The Skull of Satoshi is the latest in Greenpeace’s year-long “Change the code” campaign to demonise Bitcoin by portraying it as a threat to the environment.
Greenpeace USA created the “Skull of Satoshi” art piece to depict the “ravenous consumption of fossil fuels” by the flagship cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC).
The piece features shadowy coders beneath a computer hardware skull against a backdrop of various industrial structures related to energy production.
The Skull of Satoshi is the latest installment in Greenpeace’s year-long “Change the code” campaign to demonise Bitcoin by portraying it as an environmental hazard due to the use of electricity in mining.
Greenpeace intended for the art installation to become a symbol of the environmental devastation caused by BTC; however, the installation was destroyed.
Elevated to meme status
Bitcoin supporters are mostly amused by the piece, which has quickly become a meme within the community. Some people have even made it their new profile picture.
Crypto According to Twitter’s analysis, the hardware used in the skull was severely outdated and mostly used technology that had nothing to do with Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies.
Furthermore, the structures depicted in the piece are nuclear reactor cooling towers, which emit water vapour and have no negative environmental impact when compared to fossil fuels. Others joked about purchasing the skull to use as decor in their mining operations.
Modify the code
Greenpeace began its crusade against Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in 2022, when it launched a campaign to “change the code” of Bitcoin in order to remove its proof-of-work (PoW) validation mechanism.
The campaign’s goal is to persuade developers to convert Bitcoin to a proof-of-stake (PoS) coin, similar to Ethereum, which switched from PoW to PoS in 2022.
Because miners have been competing for BTC rewards for well over a decade, Bitcoin currently requires astronomical amounts of computing power to validate blocks on its network.
Mining’s competitive nature is a double-edged sword in that it increases the overall security of the blockchain while also requiring an increasing amount of energy to keep the system running.
However, as the cost of electricity has risen globally in recent years, miners are increasingly turning to off-grid solutions, some of which use green energy production such as solar.
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