In a separate development, a group of researchers from the Blockchain Research Group at PayPal, in partnership with Energy Web and DMG Blockchain Solutions, proposed that now there could be an alternative solution to curbing Bitcoin's environmental concerns. They use core economic principles of cryptocurrencies to give incentives to the miner for greener practices.
On the other hand, the Bitcoin has a secure system supported by the terrible PoW consensus, but at a very high and polluting cost—high energy consumption. This novel proposal research therefore suggests a system that would fit seamlessly into the present PoW architecture and therefore pushes miners to use cleaner energy.
It would label miners who use renewable sources of energy as "green miners." Special public keys would be allotted to these miners, which will be referred to as "green keys" and would serve the purpose of identification in the network.
This will then route transactions paying lower fees towards these green miners. One fundamental difference, though: part of the mining reward for them will be "locked" in a special multi-signature payout address.
That locked reward then becomes the crucial incentive toward green miners. Hence, the additional reward is unlocked, and thus, claimable by only the green miners that have the corresponding green keys. This, in turn, creates great economic motivation toward processing transactions that explicitly support sustainable mining.
The paper accentuates that the approach to encouraging this apparently needs no drastic changes to the core functionality of Bitcoin but basically lies upon the earlier economic framework to affect the miner's behavior.
The successful deployment of such a system has huge potential to improve, dramatically, the environmental footprint of Bitcoin mining. Furthermore, the research had demonstrated the power of cryptoeconomic incentives for effective promotion of successful positive change within the operational blockchain networks. In so doing, researchers hope this approach will be used as a model to implement such sustainability-focused solutions across various industries in the future.