Ripple Co-Founder Donated To Environmental Campaign Against BTC Mining

The ripple co-founder donated funds to an environmental campaign against Bitcoin mining and the campaign calls for the miners and developers to move the network away from the PoW work as we can see more today in our latest Ripple news.

Chris Larsen, the Ripple co-founder donated funds to an environmental campaign to change the Bitcoin code. Using the funds, a consortium of environmental groups will run ads in newspapers to convince the miners, software developers, and others to drop the network’s PoW consensus model. The envrioenmtanl lobby however seeks not to end BTC itself but to make it use less energy-intensive models. Former Sierra Club Director Michael Brune claimed that BTC is contributing to most of the glboal warnings in light of the severity of the climate change:

“It’s important for anyone in a position to act, to act. You can’t ignore that we are in a climate emergency.”

Bitcoin’s PoW mode requires the network users to compete by solving a highly difficult math problem for permission to create a  new block. The winner is rewarded with newly minted BTC and the proceeds from the transaction fees. To solve the problem the fastest, miners have to spend more energy than their competitors so the mechanism’s purpose is to make it expensive for users to propose a block in the first place which only incentivizes them to propose blocks in line with the network rules.

The nature of the competition spurred the growth of BTC mining farms worldwide and these farms consume up to 136.79 terawatt-hours of electricity per year. This raised some concerns among the environmentalists in crypto, politics, and businesses including the ones in Chris Larsen. The Ripple co-founder previously advocated for BTC to shift to a lower energy validation method but now he pledged $5 million to new campaigns against BTC mining and added to the nearly $90 million he has already donated to other environmental causes.

The campaign will be driven by Greenpeace USA as well as some others to place ads in newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Politico. The ad will call out Bitcoin’s environmental impact alongside the industry leaders such as Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey. Musk started accepting payments in BTC but then ended the program because of environmental concerns. He noted that the BTC mining processes and shifting to renewable energy can be done, opening the door to accepting BTC again.