Chia: Bitcoin's Green Competitor Must Still Compete With Inertia That Made Climate Change a Problem in the First Place

Bitcoin may require more energy consumption than a Trump fan with a McMansion and an SUV, but now, reports Josh Constine at TechCrunch, a talented coder has come up with a solution:

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.

Pretty impressive -- though this just means Chia is facing the electric car problem on a micro level:

Electric cars have existed for about as long as the internal combustion engine, but were only proposed as a solution to human-caused climate change in the 80s. But by that time, fossil fuel-dependent engines (largely responsible for climate change in the first place) had become so deeply entrenched in the economy, the cost of switching whole infrastructures and economies over to an electric model were so high, most car companies were loathe to even try. (And thus too costly for most consumers to buy.) That's only started changing very recently thanks in great part to government subsidies for electric vehicle production and consumption. (Which Tesla's sexy PR aside, are still a tiny part of the overall car market -- seriously, way less than 1 percent.) 

Somewhat similarly, Bitcoin mining has already become a massive cottage industry, especially in developing nations, and having invested so much resources on the mining infrastructure, they have little reason to switch. And because Bitcoin has such a small user base, Bitcoin miners are also a large part of the Bitcoin user base. Meaning few of them have an incentive to switch. So unless Chia gets a massive influx of venture capital and government support, it may go the way of the electric car in the 80s -- a great idea both ahead and behind the times.