The CEO of Ripple Brad Garlinghouse addressed the energy consumption of some cryptocurrencies, including obviously Bitcoin.
Today on Twitter, commenting an article from the Telegraph, he wrote:
“Energy consumption for BTC and ETH mining is a huge waste and there is no incentive to take responsibility for the carbon footprint. This is definitely not high on the agenda for the growing climate crisis”.
It is worth remembering that XRP, Ripple’s cryptocurrency, uses a custom consensus algorithm, the Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm (RPCA), which actually consumes less energy than Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work or Ethereum.
On the other hand, the reference to the climate crisis seems to be insubstantial, as well as obviously biased, especially in light of what The Cryptonomist revealed a short time ago.
In fact, the real impact on the climate of Bitcoin’s PoW is lower than that of the online porn industry, for example, revealing clearly that Bitcoin is not the real problem for the environment.
Moreover, although Ethereum still uses Proof of Work today, with resulting high energy consumption, there are plans to replace this consensus algorithm with Proof of Stake in the not too distant future, which would drastically reduce energy consumption to the point of making it probably comparable to Ripple.
The comments of Garlinghouse on Twitter, although reporting real data, have more the appearance of an attempt to promote XRP as an alternative, in the light of the fact that until now XRP has never been able to impose itself as such neither against Bitcoin nor Ethereum.
In fact, despite XRP excelling in the last few months in terms of the number of daily transactions on the three different blockchains, XRP is in seventh position in terms of USD trading volumes in the last 24 hours, overtaken also by Tether, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin and EOS, as well as BTC and ETH, and only slightly higher than BSV.
Evidently, the financial markets are less interested in XRP than BTC or ETH, perhaps also because of its disappointing price performance over the past several months.
And, since, according to Garlinghouse himself, Ripple is not profitable without the sale of XRP, that of the company’s CEO seems more an attempt to advertise XRP than an in-depth discussion of, for example, how much security can Proof of Work guarantee to a truly decentralized blockchain.