Charles Hoskinson says Bitcoin should adopt Cardano’s Ofelimous protocol to survive

Founder of Cardano, IOG and one of the creators of Ethereum, Charles Hoskinson, has recorded a video in which he comments on the recent recommendations from the White House to crack down on all energy-intensive industries, including Bitcoin mining.

Hoskinson believes that the recently unveiled Cardano protocol Ofelimous could help Bitcoin survive as a cryptocurrency. Ofelimous is a proof-of-work protocol that was created to reduce the carbon footprint of proof-of-work chains, like Bitcoin and many other coins.

Ofelimous protocol from Cardano

Ofelimous is a newly introduced, provably secure, proof-of-work protocol that aims to minimize the amount of energy used by proof-of-work chains. Unlike proof-of-work, proof-of-work ensures that the computational power of miners is directed toward solving real-world problems.

However, this makes the blockchain that has adopted it less secure, as an attacker can use the system to solve simple problems, thus creating more blocks as miners would with the same resources. However, Cardano assures that Ofelimous can easily solve this dilemma.

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Hoskinson recommends that Bitcoin miners should switch to this PoUW protocol to minimize their carbon footprint, which is now comparable to that of small countries.

Climate and Energy Implications of Crypto Assets in the United States

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) 8 September 2022

The White House proposes to ban crypto mining unless it becomes greener

A group of lawmakers from the White House has published a report made at the behest of President Biden in March of this year, related to the excessive use of energy by various industries, including cryptocurrency mining.

In a nutshell, the report recommends that if these industries cannot significantly reduce energy consumption, they should be banned. A large carbon footprint left by the Bitcoin blockchain has been an issue raised many times by BTC critics. Recent reports say that the amount of energy used by BTC miners (the network runs on the PoW consensus protocol) is equal to that consumed by small countries around the world.

With the current rapidly rising prices of energy resources, this issue becomes even more relevant. However, the report recommends that a transition to the proof-of-stake protocol for PoW blockchains would significantly reduce the amount of energy they use.

Switching to alternative crypto-asset technologies such as Proof of Stake can dramatically reduce total power consumption to less than 1% of current levels.

The aforementioned Cardano runs on this protocol, and Ethereum, the second largest blockchain, is in the process of switching to PoW as well. The long-awaited Merge upgrade will happen in about a week – between September 15th and 20th.