Bitcoin Has a Green Competitor, Chia

One of the problems with bitcoin and blockchain is the amount of electricity bitcoin miners consume for transactions. Some experts have predicted the amount of electricity each bitcoin transaction consume can power an American home for a week, that could easily be a village in other countries. As a matter of fact, the Ethereum Is Already Using a Small Country’s Worth of Electricity.

That is a major problem and BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen has a plan to fix that. Bram Cohen has just announced a new bitcoin like cryptocurrency named “Chia” that requires much less resources than bitcoin.

 

Chia claims to be the “green money for digital world” is expected to start selling sometime next year.

Here are some of the points from a Chia presentation.

  • Chia is a better Bitcoin
  • Instead of using wasted electricity for security it leverages the already widely distributed large sunk cost of unutilized storage space
  • This results in a system which is much more distributed, secure, and green.