So Elon Musk now no longer accepts bit coin for Tesla purchases because of energy bitcoin uses

[GregariousGroundhog]

11. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general are quite a bit different than electronic banking

The basic gist of it is that the bitcoin network publishes a mathematical hashing puzzle for someone to solve. The difficulty of the math puzzle is dynamically adjusted so that on average someone on the network solves it every 10 minutes. When someone solves it, they get a rewarded with something called a block reward (created out of thin air, currently 6.25 bitcoin, and halving every 210,000 rewards) plus the transactions fees for however many financials transactions they can fit on a block. The block size is limited, and so most miners will publish whoever offers the largest transaction fee (the person sending the bitcoin decides how much they want to offer).

The 6.25 bitcoin reward is currently worth more than $300,000 and so miners spend a lot of money on hardware capable of performing mathematical computations as fast as possible in the hopes that they can solve the puzzle faster than anyone else and/or band together and split the reward between themselves.