Bitcoin took another large stride toward mainstream acceptance on Monday after billionaire Elon Musk's electric vehicle company Tesla Inc revealed it had bought US$1.5 billion of the cryptocurrency and would soon accept it as a form of payment for cars, sending the cryptocurrency shooting higher.

The announcements, buried deep in Tesla's 2020 annual report, drove a roughly 20% surge in the world's most widely held cryptocurrency to over US$47,000. At current prices, 0.8 bitcoins would be enough to buy an entry-level Tesla Model 3.