Skull of Satoshi's Benjamin Wong Apologizes for "Anti-Bitcoin" Project

Benjamin Von Wong – a Canadian artist responsible for creating the “Skull of Satoshi” installation back in mid-March – has apologized for his work, claiming in a recent interview that it was “never meant to be anti-bitcoin,” and he is not pleased people took it in such a way.

Benjamin Wong: I Never Sought to Create an Anti-Bitcoin Project

Wong stated:

It was an optimistic hope that bitcoin could shift away from the needless burning of fossil fuels without losing all the other features that make bitcoin safe, secure, and decentralized… I’ve spent my entire career trying to reduce real-world physical waste, and PoW felt intuitively wasteful. Of course, I was wrong.

Skull of Satoshi was unveiled after Wong and his fellow associates at Greenpeace worked on it for over a year. The goal was to try and shed light on the wasteful energy use in the bitcoin mining industry. The project has been supported by several cryptocurrency heads including Chris Larsen, the Ripple co-founder. The idea behind it is to “change the code, not the climate.”

Sadly, there has been backlash thrown at the project from those who feel bitcoin is simply being pushed towards PoS territory like Ethereum. Rolf Skar, a special projects manager at Greenpeace USA, explained:

We are pointing to the fact that other cryptocurrencies realized that PoW has an energy problem and changed. Bitcoin is the laggard in this area and is sticking to decade-old technology while other newer cryptocurrencies are using different consensus mechanisms and cutting their carbon emissions.

Wong has further stated he’s going to remove himself from future projects similar with Skull of Satoshi so he can really analyze himself and his work and see where it is, specifically, that he can contribute to stronger aspects of environmental responsibility. He stated:

I needed to first string together some official responses to the Twitterverse and [I’d] been trying to digest all the different fragments of information I was receiving from various places. I’m trying to better understand the nuance between progress and perfection.

Pos Isn’t Possible for BTC

Skar further commented he’s not necessarily against bitcoin, and he’s confident humans can be innovative enough that they manage to find new ways of ensuring the environment’s survival while remaining creative. He mentioned:

The climate crisis demands that we all, not just Greenpeace or bitcoin, find ways to ensure a just and green future. We regularly work on issues that are objectively more complicated and difficult to figure out than changing bitcoin’s code. It is only impossible if we refuse to try.

Some, such as Phil Harvey – CEO of bitcoin mining firm Sabre56 – says it’s virtually impossible for BTC to switch to a PoS network, and he’s confident that users would never accept it as an original network even if this was doable.

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