Greenpeace has intensified the campaign against Bitcoin following Ethereum’s merge. The movement features a petition asking Fidelity, BlackRock, and other companies to convert Bitcoin away from PoW.
According to a press release, Greenpeace and the Environmental Working Group have stepped up their criticism of Bitcoin’s proof-of-work (PoW) system with a $1 million advertising campaign.
The environmental groups want organizations like Fidelity, BlackRock, Block, and PayPal to have influence on the Bitcoin protocol. The organization wants to use these institutions to assist in switching the consensus method from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake (PoS).
Following today’s completion of the Merge, an event that altered Ethereum’s consensus method from PoW to PoS, an attack that started in March with the beginning of the “Change The Code, Not The Climate” campaign has intensified.
“Ethereum has shown it’s possible to switch to an energy-efficient protocol with far less climate, air and water pollution,” said Michael Brune, director of the Change the Code, Not the Climate campaign.
One could counter that these environmental groups are overlooking a crucial aspect of Bitcoin. Not only is Proof of Work (PoW) the real innovation and foundation of Bitcoin’s effective operation, but institutional and corporate pressure to alter the Bitcoin protocol is not new.
As a result, during the Block Size Wars, some organizations argued for higher block sizes on the blockchain, which would have resulted in the network’s nodes becoming more centralized and reducing the distributed network we know today. The decentralized network held strong, and an upgrade known as SegWit enabled for critical changes to block sizes without centralizing the Bitcoin infrastructure, therefore attempts to consolidate the network eventually failed.
Furthermore, arguments against Bitcoin that are based on climate change are being refuted more and more every day. Actually, the executive chairman of the pro-Bitcoin software analytics company MicroStrategy published a paper yesterday disputing a number of prevalent claims.