Could BitTorrent Creator's Chia Cryptocurrency Overtake Bitcoin?

There are thousands of virtual currencies available in the market right now, but there is one that wants to ‘kill’ Bitcoin with a new green system.

Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent platform, could be also getting some attention for creating one of the cryptocurrencies that would challenge Bitcoin’s power in the market.

Cohen has created a new virtual currency called Chia that presents itself as a different virtual currency. It aims at solving the problem of electricity consumption that Bitcoin currently faces. In order to be secure, Bitcoin’s network needs to process large amounts of data and equations. Miners use a lot of energy to power ASIC mining hardware to solve these calculations. This system is called Proof-of-Work (PoW) and it consumed as much energy as Austria.

Instead, the Chia network uses a different mechanism called Proof-of-Space. Instead of using processing power the mining process uses the hard disk space.

During a conversation with Breaker Magazine, Cohen explained:

“The idea is that you’re leveraging this source 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.”

This would allow the network to consume much less energy than Bitcoin, thus reducing electricity consumption around the world. At the same time, the creator of the Chia cryptocurrency claims that it is much more secure than Bitcoin.

Cohen explained that those interested in attacking the network would have to get access to more resources than the network has. This is something complicated since the cost of acquiring them up front would be very huge. Furthermore, he said that the costs would be greater than the cost of the ASICs necessary to attack Bitcoin.

Although the new system seems more secure, it has several limitations. For example, it is possible to make a re-mining form genesis attack if desired. Actors that have enough resources could create a new blockchain from the ground up and switch the blockchain once it gets longer. This would allow them to take possession of coins and cancel previous transactions.

So as to prevent these issues, Chia has a proof-of-time consensus mechanism. This would not allow bad actors to attack the network and have a deep effect on it in a short period of time. It is expected for this network and virtual currency to be launched in the coming months.

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