This ideological battle, and the strength of the animosity between bitcoin evangelists and their critics, means it’s difficult to have a nuanced discussion about the industry, and both sides are entrenched in their positions.
According to De Vries, it would be technically perfectly possible for Bitcoin to follow in the footsteps of the Ethereum network. “Bitcoin can move to PoS, no problem,” he says. “But it’s a societal challenge.”
De Vries is often attacked by bitcoiners, who claim he is boosted by its link with central banks to criticize bitcoin that its data is inaccurate and that it fails to take into account the nuances of bitcoin’s relationship with the environment.
Bitcoiners have locked horns with environmental charities. On March 23, activists at Greenpeace unveiled an art installation called the Skull of Satoshi, an allusion to the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. The skull is 10 feet tall and is decorated with old motherboards, the eye sockets glow red, and chimneys emit smoke from the crown. The installation was intended to represent crypto mining’s dual contribution to carbon emissions and e-waste, said Rolf Skar, campaign manager at Greenpeace USA. But the skull was quickly appropriated bitcoin supporters on Twitter, who described the skull as “metal” and “badass.” Some used it as a new profile picture.
“The response was predictable, but disappointing,” says Skar. “It’s not surprising, but it’s a bad impression to play down these very real problems.”
The artist who designed the statue, Benjamin Von Wong, also suffered some of the backlash. On March 25, he published a Twitter thread saying he revised his “black and white” rating after talking to bitcoiners. But he also pointed to the forces that stand in the way of productive debate: “There are those on both sides who believe the other is naively optimistic, misguided and ill-informed,” he wrote.
The Skull of Satoshi, which is being taken on a tour of US cities, is part of a wider Greenpeace campaign called “Change the Code, Not the Climate,” whose goal is to push for changes to the Bitcoin code base that will reduce emissions of the network would decrease. Skar says the aim is to prevent fossil fuel plants from “coming back to life” courtesy of bitcoin, but Bendiksen calls the effort a “slander campaign”.
Both parties also accuse the other of bad faith misrepresentation of facts and data. The Greenpeace campaign, Pritzker and Bendiksen say, is being funded in part by Chris Larsen, founder of Ripple, a company with interests in promoting XRP, a cryptocurrency launched as a direct competitor to bitcoin. But similarly, Howson says, arguments for bitcoin mining are often based on data from the Bitcoin Mining Council, a coalition of mining companies led by Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, a company with hundreds of millions of dollars invested in bitcoin.
The impasse is exacerbated by the ideological opposition to PoS among bitcoiners, apart from environmental concerns. Some consider it unthinkable to tamper with Satoshi Nakamoto’s original invention, and others, such as Bendiksen and Pritzker, believe that PoS carries a greater risk of centralization and censorship, and therefore poses a threat to the basic principles of crypto. “PoS is essentially the fiat system,” says Pritzker, “because whoever has the gold makes the rules.” For this reason, Bendiksen explains, bitcoiners will “never agree” to a shift.
“Any attack on bitcoin is an attack on their morality, values and often their net worth. This makes everything feel personal,” Von Wong told WIRED. “Because most people don’t see themselves as intrinsically bad, they feel misjudged and misunderstood, which is a terrible place to start a conversation.”
The result is a situation where both sides throw insults across the void, but none of the legitimate or well-intentioned complaints register. Any piece of information that could be used to discredit the opposition is also seized. And von Wong is worried about becoming a lump himself.
“The hardest thing about being at the center of a controversy is feeling like a chess piece,” he says. “I don’t feel I can speak freely in public without someone somewhere taking what I say out of context and trying to use it against the other side.”
