC and is looking at other cryptoassets, prompting a selloff in the crypto market.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s major Taproot upgrade was locked in this past weekend and the Taproot activation is now set to occur in November.

As reported, the Taproot upgrade is a major one – the biggest since SegWit in 2017 – as it will expand Bitcoin’s smart contract and scripting capabilities along with bringing better privacy measures. It can also improve privacy on the second layer solutions like the Lightning Network by making channels look like regular Bitcoin transactions if integrated into the Lightning implementations.

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Learn more:
– 9 Tweets By Elon Musk and 9 Bitcoin Reactions
– Bitcoin Should Be Treated as a Five to Ten Year Investment – Kraken CEO

– Sentiment Against Elon Musk on Twitter Rose in May Post-Bitcoin-Criticism
– Fundstrat’s Tom Lee Boosts Bitcoin Target 25% Despite Musk’s Criticism

– Moving to Green Bitcoin May be Moving To a Two-Tier Bitcoin
– A Closer Look at the Environmental Impact of Bitcoin Mining

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