This ideological battle, and the strength of the animosity between Bitcoin’s evangelists and their detractors, means that it’s difficult to have an accurate discussion about the industry, and both sides have become entrenched in their positions.
According to de Vries, it would be entirely possible, from a technical perspective, for Bitcoin to follow in the footsteps of the Ethereum network. “Bitcoin can migrate to PoS, no problem,” he says. “But it’s a social challenge.”
Mostly de Vries attacked by bitcoins, who claim it is motivated by its affiliation with central banks to criticize Bitcoin, that its statements are incorrect, and that it fails to account for the nuances of Bitcoin’s relationship to the environment.
Bitcoin has closed ties with environmental charities. On 23 March, activists at Greenpeace unveiled an art installation named after him Satoshi skull, referring to the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. The skull is 11 feet high, decorated with antique mother-of-pearl, the eye sockets glow red, and the stacks blow smoke from the crown. The installation was meant to represent the dual contribution of cryptocurrency mining to carbon emissions and e-waste, says Rolf Skarr, Campaign Director at Greenpeace USA. But soon the skull was seized Bitcoin supporters on twitter, who described Skull as “metallic” and “badass”. Some used it as their new profile picture.
“The reaction was expected, but disappointing,” says Scar. “It is not surprising, but it is bad to underestimate these very real issues.”
The artist who designed the statue, Benjamin von Wong, has endured some backlash as well. On March 25, A.N Twitter topic Saying he revised his valuation “in black and white” after talks with bitcoin. But he also pointed to the forces that stand in the way of a fruitful debate: “There are people on both sides who think the other is naively optimistic, misguided, and misguided,” he wrote.
the Satoshi skull, which is taken on a tour of US cities, is part of a broader Greenpeace campaign called “Change the Code, Not the Climate,” whose purpose is to push for changes to the Bitcoin codebase that would reduce the network’s emissions. The intent, Skarr says, is to prevent fossil fuel stations from “coming back to life,” courtesy of bitcoin, but Bendixen calls the effort a “smear campaign.”
The two parties also accuse the other of misleading facts and data in bad faith. Pritzker and Bendixen say Greenpeace’s campaign was funded in part by Chris Larsen, the founder of Ripple, a company with interests in promoting XRP, a cryptocurrency launched as a direct competitor to bitcoin. But by the same token, says Howson, arguments in favor of bitcoin mining are often based on data provided by the Bitcoin Mining Council, a consortium of miners led by Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, a company that invests hundreds of millions of dollars in bitcoin.
The impasse is exacerbated by ideological opposition among bitcoins to points of sale, separate from environmental considerations. Some find the idea of tampering with Satoshi Nakamoto’s original invention unimaginable, and others, like Bendiksen and Pritzker, believe that PoS presents greater risks of centralization and censorship – and thus a threat to the founding principles of crypto. “PoS is basically a fiat system, because who owns the gold makes the rules,” says Pritzker. For this reason, Bendiksen explains, bitcoins will “never agree” to a transformation.
“Any attack on bitcoin is an attack on their morals, their values, and often their net worth. It makes everything sound 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 parties make insults through the void but register none of the legitimate grievances or goodwill. Any piece of information that could be used to discredit the opposition is also confiscated. Fon Wong is afraid of becoming a bitch himself.
“The hardest part about being at the center of an argument is feeling like a chess piece,” he says. “I don’t feel like I can speak freely in public without someone, somewhere, taking what I’m saying out of context and trying to leverage it against the other side.”