The Bitcoin network is the first payment network based on blockchaintechnology proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, with the first block beingcreated in January 2009. Over the past 13 years, Bitcoin has evolved from aninnovative cash and payment system to a speculative asset acting as digitalgold. The rapid increase in Bitcoins value over the past decade led to asubstantial increase in demand, which in turn has significantly increased thenumber of miners involved in the network and, as a result, drasticallyincreased the total energy expenditure.

The energy used to maintain the Bitcoin network consumes as much energy assome medium-sized countries. If the Bitcoin network were a country, it would beone of the world’s top 30 countries for electricity consumption. According toresearchers at Cambridge, the Bitcoin network used over 121.36 terawatt-hours(TWh) of electricity in 2019, which would have more energy consumption than acountry like Argentina with a population of nearly 50 million. As a result, theenvironmental pollution and carbon emissions are considerably higher than firstanticipated during Bitcoin’s inception.

The reason behind this is Bitcoin’s inefficient consensus mechanism andscalability. The Bitcoin network is based on the PoW (Proof of Work) consensusmechanism, which rewards miners for competing to solve mathematical problems(cryptographic hash puzzles). This competition becomes more and more intense asthe value of bitcoin rises. Miners need to consume more electricity to performcalculations, but in the end, only the first miner who solves the hash puzzleis rewarded, while the remaining 99.99% of miners are not, resulting in a largeamount of wasted energy. In addition, the limited scalability of Bitcoin meansthat the network cannot process large transactions in a short period of time.Currently, the Bitcoin network can only process 4.6 transactions per second,while Visa can process an excess of 1,700. Not to mention the cost of verifyinga Bitcoin transaction, which is currently, on average, 2.13 USD and 885 kWh pertransaction. Those limitations significantly constrain the adaptability ofBitcoin as a global digital currency that can be used in daily transactions.

Green Bitcoin uses PoST (Proof of Space-Time) as a consensus mechanism andimproves bitcoin’s scalability. By using PoST as a consensus mechanism, minersonly need to provide hard drive disk storage space and no longer need toprovide computing power to compete for mining rewards upon completing averified block. Rewards will be issued according to the size and time of filessaved by miners, which effectively solves the problem of miners competing withcomputational power (the current consensus mechanism used in Bitcoin). GreenBitcoin miners need significantly less power to maintain the hard drive storagethan the traditional CPU or GPU mining process. Carbon-neutral goals can beeasily achieved by using clean energy to power the network. In addition, thedistributed storage space can be used to meet the storage requirements of usersand significantly reduce waste. Finally, Green Bitcoin can dramaticallyincrease transaction efficiency using the innovative EMP2P communicationprotocol and simplifying the transaction process using advanced nodes.

We hope to provide people with a genuinely decentralised transaction systemthat can realise affordable daily transactions through the Green Bitcoinproject. Furthermore, we can awaken people’s awareness of environmentalprotection and actively join the environmentally-conscious community togetherwith our team through our actions.