Actor Adrian Grenier, who is known for his roles in Netflix’s Clickbait, HBO’s The Entourage and film The Devil Wears Prada, attended the eighth CoinGeek Conferencein New York City on October 6 to discuss the Bitcoin sustainability. Grenier, who is also the United Nations Environment Goodwill Ambassador for North America and has been active a long time in various environmental conservation efforts, was part of a panel that included experts in the field of Bitcoin sustainability:Gray Wolf Analytics Inc. President and Chair Dr. Dhirendra Shukla, TAAL Distributed Information Technologies COO Lars Jorgensen, Compute North Co-Founder and CEO Dave Perrill, MNP Partner Hassan Quresh, and nChain CTO and BSV Infrastructure Team Technical Director Steve Shadders. Bitcoin, the pioneer digital currency, is the first-ever functional application of blockchain technology. Hence, the focus of the discussion is more about the technology, rather than the popular trading aspect of cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin has been under fire in the recent months due to its supposed unsustainability because of the extremely high energy consumption of Bitcoin mining, which is centered around the concept of Proof-of-Work. “Proof-of-Work is actually a kind of essential feature of a Bitcoin blockchain because it underlies the economic incentive model that actually makes Bitcoin work and makes Bitcoin scale… it keeps the industry competitive, and that’s essentially what drives Bitcoin to be able to eventually become a global infrastructure provider,” Shadders said.
The key to making Proof-of-Work sustainable is the ability of the blockchain to provide utility and benefits to society by creating a global infrastructure. This is only possible if the blockchain can scale to accommodate the world’s data needs.
“At the end of the day, I believe this is about data. This is about data and the value tied to that data. Whichever solution allows you to move more data is in the end going to win out. And I think things like ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance), effective reporting, it’s all about data. Reporting sits on top of data,” Qureshi pointed out.
Now, it must be clarified that there are different implementations of Bitcoin, and even though many regard BTC as the original, the one that is actually closest to the original vision of Bitcoin white paper author Satoshi Nakamoto is BSV.
BTC has no future of ever becoming a global infrastructure as it has no other utility aside from being used as a pseudo digital gold due to its small 1MB data block limit, low throughput of seven transactions per second (tps), expensive transaction fees and price volatility.
On the opposite side is BSV, who is committed to realizing Satoshi’s vision by continuously scaling. A 2GB block has already been mined on the BSV blockchain, and the network will soon increase its throughput to 50,000 to 100,000 tps, which will further lower transaction fees at only fractions of a cent.
And this is just the starting point. As BSV continues to scale, billions of tps are possible in the future, which is what it takes to be able to provide a global technological infrastructure that businesses from all industries can use and benefit from. Herein lies BSV’s sustainability. It does not matter if it consumes an insane amount of energy because the benefits surpass that amount.
“This is still a new technology that’s improving every day and getting better. And the competition will help it get better even more quickly. But I think people that want to dismiss crypto as being unsustainable don’t fully understand the complexity of the opportunity that crypto has for society across the board. It’s not just about mining efficiency, it’s also about how it’s going to improve every industry,” Grenier said.