Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s decision to stop accepting BTC payments due to the digital currency’s “rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining” has culminated into what could be the world’s most expensive breakup ever, with the BTC price dropping costing the cryptocurrency market more than $365 billion. Until now, BTC has not yet fully recovered from the price drop.
But the ramifications of these events did not stop here. Now, digital currencies are being seen as wasting a massive amount of energy like BTC. This is because Bitcoin mining uses Proof of Work algorithm (PoW), which is integral to the original Bitcoin design. According to the Bitcoin white paper published by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, all miners who act as nodes on the network must “vote with their CPU power,” expending a huge amount of electricity in the process. Now, all people are talking about is how Bitcoin is inefficient and not environment-friendly.
And this is where the big misunderstanding lies. While BTC is indeed wasting energy due to its massive energy consumption that only benefits the few rich who can afford to store it in order to sell it when its value goes up, the same is not true for all digital currencies, especially BSV, which can actually be considered the green Bitcoin.
“I think what [Elon] got right is that BTC is not efficient and it does not, I think, have a good ratio of what it costs to use and the environmental cost relative to its utility. I think what people get wrong though is then that’s true for all Proof-of-Work blockchains, that’s true for all versions of Bitcoin, that’s true for crypto in general,” Zach Resnick, managing partner of BSV-focused Unbounded Capital, said during a panel discussion at the CoinGeek Conference in Zurich that includes nChain CTO Steve Shadders, TAAL Distributed Information Technologies CMO Angela Holowaychuk and Kristeen Harrison, environmental & sustainability advisor to the board of UK-based wallet Zumo.
“You cannot just look at the power consumption in isolation, you have to look at what is the utility, what is this thing providing and how much power does that cost, and looking at the net metric—not just how much power, which I think is a pretty horrible metric for analyzing this,” Resnick added.
And in this true measure of sustainability, which accounts for the energy consumed in proportion to the benefit and utility it provides, it can be said that BSV is the real green Bitcoin. How so? BTC can only process five to seven transactions per second (tps) and its blockchain only has a maximum of 3MB block sizes due to its refusal to scale. At this rate, where one BTC is mined at 5,500 kilowatt-hours, half the consumption of an average American household in a year, it certainly is a waste of electricity.
Now, compare that to BSV, which continues to scale. At present, its test network has already surpassed 9,000 tps. Last March 14, TAAL mined 2,674 transactions in a 638MB block. And with the release of Teranode later this year, the BSV network can process more than 50,000 tps—a figure that rivals that of VISA. The numbers speak for themselves. And the conclusion can only go one way—BSV is the green Bitcoin and is energy efficient.
“And you know, 50,000 is just the starting point, we’re talking about millions, billions of transactions per second. It’s only one angle to it, but there’s this total energy aggregate cost for Bitcoin, which you can divide amongst five transactions per second, or you can divide that cost amongst millions or billions,” Shadders explained.
“I think there’s a meaningful chance that when we look back 20, 30 years in the future back to now or over the next five to 10 years, there’a a very good chance that BSV adoption is synonymous with our transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy and potentially the largest driver of that revolution,” Resnick concluded.
