Greenpeace blasts Bitcoin with artwork showing environmental damage – Bitcoiners love it
Greepeace’s latest marketing stunt in its campaign against the Bitcoin mining industry appears to have backfired, with BTC boosters welcoming the artistic fruit.
Meanwhile, Bitcoiners continue to blast the organization’s efforts to denigrate the network as environmentally harmful, and remain committed to its proof of work consensus mechanism.
The skull of Satoshi
In a chirping on Friday, Greenpeace repeated earlier claims that Bitcoin causes “dangerous amounts of real-world pollution” through fossil fuel consumption incentivized by its “outdated code.”
The activist group tagged the tweet with its original hashtag, “#ChangeTheCode” — a movement to see Bitcoin shift its consensus mechanism from proof-of-work (POW) to proof-of-stake (POS).
Proof of work is Bitcoin’s way of keeping the blockchain secure by having network users compete with computing power to solve the next block and earn the associated rewards. However, Proof of Stake has users putting their crypto on the line when validating blocks and leads to far less energy consumption than the former.
As included in the tweet, the “Skull of Satoshi” is meant to depict the damage caused by this consumption. The eleven-foot-tall creation is built from computer motherboards, topped with stacks of smoke, and lit by glowing red eyes often used in Bitcoin bulls’ Twitter profile pictures.
What Bitcoiners Think
Those same bulls, however, were more amused—even impressed—than they were enraged.
“Greenpeace accidentally created the most metallic bitcoin artwork to date in their misguided anti-PoW campaign,” tweeted Castle Island Ventures co-founder Nic Carter. The popular essayist has previously helped defend Bitcoin’s mining industry as positive for the environment instead of hurtful.
Others like @notgrubles LO on aspects of the artwork, such as the lack of a single ASIC machine in the construction and its inclusion of nuclear cooling towers in the construction – which emit pure water vapor.
Some continued to dog Greenpeace for accept $5 million from Ripple executives to slow down Bitcoin mining in the first place.
Michael Saylor – one of the world’s largest owners of Bitcoin – claimed in September that fears about Bitcoin’s energy consumption are big “lobbyist propaganda” that was trotted out by altcoin promoters. He and the Bitcoin Mining Council frequently spar updates on Bitcoin’s green energy mix, which is significantly higher than other industries.
