Greenpeace, along with other climate groups and Ripple co-founder and CEO Chris Larsen, have launched a new campaign aimed at shifting Bitcoin (BTC) to a greener consensus model.
The “Change the code, not the climate” campaign aims to pressure key industry leaders, bitcoin miners and influencers like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey to move to a new consensus model stating:
“If just 30 people — the key miners, exchanges, and core developers who create and contribute to bitcoin’s code — agreed to reinvent proof-of-work mining or move to a low-energy protocol, bitcoin would stop destroying the planet to pollute.”
Greenpeace raises concerns that the energy needed to mine Bitcoin comes primarily from fossil fuels and that miners are using waste coal and associated natural gas to fuel their operations.
Greenpeace accepted bitcoin donations for seven years between 2014 and May 2021 before announcing it would stop accepting bitcoin donations, citing environmental concerns. Around the same time, Tesla CEO Elon Musk also stopped accepting Bitcoin payments for Tesla vehicles.
Ethereum (ETH), which currently relies on the same Proof-of-Work mechanism as Bitcoin, is in the final stages of a lengthy and complicated process towards a new Proof-of-Stake mechanism. Greenpeace says proof-of-stake is much less polluting due to its lower energy consumption.
“Now that Ethereum is changing, Bitcoin is really the outlier,” Larsen told Bloomberg in an interview published March 29. “Some of the newer protocols, Solana and Cardano, are built on low power,” he added.
Larsen explained that he owns Bitcoin and Ethereum and wants to see the success of both cryptocurrencies, but that Bitcoin is taking an unsustainable path. He added that if he had concerns about bitcoin as a competitor to Ripple, he would let it go.
Related: In Defense Of Crypto: Why Digital Currencies Deserve A Better Rep
Some of the largest bitcoin miners hold over 5,000 BTC, over $237 million at current prices, and data shows those with the most bitcoin reserves are increasing their hash rate.
Greenpeace notes this in its manifesto, saying they understand that bitcoin stakeholders have an incentive not to switch, as switching from bitcoin would make their expensive equipment much less valuable, meaning sunk costs or “other creative solutions” would have to be implemented.
Chris Bendiksen, a Bitcoin researcher at CoinShares, was quoted in the report as saying:
“I would estimate the probability of Bitcoin ever moving to PoS to be exactly 0%. There is no appetite among bitcoiners to destroy the security of the protocol by such a move.”
Greenpeace did not immediately respond to a request for comment.