Bram Cohen BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly bitcoin competitor Chia
- power consumption of bitcoin mining is becoming increasingly expensive. there are some alternative power sources such as solar.
- the higher the price of bitcoin goes up > the difficulty level of bitcoin mining goes up > higher the cost of mining
- bitcoin mining rigs have high upfront cost and short life time
Chia proposed to be better than bitcoin. Instead of using CPU power (electricity) for computing hashes it leverages the distributed storage space.
- similar to bitcoin there is a permanent immutable history called the "blockchain"
- Farmers instead of Miners prove they have used the resources with proofs of space and time instead of proofs of work to mint new blocks.
- Farmers in return get rewards and transaction fees
- network nodes propagate three instead of single heaviest histories they know of to all their peers.
- farmers find the best proof of space they have. The three best proofs of space propagate throught the network and proof of time servers start working on new blocks. * When a proof of time server finishes the proof of time for a proof space it adds to the blockchain
- Proof-of-Space is the amount of space is allocated to a task based on latency and cost
- Proof-of-Time is proof of work algorithm that takes specific amount of iterations.
- the output from proof of time for one block is used as challenge for the proof of space in the next block.
- Each block starts with proof of time and finalized with proof of space. Both of which must meet quality threshold.
Source: https://chia.network/
Video: https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/2006069823011271/
image: https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/bram-cohen1.jpg
