The Skull of Satoshi is an 11-foot skull built from electronic waste by 📝Benjamin Von Wong and Greenpeace USA, unveiled in March 2023 to spotlight Bitcoin's climate footprint.
The skull's smokestacks represent the fossil-fuel pollution generated by Bitcoin mining; its eyes carry Bitcoin logos and red lasers, and cables protrude from its neck. The electronic waste was donated by Unirecycle and stands in for the millions of computers used to validate Bitcoin transactions. The piece anchored Greenpeace's "Change the Code, Not the Climate" campaign, which called on financial institutions to push Bitcoin toward a proof-of-stake protocol — a change campaigners argued could cut the network's electricity use by 99 percent, as Ethereum's 2022 transition demonstrated.
The campaign took an unplanned turn when parts of the Bitcoin community embraced the skull as a defiant mascot, a twist covered by Decrypt and Cointelegraph — a reminder that conversation-generating art does not get to choose the conversation it generates.
We have the unique opportunity to erase the climate footprint equivalent of an entire country by fixing Bitcoin.