🐻 Why Bitcoiners love this anti-Bitcoin artwork

GM friends 👋. Happy Monday. We’re saying goodbye to March this week and heading into the second quarter of the year. We’ve been off to a great start already, haven’t we?

We saw more crypto companies collapse and go bankrupt, a reincarnation of the 2008 financial crisis and more money being printed from thin air 🫡. But hey, Bitcoin is finally decoupling from this tradfi mess and performing like the true hedge against inflation it was meant to be.

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In this issue:

📣The big story of the week. Bitcoin’s greatest enemies are its greatest marketers.

🗞️ In other news. Silicon Valley Bank gets sold for $500 million to First Citizens Bank and Coinbase wants to build an inflation-pegged flatcoin.

📣The big story of the week

Bitcoin’s greatest enemies are its greatest marketers

We’re not sure if this is good or bad news, but it seems like Bitcoin’s unofficial marketing team is growing in size!

Let’s meet the new recruits from the past week, shall we?

Greenpeace brings peace to the Bitcoin community

The Bitcoin community can be quite divided at times. We saw that with the recent emergence of Ordinals (Bitcoin NFTs) that drove a bigger wedge between the community on the future vision of Bitcoin. But last week, Bitcoiners finally came back together and made peace thanks to this ‘bad-ass’ skull artwork created by Greenpeace 💀.

Made out of electronic waste, this skull sculpture was created in collaboration with artist Benjamin Von Wong. We can all agree that it looks pretty cool, right? Several crypto folks praised Von Wong’s work, but what’s it got to do with Bitcoin?

Well, the electronic waste used is actually supposed to represent the millions of computers wastefully used for Bitcoin mining. This artwork is part of an anti-crypto campaign run by Greenpeace. The activism initiative, ‘Change the Code, Not the Climate’ has been running for a while now with the goal to bring awareness to Bitcoin’s non-environmentally friendly mining practices.

There has long been a debate over Bitcoin’s proof-of-work (PoW) system for validating transactions because of its high energy consumption. It has been estimated that Bitcoin mining consumes around 100 terrawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity annually. To put that in perspective, that is more than the annual energy consumption of entire countries like Argentina or the Netherlands.

Since Bitcoin is open-sourced, anyone, including Greenpeace can actually submit a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) to suggest changes. The proposal would go through a review process and would have to win over several stakeholders, such as the developers, miners and the general Bitcoin community.

So, instead of taking their activism seriously, the Bitcoin community did a reverse UNO card on Greenpeace by adopting the skull as Bitcoin’s unofficial mascot.

This propaganda campaign turned out to be a great marketing piece for Bitcoin and a peacemaker amongst the community 👍️.

But what’s also interesting to note is that this initiative was partially funded by Ripple’s co-founder, Chris Larsen who contributed $5 million to the lobbying campaign.

Why is he going against the crypto community though? According to Larsen, this is not an “anti-Bitcoin” or “anti-competitor” move. He claims that he wants to see Bitcoin succeed, but is worried that its mining practices will turn investors away.

Well, that sounds absolutely convincing 🤔.

At least Von Wong, the artist of the Skull of Satoshi has admitted that he was wrong about the issue at hand and it’s not as black and white as he initially believed.

All in all, this has been great for Bitcoin as we continue to hold steady at $28,000 💪. Thanks for the free marketing Ripple!

🗞️In other news

💸 SOLD! The FDIC sells bankrupt Silicon Valley Bank to First Citizens Bank for $500 million. SVB depositors will now be moved to the First Citizens Bank who will take over $72B in loans and $56B in deposits.

🛠️ Coinbase wants to develop an “inflation-pegged flatcoin”. Rather than pegging to the US dollar, a flatcoin would peg to the “price of living” by tracking the consumer price index (CPI) and inflation data.

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