Crypto twitter turns Greenpeace’s attempt to vilify BTC via art piece into meme

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Green­peace USA pub­lished an art piece called the “Skull of Satoshi” to depict the “rav­en­ous con­sump­tion of fos­sil fuels” by the flag­ship cryp­tocur­ren­cy Bit­coin (BTC).

The piece involves shad­owy coders under a skull made of com­put­er hard­ware with a back­drop of var­i­ous indus­tri­al struc­tures relat­ed to ener­gy production.

The Skull of Satoshi is the lat­est in Greenpeace’s now year-long “Change the code” cam­paign to vil­i­fy Bit­coin by paint­ing it as an envi­ron­men­tal haz­ard due to the con­sump­tion of elec­tric­i­ty in mining.

Green­peace intend­ed for the art instal­la­tion to become a sym­bol of the envi­ron­men­tal destruc­tion caused by BTC; how­ev­er, the piece seems to have had the oppo­site impact on the community.

Elevated to meme status

Pro­po­nents of Bit­coin most­ly seem amused by the piece and are quick­ly mak­ing it a meme with­in the com­mu­ni­ty. Some have even adopt­ed it as their new pro­file pic­ture.

Cryp­to Twitter’s analy­sis revealed that the hard­ware used in the skull was severe­ly out­dat­ed and most­ly employed tech that had noth­ing to do with Bit­coin or cryptocurrencies.

Addi­tion­al­ly, the struc­tures depict­ed in the piece are Nuclear reac­tor cool­ing tow­ers, which emit water vapor and have no adverse impact on the envi­ron­ment com­pared to fos­sil fuels.

Oth­ers joked about buy­ing the skull to use as dec­o­ra­tion in their min­ing setups.

Change the code

Green­peace first began cru­sad­ing against Bit­coin and cryp­tocur­ren­cies in 2022 by launch­ing a cam­paign to “change the code” of Bit­coin to remove its proof-of-work (PoW) val­i­da­tion mechanism.

The campaign’s goal is to push devel­op­ers to make Bit­coin a proof-of-stake (PoS) coin instead — like Ethereum, which tran­si­tioned from PoW to PoS in 2022.

Bit­coin cur­rent­ly requires astro­nom­i­cal amounts of com­put­ing pow­er to val­i­date blocks on its net­work as min­ers have been com­pet­ing for the BTC rewards for well over a decade now. The com­pet­i­tive nature of min­ing is a dou­ble-edged sword as it increas­es the over­all secu­ri­ty of the blockchain but it also requires more and more ener­gy to keep the sys­tem running.

How­ev­er, due to the ris­ing costs of elec­tric­i­ty across the world in recent years, min­ers are increas­ing­ly turn­ing to off-grid solu­tions — some of which employ green ener­gy pro­duc­tion like solar.



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