dryland 🟧🐒

JUST IN: Bitcoin is now 59.4% sustainably powered 🥇Higher than any reported global industry ⬆️Up 7.0% since last Cambridge survey 14 months ago 🌊Largest power source: hydro Source: Cambridge 2026

As you probably know, there's a giant skull on display in the Bitcoin Museum in Nashville. It was created in 2023 for GreenpeaceUSA's campaign against Bitcoin mining, and its job was to make the world see Bitcoin as an environmental villain. So how did it end up in a museum built by the people it was designed to shame? I was close to most of what happened next. But it took me until this year to see what the story was actually about. Early 2023 was the high-water mark of the environmental case against Bitcoin. Tesla had already stopped accepting Bitcoin payments, citing environmental concerns. Most press on mining was hostile. And GreenpeaceUSA's "Change the Code" campaign, funded with $5 million from Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen, had just unveiled its centrepiece: the Skull of Satoshi, a striking sculpture by the artist Ben Von Wong. Source: bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Troy Cross (who became not just a comrade in arms but a friend during this chapter of Bitcoin's history) saw a different way in. Troy's insight was and always had been to turn a public debate into a 1:1 conversation fast. He did that much better than was ever my nature, and he did it with Ben. It was Troy who invited Ben to talk to him: environmentalist to environmentalist, peer to peer. At last year's Bitcoin conference, Troy told me something I didn't know at the time: the conversation had lasted for four days. Troy made the case most of us would have made: how mining soaks up wasted renewable energy, how it can stabilise grids. And it worked, for hours at a time. Ben would shift. Then he'd check in with GreenpeaceUSA, and the campaign would pull him back to the script. At one point they brought in Alex de Vries, the central-bank employee whose since-debunked research the campaign was largely built on, to talk to Ben directly. Two steps forward, two steps back. Source: xitter.cf/DSBatten/status/186725… Then Troy stopped. He told me later that the breakthrough came "when I stopped trying to spell out the case for Bitcoin and just said, 'OK, let me lay out all the reasons why I think you're opposed to it.'" Read that again. The turning point in the most public fight over Bitcoin's environmental story was a man offering to argue his opponent's case. I've coached founders and CEOs for twenty years, and I recognised the move the moment Troy described it. When a person is defending a position, their mind is occupied with protection, and almost nothing you say gets processed. Data bounces off a defended mind. When you lay out someone's case better than they've articulated it themselves, the defence has nothing left to push against - you've proven you understand them before asking to be understood (Aristotle noticed the same thing about character twenty-three centuries ago). Source: classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/r… And those first days of arguing weren't wasted. They showed Ben who he was dealing with: an environmentalist who knew the data cold and never once raised his voice. By the time Troy held up the mirror, Ben trusted the man holding it. The order matters. People accept evidence from a messenger they trust, inside a conversation that feels safe, and at no other time. What happened next was the tide turned. Ben adopted a new position around Bitcoin, not pro-Bitcoin, but definitely no longer anti-Bitcoin either. He was now in the middle ground of uncertainty, redefining the meaning of his own art and expressing hope of both sides engaging in dialog. His beautiful tweet where he announced this shift was not only public, it has remained his pinned post ever since: "I made the Skull believing that Bitcoin Mining was a simple black-and-white issue. I've spent my entire career trying to reduce real-world physical waste, and PoW felt intuitively wasteful. Of course, I was wrong. Few things in the world are black and white. Dumb me." The "Dumb me" included - his words, on his profile, by his choice, for three years now. Source: xitter.cf/thevonwong/status/1639… He let better information redraw the picture in shades of gray, publicly, which takes more intellectual honesty than either defending one's original position or "switching teams". Then Ben did something nobody asked of him. He set up meetings between the campaign's director, Josh Archer, and four of us: Troy, Margot Paez, Trey Walsh and me. What was said in those rooms stays private, and that's how it should be. What I can share is that I found Josh genuinely interested. A few months later, he left the campaign. Then he left GreenpeaceUSA altogether. The campaign wound down. Not one node owner changed the code. In April last year, I reached out to Ben to ask whether we could procure the skull from him, so it could have a second life somewhere better than a warehouse. The reply never came. Six weeks later I found out why: Ripple, the company whose co-founder had funded the campaign, had already bought it under NDA, to unveil at the Bitcoin Conference and gift to the Bitcoin Museum in Nashville. The sculpture commissioned to bury Bitcoin's reputation was donated to Bitcoin's museum by the campaign's own funder. You couldnt script it. At the Bitcoin Conference, Ben got back to me with a message: "I think you were right in some ways in that Bitcoin really has been the fastest greening technology out of all the other ones. And looking at how other technologies have gone backwards, Bitcoin hasn't ... yet, anyways." I asked whether I could share it publicly. He replied: "Sure thing go for it. Thanks for asking I appreciate the transparency." That "yet, anyways" at the end is what intellectual honesty sounds like in two words. Ben was prepared to give time, data and evidence the casting vote. Few things in the world are black and white - and Ben writes like a man who means it. The skull arrived in Nashville as it should have: unaltered - the same immutable monument Ben has built. What had changed was everything surrounding it: the art's meaning, the story around it, the zeitgeist, the artist himself. All that had changed because of the simple acts of one human talking to another human, repeated over time. And Troy's four days were one thread of many. Nobody appointed him to talk to Ben. Nobody appointed Margot, Trey or me to defend Bitcoin. No campaign manager set us weekly KPIs for number of GreenpeaceUSA ratios. Nobody coordinated the Bitcoiners who met every campaign post with their own data, day after day, in numbers no press office could match. The campaign ran on $5 million, a media plan and a famous brand. The defence ran on individuals with no budget, no leader and no title, each deciding alone to talk to another human being directly. Satoshi's whitepaper described electronic cash that needed no intermediaries. It turned out the defence of his network needed none either. That's what the skull means to me now. A network designed peer to peer was defended peer to peer.