Today is Earth day.

And Blockchain is still labeled as a non-green and harmful tech.

Where do we stand right now?

Firstly, let’s put things into context.

What’s polluting is not the blockchain technology itself but the way to secure it (consensus).

We all agree that it is the fuel burning mechanism that is contaminating our Nature and that there are existing alternatives to make cars greener, right?

It’s exactly the same with our beloved blockchains.

For example, proof-of-work - the Bitcoin consensus - is highly harmful: millions of people are competing to mine new blocks. How? Miners are literally playing a huge lottery where the more computing power (lottery tickets) you got, the more likely to be the winner you are.

There’s only one winner for each block, so all the others miners totally waste electricity for nothing.

If Bitcoin was a country, it would be ranked 23th in terms of energy consumption. Between Thailand and Vietnam.

But our community understood this footprint issue and designed elegant alternatives:

• Make Proof-of-stake greener: Recently, Tesla, Block and Blockstream combine their strength to focus on renewable energy like Solar power to mine Proof-of-Work blockchain.
• Do like Ethereum and move to a greener consensus. When the Merge occurs in the following months, no more miners but validators who put at stake 32 $ETH will be randomly selected to secure the network. This is Proof of Stake and it will reduce the network energy consumption by 99.5%.

So, are you still not confident about a green future for blockchains industry?