This is an opinion editorial by Doc Sharp, a Bitcoin product designer currently funded by Spiral to contribute to various Bitcoin FOSS projects.
It’s not a truth for anyone who has been in the digital asset space for a while that almost every project except the magnum opus of the bitcoin industry manages to build effective PR to sell their decentralized project in name only (DINO). That’s no surprise because the tens of billions raised over the past few years had to go somewhere, and they certainly haven’t been used to build innovative new technologies.
One area where bitcoin has failed in the PR department, and the focus of this article, is the framing of how blocks are validated, colloquially referred to as proof-of-work (PoW) or mining.
First, how does mining work?
In a nutshell, bitcoin miners use PoW, which uses energy, to find a needle in a haystack. When they find the needle, they use it to create and add a new block to the Bitcoin blockchain. When this new block is added, the miner is rewarded with a new bitcoin. To date, it is the most decentralized way to achieve consensus on the network and create valid blocks. More information on bitcoin mining here.
Bitcoin Mining and the Framing Effect
In a world where capital is driven by criteria such as environmental, social and governance (ESG) scores, green narratives in the adoption of new technologies are becoming increasingly important.
Knowing this, the perceived high energy costs of bitcoin mining and the term mining itself, which is associated with environmental destruction, have become a barrier to bitcoin adoption and a faux pas. leaky used by DINO projects to discredit bitcoin and pump their bags.
However, relatively speaking, the energy consumption of bitcoin mining is quite low and is mostly green. The reason people look past these realities is due to a cognitive bias known as the framing effect.
The term mining comes with many negative connotations (see image below). With other digital assets available that promise bitcoin-like solutions with a much smaller environmental footprint, naïve users in many cases will choose them over bitcoin due to the framing effect.
People think of this when they hear mining.
I won’t go into detail in this article, but the “greener” proof-of-stake (PoS) solution is not a viable alternative and will inevitably lead to centralization. Although with the complexities underlying both PoW and PoS, it’s no surprise that people make choices for superficial reasons, such as naive opinions about energy.
A psychological theory that underlies the framing effect is known as perspective theory explains why:
Most people don’t understand that the gain of PoW (More power consumption, but decentralized) is greater than the loss of PoS (Less power consumption, but centralized). Although it is easy to understand the loss from a purely environmental point of view.
This is exacerbated by the fact that the majority of people today view climate change as a serious societal issue and sensationalist articles such as “Bitcoin uses more electricity than many countries. How is this possible?” circulate regularly. This is how the framing effect manifests itself when individuals only see the context of one of the frames (the environmental one).
So what can we do to overcome the framing effect and make people realize that bitcoin mining is not going to boil oceans and is actually a good use of energy? We could take note of the DINO manual and leverage stories that have fewer negative connotations associated with them to our advantage.
How could this be applied to bitcoin mining? Good …
Call Bitcoin Miners, Bitcoin Validators
With the Ethereum 2.0 merger, Ethereum moved from mining with PoW to using validators with PoS. Mining and miners as we know them will no longer exist on Ethereum, and claims of up to 99.5% reduction in power consumption have been cited.
These energy savings are a red herring because they come at the expense of decentralization. Decentralization is a first fundamental principle of cryptocurrencies, without it they are useless. The power consumption of a centralized public cryptocurrency, even if tiny, is 100% wasted because the network is down. Bitcoiners know it, and that’s why they will never change the code.
So, back to the framing effect. The term validators has much more positive connotations towards it due to DINO’s marketing efforts, and it’s not as loaded a term as mining. Less negative connotations mean people will perceive the term more positively. Avoiding the framing effect by using a more media-friendly term as a validator will make it easier for people to understand that the PoW gain (more power consumption, but decentralized) is greater than the PoS loss (less power consumption, but centralized).
DINO has done all the work here by moving the narrative to be PoS > PoW. The least we can do is leverage this effort to our advantage, as they have done so time and time again using the bitcoin brand to justify their Rube Goldberg machine.
So, by calling bitcoin miners, bitcoin validators can prevent the framing effect from happening and shift the narrative to PoS
Below are the mining-related terms that we should change:
Bitcoin mining pools = Bitcoin validator pools
Bitcoin miners = Bitcoin validators
Bitcoin mining = bitcoin validation
Summary
In summary, reframing PoW mining in PoW validation will benefit Bitcoin in the long run by preventing the framing effect from occurring, which is a cognitive bias where people decide options based on whether the options are presented with positive or negative connotations.
Mining = negative connotations.
Validation = positive connotations (thanks Ethereum).
This is a guest post by Doc Sharp. The opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.