While Bitcoin has become a popular form of cryptocurrency, it has become a cause for concern for environmental groups due to the enormous energy required to produce it. On March 28, a group of environmentalists launched a campaign to change Bitcoin’s code in hopes of decreasing its overall energy footprint, which has continued to rise for the past few years.
The campaign website, CleanUpBitcoin.com, urges the Bitcoin community to “Change the Code, Not the Climate.”
The campaign’s goal is to persuade Bitcoin’s community (investors, miners, software developers, and backers) to change the network’s core code by removing the ‘Proof-of-work’ mechanism, which is a form of adding new blocks of transactions to a cryptocurrency’s blockchain.
According to Investopedia, “Proof of work (PoW) is a decentralized consensus mechanism that requires members of a network to expend effort solving an arbitrary mathematical puzzle to prevent anybody from gaming the system. Proof of work is used widely in cryptocurrency mining, for validating transactions and mining new tokens.”
The Motley Fool explains that “The proof-of-work algorithm used by Bitcoin aims to add a new block every 10 minutes. To do that, it adjusts the difficulty of mining bitcoin depending on how quickly miners are adding blocks. If mining is happening too quickly, the hash computations get harder. If it’s going too slowly, they get easier.”
The Bitcoin network, according to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance, uses slightly more energy each year than the entire country of Norway, using 134.9 and 124.3 terawatt-hours, respectively. However, according to the research institute, Bitcoin uses less energy than is lost in the United States during electricity transmission.
There have been attempts in the past to lower Bitcoin’s energy profile. A total of 250 companies, such as Hut 8 Mining Corp. and TeraWulf, Inc., supported the Crypto Climate Accord, pledging to switch to more renewable energy sources.
However, some environmentalists feel that switching to renewable forms of energy is not enough.
Chris Larsen, climate activist and chairman of the crypto company Ripple, commented, “The issue is not, as some have suggested, powering Bitcoin with clean energy. We need the limited supply of clean energy for other vital uses. The issue is changing the code to use far less energy.”
That is why the new campaign is pushing for a change in the Bitcoin proof-of-work algorithm. The Change the Code, Not the Climate campaign attempts to persuade everyone involved in Bitcoin that a change is better for the environment and the cryptocurrency’s reputation and support.
Greenpeace USA, the Environmental Working Group, and others will publish ads in The New York Times, Politico, and The Wall Street Journal highlighting Bitcoin’s environmental impact and lobbying for reform.
Larsen is funding the $5 million campaign, but not as a representative of Ripple.
According to Michael Brune, the former executive director of the Sierra Club who is currently advising the campaign, it is a viable argument that climate change has reached an alarming point, and Bitcoin contributes a great deal to global warming.
The new campaign is pro-climate awareness, not anti-Bitcoin.
“It’s important for anyone in a position to act, to act — You can’t ignore that we are in a climate emergency,” Brune said, adding that the change in the PoW mechanisms would drastically reduce Bitcoin’s energy use.
The Ethereum crypto network also uses proof of work, but it is changing its model to reduce its energy footprint. This shift is expected to reduce its electricity consumption by 99%.