Rationale behind accepting btc as a mode of payment? Tesla has said they &quot;expect to begin accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment for our products in the near future.&quot;
But Bitcoin doesn't scale. It achieves about roughly 6 transactions per second, paling in comparison to the likes of Visa, which facilitates around 1,700 transactions per second.
What's the rationale behind their decision?
Sending a Bitcoin payment incurs a fee relative to the weight of the transaction. Every transaction must have at least one input and one output. Assuming a minimal transaction weight for either, it costs the same to send 1 mBTC or 100 BTC.
The cost per transaction weight is one reason why on-chain transactions are ill-suited for micropayments, but it also means that larger payments can come at a significantly lower relative cost than other payment forms.
A new Tesla 3 costs about 0.9 BTC today. At a feerate of 150 sats/vB (next block confirmation even at high demand) and a transaction weighing 250 vB, the transaction fee of 37,500 sats (0.375 mBTC) translates to a relative fee of 0.0417%. I believe that you will find many other payment forms to incur a larger fee, especially for the merchant.
On the other hand, payments on the Lightning Network incur a cost relative to the paid amount, so I expect smaller payments to shift to Lightning Network and similar solutions more and more.