Crypto twitter turns Greenpeace’s attempt to vilify BTC via artwork into a meme

Greenpeace USA published an artwork called “Skull of Satoshi” to depict the “devouring consumption of fossil fuels” by the flagship cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC).

The piece involves shadowy coders under a skull made of computer hardware against a backdrop of various industrial structures related to energy production.

The Skull of Satoshi is the latest in Greenpeace’s now year-long “Change the code” campaign to vilify Bitcoin by painting it as an environmental hazard due to the consumption of electricity in mining.

Greenpeace intended the art installation to become a symbol of the environmental destruction caused by BTC; however, the play appears to have had the opposite impact on society.

Elevated to meme status

Supporters of Bitcoin seem mostly amused by the piece and quickly turn it into a meme in the community. Some have even adopted it as their new profile picture.

Crypto Twitter’s analysis revealed that the hardware used in the skull was seriously outdated and mostly used technology that had nothing to do with Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies.

Additionally, the structures depicted in the piece are nuclear reactor cooling towers, which emit water vapor and have no negative impact on the environment compared to fossil fuels.

Others joked about buy the skull to use as decoration in their mining setups.

Change the code

Greenpeace first began crusading against Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in 2022 by launching a campaign to “change the code” of Bitcoin to remove its proof-of-work (PoW) validation mechanism.

The campaign’s goal is to push developers to turn Bitcoin into a proof-of-stake (PoS) coin instead — like Ethereum, which transitioned from PoW to PoS in 2022.

Bitcoin currently requires astronomical amounts of computing power to validate blocks on its network, as miners have been competing for the BTC rewards for well over a decade now. The competitiveness of mining is a double-edged sword as it increases the overall security of the blockchain, but it also requires more and more energy to keep the system running.

However, due to the rising cost of electricity worldwide in recent years, miners are increasingly turning to off-grid solutions – some of which use green energy generation such as solar power.