Chia

[Bittorrent inventor] 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.

“The idea is to make a better bitcoin, to fix the centralization problems” Cohen tells me. The two main issues he sees in bitcoin are in environmental impact and the instability that arises from the few bitcoin miners with the cheapest access to electricity exerting outsized influence.

Chia aims to solve both.

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.

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Fascinating. I wonder how disk space is used as proof-of-work.. how can u make sure someone has X amount of space, reliably..? I wish I had time to dig into it.

The huge amount of CPU power spent on BC mining always bother me, hopefully Chia fixes that. "Democratizing" mining is nice too -  if mining is easy, and the currency is adopted widely, in theory this would be your UBI mechanism, ppl can mine reasonable amount of $$ on their own, no being bothered by the stigma around hand-outs.

So here is my ideal cybercurrency features - uses less CPU like Chia, is completely anonymous like Monero, supports ultra-smart contracts like Ethereum, and is as robust as Bitcoin. Mining should never end, so currency is not dis-inflationary.