A single change in Bitcoin's coding could reduce its carbon footprint by 99%, say campaigners

euronews.com:

Bitcoin's energy consumption could be vastly reduced by a single change to the cryptocurrency's programming, a new campaign backed by Greenpeace USA and the billionaire founder of the Ripple cryptocurrency, Chris Larsen, has claimed.

The Change the Code Not the Climate campaign says switching Bitcoin's mining method from proof of work (PoW) - where mining rigs compete in a winner-takes-all race to solve energy-hungry cryptographic puzzles - to the more energy efficient proof of stake (PoS) model would cut the cryptocurrency's electricity usage.

Rather than requiring increasing amounts of computing power to validate transactions on the blockchain, PoS requires miners to wager their own crypto in return for the ability to validate transactions and earn more tokens as a reward.

Bitcoin currently consumes more electricity in a year than Norway or Sweden do, according to figures from the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, while other coins including Cardano and Solana already use a PoS model.

"We know crypto doesn’t need much energy to work," the campaign said.

"Many newer cryptocurrencies are low consumers of energy or carbon-neutral because they use a better model: proof-of-stake".

The campaign plans to launch a series of adverts putting pressure on well-known crypto boosters, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who it says have a "responsibility to help clean up Bitcoin".

Ethereum, the world's second-biggest cryptocurrency network by market capitalisation, is expected to move to PoS later this year. The Ethereum Foundation, co-chaired by the network's founder Vitalik Buterin, has estimated that the switch will cut Ethereum's carbon footprint by over 99 per cent.

"Now with Ethereum