Environmental activist organization Greenpeace is launching a campaign to make Bitcoin (BTC) more energy efficient.
Greenpeace says Bitcoin’s energy consumption can be vastly reduced by a single change to the cryptocurrency's programming code. The Greenpeace campaign is being backed by the billionaire founder of the Ripple (XRP) cryptocurrency Chris Larsen.
The campaign called “Change the Code Not the Climate” says switching Bitcoin's mining method from proof of work (PoW), where mining rigs compete in a winner-takes-all race to solve energy-intensive cryptographic puzzles, to the more energy efficient proof of stake (PoS) model would cut the cryptocurrency's electricity usage dramatically.
Rather than requiring increasing amounts of computing power to validate transactions on the blockchain, proof of stake requires miners to wager their own cryptocurrencies in return for the ability to validate transactions and earn more tokens as a reward.
Bitcoin currently consumes more electricity in a year than Norway or Sweden, according to figures from the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index.
The campaign plans to launch a series of advertisements putting pressure on well-known cryptocurrency boosters, including Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk and Twitter (TWTR) founder Jack Dorsey, who it says have a “responsibility to help clean up Bitcoin.”
Ethereum (ETH), the world's second-biggest cryptocurrency by market value, is expected to move to a proof of stake model later this year. The switch is expected to cut Ethereum's carbon footprint by over 99%.
