Greenpeace and Ripple Co-Founder Pushing to Change Bitcoin Code

Greenpeace and Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen have launched a campaign aimed at changing Bitcoin into a more environmentally friendly model.

Greenpeace, along with Ripple executive chairman Chris Larsen, have launched a $5 million collaboration aimed at changing Bitcoin to a more environmentally-friendly consensus model. The campaign wants to pressure key industry leaders and influencers such as Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey into transitioning into a cleaner model, as Greenpeace cites that there are concerns that the energy required to mine Bitcoin comes mostly through fossil fuels.

Using University of Cambridge’s calculations, the campaign has tallied that the Bitcoin network’s electricity use exceeds that of Sweden. The campaign is therefore calling for a transition away from Proof-of-Work mining, through which warehouses full of computers compete to solve a mathematical puzzle to “win the right to add a block of transaction data to the blockchain.” 

Ethereum, on the other hand, has already begun transitioning into a more sustainable framework that uses up much less energy, which works by affording the right to validate a new block of data based on how many tokens someone already owns. “Now with Ethereum changing, Bitcoin really is the outlier,” Larsen said. “Some of the newer protocols, Solana and Cardano, are built on low energy.”