It was an all electric deal in which no one got burned.
A Florida man spent 91.4 bitcoins, a controversial electronic currency, to buy a slightly used white Tesla Model S this week.
And good thing he did it when he did, too, as the price of the e-currency has taken a massive dive this week, including a 24 percent dip Friday on news that Chinese Internet company Baidu will stop accepting the currency as service payments.
The transaction, which took place on Tuesday, took just 24 hours to complete and was as easy as using PayPal, said Cedric Davy, marketing director for Lamborghini Newport Beach, the dealership in Costa Mesa, Calif., that sold the Tesla.
News of the sale, which the dealership posted on its blog Wednesday, has gone viral amid a furious debate over bitcoin’s future.
The currency has soared to a market value of more than $10 billion on expectations that it will become the new global currency. But the money is also highly volatile, and it dropped this week to under $1,000 after it came to light that China’s central bank barred its financial industry from dealing the virtual currency.
On Friday, the currency fell further, to $871 per bitcoin, on Baidu’s announcement that it, too, will stop accepting the currency.
Davy admits that the staff was skeptical when first approached with the idea to trade the car for bitcoin on Monday. The salesman who received the call from the Florida buyer, who the dealership is keeping confidential, broached the subject in a staff meeting.
“We were like, ‘Are you kidding me?’” Davy said.
But rather than shoo the customer away — as other dealerships had done, according to the customer — they decided to investigate.
One day later, the dealership successfully cashed out 91.4 bitcoins using BitPay, an electronic payment processing system, in exchange for more than $100,000, which was what the customer had agreed to pay to buy the car outright.
“It was very easy and similar to opening a PayPal account,” Davy told The Post.
Due to recent declines, today, the same bitcoins would be worth under $80,000. The currency was trading above $1,200 earlier this week before falling to around $950 and then $871, according to preev.com.
That hasn’t deterred Lamborghini Newport Beach from looking out for more opportunities to deal in bitcoin.
Davy said the dealership has received four more inquires to pay in bitcoin since they put out the blog entry on Wednesday and that they are open to more such transactions.
After they successfully cashed out on Tuesday, Davy said the staff was marvelling at how they had just sold an electric car using electric currency.
“We were joking that we need the Amazon drone to deliver it and it will be perfect,” he said, referring to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ announcement this week that Amazon is working on a way to deliver packages using unmanned aircraft.