BitTorrent Inventor Announces Bitcoin Competitor Chia

November 9th, 2017

Via: TechCrunch:

A bitcoin transaction wastes as much electricity as it takes to power an American home for a week, and legendary coder Bram Cohen wants to fix that. And considering he invented the ubiquitous peer-to-peer file transfer protocol BitTorrent, you should take him seriously.

Cohen has just started a new company called Chia Network that will launch a cryptocurrency based on proofs of time and storage rather than bitcoin’s electricity-burning proofs of work. Essentially, Chia will harness cheap and abundant unused storage space on hard drives to verify its blockchain.

“The idea is to make a better bitcoin, to fix the centralization problems” Cohen tells me. The two main issues he sees in bitcoin are in environmental impact and the instability that arises from the few bitcoin miners with the cheapest access to electricity exerting outsized influence.

Chia aims to solve both.

Posted in Economy, Energy, Technology | Top Of Page

No Responses to “BitTorrent Inventor Announces Bitcoin Competitor Chia”

  1. NH says:
    November 10, 2017 at 11:18 pm

    The energy use aspect of the proof of work(POW) protocol used by most cryptos is really starting to bite.

    An energy conserving alternative, proof of stake(POS), seems to be getting to a pretty well developed stage, with Etherium looking like they’re close to switching over:

    https://blockonomi.com/ethereum-casper/

    Charles Hoskinson:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1fNLSjAgHg

    was a founder at Etherium and a couple years ago put together a new company:

    https://iohk.io/team/

    that among other things has built and recently released the blockchain called Cardano, which uses the POS protocol:

    https://iohk.io/projects/cardano/

    Kind of an impressive looking effort.

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