BitTorrent creator announces his "Green" Bitcoin

Speaking to technology industry magazine TechCrunch, Bram Cohen said the Chia Network, his long-hinted Bitcoin alternative, could launch by late 2018.

A “very hot” seed investment round has enabled the project to get off the ground and hire that kind of developer skill required to see Cohen’s Chia cryptocurrency sell to investors.

“The idea is to make a better bitcoin, to fix the centralization problems,” Cohen explained, reiterating previous criticisms of Bitcoin’s network.

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.

“We’re building a blockchain based on proofs of space and time to make a cryptocurrency which is less wasteful, more decentralized, and more secure,” Chia’s website proclaims.

Bitcoin uses proofs of work to verify the blockchain. That’s because it’s prohibitively expensive to make a fake blockchain as it wouldn’t have as much work demonstrated as the real one. But over time that’s given a massive advantage in collecting the incentives for mining bitcoin to those who operate close to low-cost electricity and naturally chill air to cool the mining rigs.

Chia instead relies on proofs of space in file storage, which people often already have and can use for no additional cost. It combines this with proofs of time that disarm a wide array of attacks to which proofs of space are susceptible.

“I’m not the first person to come up with this idea,” says Cohen, but actually implementing requires the kind of advanced computer science he specializes in.

After inventing torrenting in the early 2000s and briefly working on Steam for Valve, Cohen had been at BitTorrent building a new protocol for peer-to-peer live video transfer. But mismanagement on the business side caused the company to implode. Now it’s limping along, and Cohen says “it doesn’t need me day-to-day.” So while he’s still on the board, he left in early August to start Chia Network.

It’s too early to guess how this will all play out, but at least someone is trying to address the ecological impact of cryptocurrency instead of just complaining about it. Cohen seems excited though. “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.”