Question the Greenpeace Ethics of Taking Money from Ripple’s Executive Chair, Chris Larson Daniel Batten

Unedited by Larry Chiang 

Daniel Batten tweeted:

We have current sources within Greenpeace who have been leaking information to us about the #changethecode campaign because while they believe in @greenpeace’s mission, they are

* not supportive of @greenpeaceusa’s campaign

* question the ethics of taking money from Ripple’s executive chair Chris Larson

* think it is damaging the Greenpeace brand

* think either that there are bigger issues to fight, or that Bitcoin is a positive force for counteracting climatechange

Here’s what we know

1. @greenpeaceusa intentionally decided to take an extreme position, even one which they realised was at best “sexed up” – at worst not true, because they wanted to “change the overton window”

2. the campaign is widely acknowledged within GreenpeaceUSA to have been a failure. One recent source said “All we have succeeded in doing is uniting the Bitcoin community against us”

3. There was a faction that developed within the ChangetheCode team. Part of the team recognised that the campaign was not working and wanted to pivot to run a more cooperative effort working with people inside the bitcoin ecosystem, and also reviewing their data to make sure that it was contemporary and accurate.

The other faction wanted to double-down and continue, moving into more ad hominum attacks aimed to try to discredit those promoting education of Bitcoin such as Satoshi action.

4. At the same time, @greenpeaceusa’s peers, EarthJustice and SierraClub told GreenpeaceUSA that they would not be allocating more resource to help their campaign. Senior people within Greenpeace International continued to ask questions of  GreenpeaceUSA’s campaign.

5. The original campaign manager of ChangeTheCode was the one advocating for change in the campaign strategy to stop taking an antagonistic stance and start working with people within the Bitcoin ecosystem. But his leadership was not supportive of this pivot. He left GreenpeaceUSA at the start of this year, replaced with a new campaign head who wanted to continue the antagonistic stance towards Bitcoin and Bitcoiners.

This is why the Changethecode website is no longer action, and the @CleanUpBitcoin Twitter handle has been inactive all year.

Current status: the faction remains within GreenpeaceUSA. The campaign has lost most of its steam. It was hoped that the ‘reveal’ hitpiece on Satoshi Action earlier this year would cause widespread embarrassment to the Bitcoin community, but numerous people in GreenpeaceUSA feel it backfired due to the poor manner in which the research was conducted and the speculative conclusions it drew.

Meanwhile, the artist who created the “Skull of Satoshi” has publicly said that he feels the issue is ‘more nuanced’ than GreenpeaceUSA had portrayed to him and that he as had “many positive interactions within the Bitcoin community”. He advocated strongly for GreenpeaceUSA to work with the Bitcoin community, which was starting to happen until the old faction essentially won the internal battle and returned to its original campaign strategy, despite the overwhelming indication it was not working, causing brand damage and stopping climate-conscious millennials in particular from aligning with GreenpeaceUSA.