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:
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.
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