XRP’s founder suggests abandoning Proof-of-Work

Chris Larsen has come up with a plan for more environmentally friendly bitcoin mining

11.12.2021 - 10:10

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1 min

What’s new? In his blog on Medium, the Ripple CEO and co-founder Chris Larsen suggested that the bitcoin miners abandon the Proof-of-Work algorithm. Instead, Chris suggests using a less energy-intensive Proof-of-Stake.

Chris Larsen's blog on Medium

Why did Larsen suggest such a method? Bitcoin mining requires a lot of electricity. According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI), as of December 10, it is 130 terawatt-hours per year. Larsen argues that the climate crisis and mining go hand in hand.

“The view of climate experts is that Bitcoin’s code needs to be changed to a low energy consensus algorithm like those used by nearly all other major crypto protocols.”

What solution does Ripple CEO offer for miners? The billionaire acknowledged that abandoning PoW will be difficult due to “opposition by bitcoin miners,” so he came up with a code change that will be beneficial to everyone. Larsen suggests “take a snapshot of the current hashrate of existing miners and then reward miners on a pro-rata hash power.” Such a method will allow current miners to be rewarded without having to spend more power.

“Consider Marathon Digital, which runs 8% of the current global hashrate, earning 75 BTC per day as of November 1, 2021. Under such a code change, Marathon would continue to earn 8% of daily Bitcoin rewards but would consume much less energy.”

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