PayPal Proposes Scheme To Selectively Mine With ESG Compliant Miners
The paper proposes routing transactions to whitelisted 'green miners' using low fees and a 'locked' BTC reward in a multisig payout address.
- "PayPal’s Blockchain Research Group, in a strategic collaboration with Energy Web and DMG Blockchain Solutions, presents an opportunity to accelerate the clean energy transition for Bitcoin mining," was stated in the announcement.
- The solution involves "identifying miners that use low-emissions energy sources, preferentially routing on-chain transactions to these miners, and rewarding them using a 1-of-n multisig script2 (i.e. any one of the n number of miners can spend the coins) which is attached to the on-chain transactions," the paper explains.
“Green miners will be incentivized to mine these transactions since they will be the only ones eligible for the additional “locked” BTC reward,” was stated in a blog post.
- The proposal suggests miners will be eligible to obtain Green Proofs for Bitcoin certification by achieving either a 'Clean Energy Score or a Grid Impact Score higher than 50.' The details of how these scores are calculated can be found here.
- The proposed solution also aims to increase the likelihood of participating entities to route on-chain transactions specifically to the whitelisted 'green miners.'
- PayPal's Blockchain Research Group (BRG) says that it has successfully tested the proposed solution with Bitcoin miner DMG Blockchain Solutions.
Full Proposal
Press Release / Archive
Forbes Article / Archive