Peter Thiel has led a chorus of bitcoin fans slamming ESG as a “hate factory” and the enemy of crypto.
“ESG is just a hate factory,” the PayPal founder and serial entrepreneur told the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami. “It’s a factory for naming enemies… When you think ESG, you should be thinking Chinese Communist Party.”
Thiel’s anti-ESG sentiment is common here in Miami among the 25,000-strong crowd at the conference.
An 8 April panel was titled: Is ESG an attack on Bitcoin? The answer for the assembled bitcoin bulls was a resounding yes.
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“We’re going to destroy ESG. It’s destroying itself already,” Troy Cross, fellow at the Bitcoin Policy Institute, said to cheers from the audience. “These people hate us, they hate you. Giving them more control will not work.”
The comments come amid an effort by environmental groups including Greenpeace USA, the Environmental Working Group and others to persuade the bitcoin community to change the network’s code, “removing the ‘proof of work’ mechanism that requires bitcoin ‘miners’ to expend a certain amount of energy”, The Wall Street Journal reported last month.
The campaign is funded by Chris Larsen, co-founder of crypto firm Ripple.
At 134.9 terawatt hours, the bitcoin network uses more energy annually than Norway’s 124.3 terawatt hours, the WSJreported, citing research from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.
The campaign group also said, however, that bitcoin uses less energy than what is lost in the US during electricity transmission.
Bitcoin’s negative environmental impact is being distorted, the panelists including Greg Beard, chief executive of Stronghold Digital Mining and a former executive at Apollo Global Management, said.
That bitcoin is under attack from traditional finance, governments, and other institutional gatekeepers, who see the booming crypto movement as a threat to their stranglehold on power, is a theme running through many of the panels here in Miami.
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It is possible, Cross said, to hold “green bitcoin”, by buying a hash rate — a measure of the total computational power needed by a proof-of-work cryptocurrency network to process blockchain transactions — in accordance with the total amount of bitcoin you have.
Some of the ESG arguments against cryptocurrency are also true of fiat money, Ari Zoldan, head of Quantum Media Group and adjunct professor at Yeshiva University, wrote earlier this year.
Excluding the energy and resources needed in printing actual dollar bills, the finance industry is dominated by white men — a big issue for the ‘S’ and ‘G’ elements of ESG, he added.
Digital investment firm CoinShares found in a 2019 analysis that around 74% of the electricity used by the bitcoin network came from renewable sources.
“We need basic peer reviewed research… get it published, there’s no shortcut,” Cross said.
“The narrative that environmentalists have right now is so wrong-headed,” he added. “We have to undo that narrative.”
Thiel also made waves at the conference when he slammed finance giants Warren Buffett, Larry Fink and Jamie Dimon as a “gerontocracy” that has held back bitcoin’s adoption.
To contact the author of this story with feedback or news, email Trista Kelley
