Bitcoin is about to face a fresh onslaught over its damaging environmental footprint.<\/p>\n
Several climate activist groups including Greenpeace and crypto billionaire Chris Larsen are launching a \u201cChange the Code, Not the Climate\u201d campaign, designed to pressure the Bitcoin community to alter the way it orders transactions that already consumes as much power as Sweden.<\/p>\n
In five years Bitcoin may consume as much power as Japan, Larsen said in an interview.<\/p>\n
The campaign will buy ads in leading publications over the next month. Greenpeace, Environmental Working Group and some local activist groups battling Bitcoin miners are also mobilizing their millions of members for grassroots efforts.<\/p>\n
The campaign has already reached out to a dozen key people and corporations, some of them involved in Bitcoin and yet pledging Environmental, Social and Governance, or ESG, compliance, according to Michael Brune, who is in charge of the campaign.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are in this campaign for the long haul, but we are hoping — particularly since Bitcoin is now being financed by entities and individuals who care about climate change — that we can compel leadership to agree that this is a problem that needs to be addressed,\u201d said Brune, who was a long-time executive director of the Sierra Club before resigning last year.<\/p>\n
\u201cGoldman Sachs, BlackRock, PayPal, Venmo, Fidelity — there are lots of companies we anticipate will be helpful to this effort.\u201d<\/p>\n
The campaign is counting on several factors to help its cause: There\u2019s increasing frustration in some communities in the U.S. that have found themselves hosting Bitcoin miners and dealing with issues such as excessive noise. After China banned crypto mining last year, a flood of miners moved to the U.S.<\/p>\n
Bitcoin\u2019s main rival, Ethereum, is readying for a major software overhaul that will make it more environmentally friendly.<\/p>\n
Just like Bitcoin, it\u2019s currently using giant server farms to order transactions via a process called Proof of Work. But within months Ethereum could switch to a different method, called Proof of Stake, which is projected by some to cut its energy consumption by 99%.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow with Ethereum changing, Bitcoin really is the outlier,\u201d Larsen said. \u201cSome of the newer protocols — Solana, Cardano — are built on low energy.\u201d Larsen said he\u2019s put in $5 million to fund the campaign, partly because he feels that Bitcoin won\u2019t continue to enjoy investors\u2019 support unless it changes.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to see Bitcoin and Ethereum succeed,\u201d said Larsen, who owns some Bitcoin and Ether, as well as XRP.<\/p>\n
Last year, Larsen had a net worth of\u00a0$3.4 billion<\/strong><\/a>, according to Forbes\u2019 billionaires list. He is executive chairman and co-founder of Ripple, which supports XRP.<\/p>\n The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission\u00a0sued<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0Ripple, Larsen and another executive in 2020, alleging they \u201craised over $1.3 billion through an unregistered, ongoing digital asset securities offering.\u201d The case is expected to wrap up this year. Larsen said he is not launching this campaign to bring down a rival cryptocurrency.<\/p>\n \u201cIf I was concerned about Bitcoin as a competitor, probably the best thing I could do is let it continue on this path,\u201d Larsen said. \u201cThis is just an unsustainable path.\u201d<\/p>\n In recent years, Larsen said he has refocused on\u00a0philanthropy<\/a>,<\/strong> and invested about $90 million into various causes, many of them related to climate change.<\/p>\n Bitcoin\u2019s environmental concerns came to the fore last year, when Elon Musk said Tesla Inc. would resume accepting Bitcoin as payment only after at least 50% of the mining relies on renewable energy.<\/p>\n Larsen said Bitcoin\u2019s power consumption issue could be fixed via a soft or a hard fork — both changing the network\u2019s code to make Bitcoin less power hungry.<\/p>\n A soft fork would preserve Bitcoin as a single blockchain. A hard fork would split Bitcoin into two separate networks, one supporting miners and the other running different code — perhaps Proof of Stake.<\/p>\n The campaign believes that about 50 key miners, crypto exchanges and core developers have the power to change Bitcoin\u2019s code.<\/p>\n Whether the campaign will work is a different story.<\/p>\n Bitcoin miners — earning more than\u00a0$15 billion<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0last year, according to data from The Block Research — would have to be given incentives to switch. Shifting to Proof of Stake is technologically complex, and it has taken Ethereum years to develop and to test the code necessary for the change.<\/p>\n Perhaps more importantly, many Bitcoin diehards are adamant against changing the system created by Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous person or group credited with developing the software.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d put the chance of Bitcoin ever moving to PoS at exactly 0%,\u201d said Chris Bendiksen, a Bitcoin researcher at CoinShares and one of the world\u2019s leading experts on Bitcoin mining. \u201cThere is no appetite among Bitcoiners to destroy the security of the protocol by making such a move.\u201d<\/p>\n But while maximalist Bitcoiners may not want to deviate from Nakamoto\u2019s vision, Larsen contends times are changing.<\/p>\n \u201cSome of it borders on religion. Heresy, of course, is not a technological term,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cNow a lot of what\u2019s driving crypto is the enormous liquidity that\u2019s come from the traditional market players. And generally those people are not religious about these technologies. So it\u2019s just a matter of time.\u201d<\/p>\n Bitcoin is about to face a fresh onslaught over its damaging environmental footprint.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":439122,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44696],"tags":[187,41590,43734,1571],"class_list":["post-439112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cryptocurrency","tag-bitcoin","tag-climate-change","tag-global-warming","tag-greenpeace"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439112"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439112\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/439122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Now read: Ukrainian flees with Bitcoin life savings on a USB drive<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"