The creator of the popular peer-to-peer file transfer system known as BitTorrent is developing a brand new cryptocurrency that's already being hailed as the eco-friendly alternative to Bitcoin.
Set to be released this summer, "Chia" will rely on what are known as "proofs of time" that use far less energy than Bitcoin's "proofs of work" – meaning it won't burn through 159 countries' worth of electricity in a year like Bitcoin currently does.
Bram Cohen, a coding expert and the mind behind Chia, says he decided to develop the novel cryptocurrency as a more sustainable replacement for the antiquated technologies currently utilized by Bitcoin and other first-generation cryptocurrencies.
"The idea is to make a better Bitcoin, to fix the centralization problems," Cohen told TechCrunch.com.
In Cohen's view, the two biggest problems with Bitcoin are its enormous environmental impact from all of the electricity it requires, as well as the inherent inequity that exists within its "mining" paradigm.
To address the first issue, Cohen came up with a model in which the crypto network utilized a series of "nodes" to maintain a full and complete history of both past and pending transactions. These nodes are designed to propagate the three weightiest histories they know of to every peer on the network.
"When a new block is minted it propagates rapidly to all full nodes and farmers (as he calls them, rather than miners) start working on top of it," explains a marketing blip about how the Chia technology works.
"When a farmer finds a new block they publish it to the network. Farmers all find the best proof of space they have ... When a proof of time server finishes the proof of time for a proof of space it publishes the whole thing as a fully validated block and publishes it to the network to be built on top of again."
Will Chia eventually overtake Bitcoin in terms of popularity?
It might sound complicated, but suffice it to say that this model significantly reduces the amount of electricity and processing power required to keep the network afloat. It's faster, cheaper, and appears to have a much greater capacity for processing more transactions at one time – this being another major flaw with Bitcoin's technology.
The mining, or farming, rigs associated with Chia don't have to perform massive mathematical equations in the same way as Bitcoin, meaning average people using low-cost systems can participate. The proofs of space model is similarly beneficial for the average Joe, as most people already have open file storage space on their computers that can be utilized to process Chia at no additional cost to themselves.
Cohen admits that he's not the first to come up with the concept. But he is the first to be putting it into practice, as Chia is set to be released sometime this summer. Since he says he doesn't need to be involved in the day-to-day operations of BitTorrent anymore, Cohen is devoting most of his time to making sure that Chia becomes a reality, and that it works as he claims it does.
"I’m not sure how much we want to announce right now, but it was a very hot round," Cohen told TechCrunch.com, explaining that Chia's initial release will begin in China, and eventually go global by the end of 2018. "It's technically ambitious and there's a big meaty chunk of work to do. I've done enough raising money and recruiting. Now for the real work."
For more cryptocurrency news and to keep track of what's going on with Bitcoin in light of new developments such as Chia, be sure to check out BitRaped.com.
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