Ripple’s Garlinghouse disses Bitcoin’s energy use in advance of Biden administration

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse thinks corporations converting cash to Bitcoin (BTC) could be making a costly mistake as a more environmentally-conscious Biden administration takes the White House in January.

Garlinghouse tweeted Monday that the incoming president will be much tougher on climate change, requiring that all publicly-traded companies disclose their greenhouse-gas producing activities. He singled out Square as one company that “may want to pay attention” to new federal guidelines that could get rolled out as soon as Biden takes office. 

Garlinghouse’s comments piggyback off an earlier tweet from NYT Politics, which outlined some of Biden’s proposed measures on climate change, including rejoining the Paris Agreement and signing executive orders to curb emissions. President Trump withdrew from the Paris accord in 2017 over allegations that the pact would harm the U.S. economy. 

Square made headlines last month by adding 4,709 Bitcoin to its balance sheet. At the time of the purchase, the newly acquired Bitcoin accounted for roughly 1% of the payment company’s available cash on hand. 

In August, mid-cap technology company MicroStrategy said it had made Bitcoin its new reserve currency by purchasing $250 million of the digital asset. The business intelligence firm has since increased its holdings to 38,250 BTC — worth roughly $590 million at the time of writing. 

Garlinghouse lauded MicroStrategy’s crypto play in August, but appears to have shifted his stance following the presidential election. Ripple’s “sustainability of money” narrative appears to gel with the concerns of the incoming Biden administration. It is also used to showcase XRP’s supposed superiority over Bitcoin’s resource-draining proof-of-work consensus.

Ripple claims that, for every 1 million transactions, its XRP token could power 79,000 lightbulb hours compared with Bitcoin’s 4.51 billion lightbulb hours. The company thus claims XRP to be 57,000 times more efficient than Bitcoin.