Bram Cohen creates chia cryptocurrency which might bench Bitcoin

 Bram Cohen creates chia cryptocurrency which might bench Bitcoin

Bram Cohen who created BitTorrent has also created the Chia Cryptocurrency and he might just have solved the electricity wastage problem of bitcoin.

Cohen’s latest creation, a cryptocurrency known as Chia which prides itself as ‘green money for a digital world’, is the very antithesis of bitcoin. Unlike bitcoin which uses the electricity-guzzling proof-of-work consensus mechanism, the chia cryptocurrency uses proof-of-space where the mining process uses the hard disk space.

Cohen while speaking to Breaker magazine stated that hard disk space is readily and widely available and most of the time either underutilized or unutilized at all.

He said: “The idea is that you’re leveraging this resource of storage capacity, and people already have ludicrous amounts of excess storage on their laptops, and other places, which is just not being utilized. There is so much of that already that it should eventually reach the point where if you were buying new hard drives for the purpose of farming, it would lose you money.”

Apart from reducing electricity usage, Cohen also claims that Chia cryptocurrency is relatively more secure compared to bitcoin.

According to Cohen, though it would be very expensive to purchase the resources required to attack the bitcoin network, it is possible to do it.

He said: “To attack Chia you’d have to get access to more resources than the network as a whole, which will be a huge amount of resources once everyone has signed up. The cost of acquiring them upfront would be huge, higher than the cost of the ASICs you’d need to attack bitcoin, so to overwhelm the system would be much more difficult.”

Let me also mention that Cohen created the BitTorrent protocol in 2001 while still a student at the University of Buffalo.