The energy crisis is behind a movement that calls for more measures to curb the excessive expenditure of electricity that the bitcoin industry entails, and we are not referring to just mining, but to everything that operating with this cryptocurrency entails.

A new environmental campaign (backed with a budget of 5 million dollars) aims to raise awareness about the high energy consumption of bitcoin, a highly polluting cryptocurrency.

The company’s goal is to push for technological change that reduces its energy consumption and the impact of its carbon footprint.

Funded by Ripple Labs co-founder Chris Larsen, the campaign, titled “Change the code, not the weather,” aims to raise awareness of technology solutions that could replace bitcoin’s costly Proof of Work security model.

A model that has made the use of energy for cryptocurrency transactions reach historical highs in 2021, with an estimated average of 204 TWh of energy consumption, approximately the same energy consumption as that of Thailand with 70 million inhabitants.

The campaign specifically calls for a move to Proof of Stake, a transaction validation method that could reduce bitcoin’s energy footprint by 99%.

Of course, implementing the changes to the Bitcoin blockchain would not be as easy as a snap of the fingers: implementing such a transition on ethereum has taken years, and that with a much more modern and flexible blockchain.

Today’s news talks about Bitcoin, about scams related to it, blockchain, cybersecurity, its high volatility… but do you really know how Bitcoin works?

Bitcoin is a digital currency that works without any central control or supervision from banks or governments. Instead, it relies on peer-to-peer software and cryptography. This is what Bitcoin would be in a nutshell.

Launched in 2009 by a mysterious developer known as Satoshi Nakamoto, this cryptocurrency was the first and most valuable participant of all those that were to come later, with greater or lesser fortune in the investment world.

Now, how does this whole system work? How do you make money with this cryptocurrency? Each Bitcoin is a file stored in a digital wallet, on a computer or smartphone. To understand how it works, it helps to gradually contextualize the different terms.

Bitcoin is based on a digital record called a blockchain. As its name suggests, this is a linked data system, made up of units called blocks, which contain information about each and every transaction, including date and time, value, buyer and seller, and a code. unique ID for each exchange.

Users carry out transactions in Bitcoin, either by buying, sending or exchanging this cryptocurrency. The transactions are broadcast to many computers that compete to validate the blocks.

The validation process, known as mining, is completed by cryptocurrency miners who own large computing resources, such as huge hardware systems. Those who solve math problems the fastest earn the right to validate Bitcoin transaction blocks and add new blocks to the chain, plus they earn Bitcoin for every block they validate.

Most of the miners of this crypto work together in mining pools, sharing both the computing power and the Bitcoin rewards received.

After this, they add blocks to the Bitcoin block chain. Each transaction is triple verified by the sender, the receiver and the rest of the network.

Each new block and the transaction information it contains is instantly copied around the world to local versions of Bitcoin miners, creating a consensus on the current state of the Bitcoin blockchain.

As you can see, the whole process that they hide behind is not easy, but it happens automatically and with thousands of daily transactions, which ensure our security, although sometimes this has been seen in vulnerability problems.