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BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

504 points by chriskanan 9y ago

kiddico 9y ago
One of the only things I dislike about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is the flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. With the proof of chia being used in storage, does that imply a lower power cost? I'm not sure what proof of time is either... Does anyone know more about this and can clarify things?
- deleted 9y ago
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- Squithrilve 9y ago
  > flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. I don't get it. Why won't you complain about monitor pixels, that don't display content using/wasting power or various unused/reserved bits transmitted every second (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-abhi-covert-00 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-abhi-covert-00) that also waste power. Proof of work uses energy to meet some strict guarantees. This reminds me of complaining that SSL is computationally expensive and therefore plain HTTP is better. 10 years ago of course.
  - joe_the_user 9y ago
    Uh, power that isn't used for bitcoin mining could be used to improve human lives in innumerable way - or not used at all and allow a decreased production of greenhouse gases.
    - Squithrilve 9y ago
      Why do you think the power is not already being used to bring useful services for people? It seems like people would want to bend thermodynamics and require that benefit is produced without spending energy... By the way mining is already used to heat houses in Siberia: https://qz.com/1117836/bitcoin-mining-heats-homes-for-free-in-siberia/ https://qz.com/1117836/bitcoin-mining-heats-homes-for-free-i...
      - imtringued 9y ago
        It doesn't really work this way... If a bitcoin costs $6000 people will spend physical resources worth $6000 (in theory) to obtain it through mining. Let's assume you are a miner in siberia and have a heating bill of $100 every month and spend $1000 of electricity to get $1100 worth of bitcoin. You now only pay $900 to get $1100 bitcoin. You will spend the excess savings of $100 on more electricity for mining. Now suddenly everyone starts heating their houses with bitcoin mining to save $100 until difficulty rises to account for the saved money. Every dollar you spend on the most efficient mining setup will only give you one dollar worth of bitcoin plus a small profit.
        Squithrilve 9y ago
        Well it's obvious you can't heat your house and earn money at the same time continuously. Bitcoin is no magic perpetuum mobile zero-point energy bending-physics solution but it's true that you can minimize the waste. > Every dollar you spend on the most efficient mining setup will only give you one dollar worth of bitcoin plus a small profit. That sounds just like any other investment, or am I missing something?
        joe_the_user 9y ago
        Bitcoin basically is money (a store of value and medium of exchange, with some speculation on increasing future value thrown in that won't change the logic here). Increasing the amount of money in the world does not increase the amount of goods and services in the world. Thus turning energy into bitcoins will increase any other goods and services but instead results in more money chasing the same amount of goods and services. Just as one gets apparent economic benefits from paying people to dig holes and fill them, one can get some appearance of benefit from resources being diverted to bitcoin mining. This is OK as long as we imagine an unlimited external resource world we exploit however we want but once you get to a world we have finite atmosphere, finite biosphere etc and pumping enough C02 into these can kill all of us, this sort of approach is becoming untenable.
  - eridius 9y ago
    If bitcoin's power usage is like a massive drain in the middle of the ocean sucking down millions of gallons of water per second, your comment is like complaining about the drip on your kitchen faucet.
    - Squithrilve 9y ago
      Maybe not exactly on my kitchen but rather all kitchens around the world as we all use monitors, TCP etc...
  - gtrubetskoy 9y ago
    > Why won't you complain about monitor pixels or the Sun, what a waste of energy that is
    - traverseda 9y ago
      Yeah, we gotta get on that dyson {sphere,swarm,etc} thing.
    - imtringued 9y ago
      Bitcoin would happily consume it...
  - traverseda 9y ago
    The problem is that coin incentivizes* the use of electricity, which is a dumb thing to incentivize. Sure, we can incentivize the use of electricity, but we can also decide to incentivize something else. A system like bitcoin but that only uses (all of) the CPU 10% of the time incentivizes a lot of cheap compute power for projects that need it. As an example. Algorithms that have similar loads to conventional software encourages more powerful general purpose computers instead of more powerful custom bitcoin ASICS. There are much better things to incentivize.
    - Squithrilve 9y ago
      > but we can also decide to incentivize something else. This needs a proper source. As far as I understand currently only Proof of Work is sound enough to use in real-world scenarios. Also see: http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/#is-a-work-independent-protocol-possible http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/#is-a-work-indep...
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - free_everybody 9y ago
    You can't possibly be comparing SSL with bitcoin mining. SSL provides a service that is immediately valuable to all parties. Bitcoin mining is done by people who want to get rich by not doing anything. The price of bitcoin is EXTREMELY speculative no matter how you look at it. What if Bitcoin were to fail for some reason? All the computation dedicated to mining coins which were never spent would be wasted. Entirely different scenarios here.
    - Squithrilve 9y ago
      > SSL provides a service that is immediately valuable to all parties. And Bitcoin does not provide service that is valuable to all parties? > Bitcoin mining is done by people who want to get rich by not doing anything. Calculating SHA256 is hardly anything because we wouldn't be arguing about that, right? > What if Bitcoin were to fail for some reason? You're not concerned about SSL failing for some reason? Heartbleed? > What if Bitcoin were to fail for some reason? That's highly speculative. Besides Ethereum has several failures already and it's still doing fine because there are serveral mechanisms that can be used to resolve such problem (e.g. hardforks).
  - kiddico 9y ago
    What are you even getting at here? That is a totally different use case. A display is supposed to always be on, while a cpu should turn off while not in use. When a cpu has no work it slows down to conserve power and reduce heat output. What happens when a monitor has no input data? It goes to sleep. It doesn't just display the last thing and continue processing a stream of data from it's input.
    - Squithrilve 9y ago
      Well Bitcoin is always on because people are constantly using it so it can't "conserve power" just as a constantly on display or CPU can't.
  - viraptor 9y ago
    The comparisons fall short. - pixels are being optimised, with displays going closer and closer to true-off all the time - pixels: even whitespace is important next to information - RFC: we're wasting a few bits as a tradeoff for less complicated hardware and less processing power. Not sure if applicable anymore, but reserved fields and consistent parsing saved us some power/materials historically. - SSL provides security and privacy in your communication at a cost reasonable for the outcome. It's only logical they if we don't need to spend the energy to mine coins, we should stop doing that sooner then later.
    - Squithrilve 9y ago
      > - pixels: even whitespace is important next to information And protecting money is not important? > - RFC: we're wasting a few bits as a tradeoff for less complicated hardware and less processing power. Not sure if applicable anymore, but reserved fields and consistent parsing saved us some power/materials historically. Well so the RFC reserved bits are waste but also a benefit? Maybe the same is true w.r.t Bitcoin mining? > - SSL provides security and privacy in your communication at a cost reasonable for the outcome. The cost is reasonable in SSL case but unreasonable in Bitcoin case based on what criteria exactly? Remember that SSL relies on PKI that has a lot weaker security guarantees (see Symantec, DigiNotar and your favourite Chinese CA in your OS's trust store).
      - viraptor 9y ago
        > The cost is reasonable in SSL case but unreasonable in Bitcoin case based on what criteria exactly Next to nonexistent cost per connection in standard case of SSL. We can saturate gigabit links using modern hardware with AES-NI. Outside of special deployment cases, the cost is a rounding error. We can't provide this capability in a cheaper way at the moment (or we would do that) On the other hand, we've got Bitcoin which chugs energy/money by design, while other solutions like proof of stake / space / ... exist and are much more energy efficient. People concisely decide to burn money to keep this system running - that's why it's unreasonable.
        9y ago
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  If Bitcoin reached 2 trillion dollars, it would use about 2% of the world's power. It seems tough to argue that a 2 trillion dollar GDP doesn't merit a 2% increase in power output.
  - kiddico 9y ago
    Solid point. Unless of course we can do it with 1% of the world's power, which is what I hope something like proof of space would allow.
  - txcwpalpha 9y ago
    Bitcoin's total value being 2 trillion dollars is not the same thing whatsoever as bitcoin being responsible for 2 trillion dollars of GDP. There is no "merit" here. We can have $2 trillion in GDP with paper money, too, and that uses 0% of the world's power.
    - yayitswei 9y ago
      Not 0% if you count the resources required to enforce that paper money.
    - simplify 9y ago
      To be fair, paper money requires banks & bank employees, bullet-proof transportation trucks, government regulation, anti-counterfeit research & technology, and perhaps more.
      - rspeer 9y ago
        Whataboutism is a form of propaganda, not of fairness.
        zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
        Comparing the consequences of alternative solutions to a problem is not whataboutism.
  - 9y ago
- gaetanrickter 9y ago
  You can always create a token basket which could be made up of crypto's that are more eco-friendly. Systems for doing this are described here https://medium.com/@alexanderwestin/3-crowdsales-leveraging-token-baskets-c4c2f9cbe329 https://medium.com/@alexanderwestin/3-crowdsales-leveraging-...
- toomim 9y ago
  Yes, I watched Bram's talk in Berkeley two weeks ago. It indeed runs with much lower power costs. The cost is the power to do a hard-disk seek every long once in a while, rather than to compute sha256 over and over again. It does incentivize a buildup of physical disk drives. And if it becomes successful, it'll likely spur specialized datacenters and hardware (think specialized tape drives) to try to outcompete in space, so it might end up just as centralized as bitcoin mining. But the power costs will be much lower. There also is a proof-of-time component, that does computation, but it is designed to not be parallelizable, which means that throwing additional power at the problem doesn't help you as much. Instead, imagine that each participant must spend a deterministic length of time to compute a solution, and the person closest to the internet backbone wins. But this proof-of-time component is also smaller subsidiary role to the proof-of-space. So overall, it's a hybrid proof. Bram didn't go into enough detail explaining the actual proof-of-time or space in his talk, so I'm not sure if it all works, but if it does, then you can expect it to use less power. Proof-of-Stake should use even LESS power, though.
  - kiddico 9y ago
    Thanks for the explanation. Does the proof of storage allow that storage to continue to be used?/does the proof use the space on a disk? Or is it sort of like mining bitcoin where a gpu is wholly used for mining?
    - tzahola 9y ago
      Certainly the latter. I can imagine proof of space implemented by requiring nodes to store terabytes of random bytes, and compute the hash of specific subsets of this huge blob based on the last block in the ledger.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    Proof of Stake is worth being highly skeptical of. The fact that most people blindly support the idea when it seems to leave fundamental questions swept under the rug is worrying. I wish I could give a further critique, but I'm not familiar enough with the subject. There have been several persuasive comments posted to HN on the brittle nature of Proof of Stake, and the lack of hard answers to basic problems. Tacking it on as "this would use even less power" is a sign that perhaps these alternate schemes (including the one in the article) should be taken with a dash of salt and pepper.
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  Proof of chia would use disk storage which at idle wouldn’t require processing . So yes because the other way is to use GPUs which would have higher costs for electricity than a disk.
- nerdponx 9y ago
  There were some attempts at actually doing useful work with all that proof of work: https://curecoin.net/ https://curecoin.net/ http://foldingcoin.net/ http://foldingcoin.net/ https://golem.network/ https://golem.network/ http://primecoin.io/ http://primecoin.io/ and a detailed article about it https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/primecoin-the-cryptocurrency-whose-mining-is-actually-useful-1373298534/ https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/primecoin-the-cryptocur...
  - civilian 9y ago
    Aren't curecoin and foldingcoin both centralized? Isn't that a bad property to have as a cryptocurrency?
  - chrisallenlane 9y ago
    I'll add Gridcoin, which is a cryptocurrency that rewards BOINC participation: http://www.gridcoin.us/ http://www.gridcoin.us/ I really wish coins like these would catch on more than they have. Proof-of-work is, to the best of my knowledge, the only system that provably works. If we could just harness that computational power to do useful work, we'd be in a great place.
- colordrops 9y ago
  > flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. This point keeps getting brought up and is patently ridiculous. It is computing something - a hash that is not easily reproducible that prevents attackers from modifying the ledger. And there is no other known way to do this, including proof of stake. I think people who say this are just naysayers that are implying that crypto currencies have no use or value.
  - ghthor 9y ago
    And that hard to reproduce hash represents computational trust, which is a new type of resource that just happens to be very expensive in energy cost using our current technology.
    - empath75 9y ago
      It would be expensive by design no matter what the technology.
  - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
    I read someone’s estimate — rough, I’ll grant you — that mining bitcoin (just bitcoin) consumes as much total electrical energy as an entire medium-sized nation. Divide network hashrate into how much power the most efficient ASICs use, and I don’t think it’s an unfair estimate. You can’t dismiss the argument that maybe we can do better as “naysaying,” nor that there is something about cryptocurrency that the people making the argument do not understand. How many joules go into making a bitcoin block? (Really, I’m curious.) It doesn’t take the entire output of a coal-fired generator to handle trillions in trade volume on traditional exchanges. Minting coins doesn’t require an entire nuclear plant dedicated to it. Even for newfangled cryptocurrency, the human race can handle a hundredish billion dollar market cap without using that much energy. It’s incredibly wasteful and destructive to our planet. How do you think the Chinese are throwing cheap electricity at all that mining gear? Provinces covered in solar panels? (For that matter, how do you think the Americans are?) Literally the entire concept of mining is brute force through the SHA2 problem space for nothing (to create the currency of value; nobody is saying bitcoin is worthless). Imagine if, instead, you dumped that energy into storage or even useful computation (again: proof of work, not the currency, is useless computation), and what you could do with it. There needs to be acknowledgment that brute force cryptographic hashing is a pretty serious design flaw. We just happen to be working around it now that bitcoin is a Big Deal. To drive this home, Bitfury is building out 30+ MW mining facilities that require immersion cooling in 3M Novec, because state-of-the-art datacenter CRACs aren’t capable of rejecting waste heat from that kind of power density. We are talking 150+ kW cabinet-equivalents, where anything over 15-20 kW per cabinet with CRAC is currently considered noteworthy. AIUI, they have to underclock their gear when relying on datacenter air. Two-phase immersion is a cool, efficient technology that will probably reimagine the datacenter and should be developed further, but machine learning and science workloads are barely starting to crack that nut. Bitcoin ran directly to the front of the line of “incredibly power-intensive workloads that we haven’t encountered in datacenter design before.” That’s good and bad.
gzou 9y ago
What are "proof of space"/"proof of work" ? How do they compare to proof of work/proof of stake ?
- kanzure 9y ago
  "Beyond Hellman's time-memory tradeoffs with applications to proofs of space" https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    Any ideas about the proof of time which Bram references?
dynofuz 9y ago
so we are going to go from spending energy for "work" to spending energy producing drives for "space". Time to buy some digital storage stock ;)
- quickben 9y ago
  Or gridcoin. At least Science is advancing with hydro bills there.
sschueller 9y ago
Sounds like IPFS. Why do we need an ICO. Can't we just do it like bitcoin and download a client to start 'mining'?
- wyldfire 9y ago
  We don't. But dev teams keep creating them. It's IMO much more appropriate for new coins to make an announcement, provide a whitepaper + source, and start the network at time X. But I can (somewhat) sympathize with their desire to be rewarded. What if someone just aims their ASICs/GPUs/cloud cycles at their new coin for the first months after the announcement and reaps the lion's share of the rewards? While that seems unfair to them, it is traditionally the fairest/most honest method.
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  Because nobody skilled is going to build this without payment? this thinly veiled criticism of ICOs has that obvious logical flaw. Computational proofs take a long time for the development team to get funded, and this delays go to market strategies. Look at the graveyard of mineable projects before this year's ICO boom, broke underfunded devs with no ability to mobilize a community to fund the tiniest things. Pitiful bounty systems where the payouts can't even motivate the imagined Indian developer. If you don't think current ICOs align economic incentives well ENOUGH, then discuss that particular nuance instead.
  - jameskegel 9y ago
    Also, mining implies PoW, whereas this is not always guaranteed to be the case. It's my favorite, but it's falling out of fashion, unfortunately.
- pdog 9y ago
  Why would they do all that work for free?
  - Domenic_S 9y ago
    Why wouldn't they just pre-mine a bunch of coins and reap benefits that way?
wyldfire 9y ago
> A bitcoin transaction wastes ^H^H^H^H^H^Hcosts -- FTFY. It's not a waste if you actually got something for it. e.g. your chemical ICE in your car produces heat that is useful in cold weather. Not waste heat if it has utility. Electric cars have to spend electrical energy to generate the same heat. That said, the fact that this keeps coming up would indicate that there's definitely a marketplace for a coin that costs less energy/emissions for the same features.
- wbkang 9y ago
  Waste: use or expend carelessly, extravagantly, or to no purpose.
  - wyldfire 9y ago
    IMO it's none of those, and I think I'm being honest and fair here -- not just a bitcoin fanboy. What's the baseline for a corresponding transaction? Maybe that's a credit card which will cost (not waste here either) 1-2% of the purchase price. But even that's not quite fair because the merchant is taking some risk on this purchase that usually amounts to some additional cost. Also credit cards can't be used to secure transactions of >= millions of USD (and if they did it would be at a significantly higher cost). Bitcoin transactions at the low end of that spectrum are prohibitively expensive, though.
    - mrguyorama 9y ago
      Bitcoin doesn't replace credit card transactions or system. You have to judge it by it's actual value, not what it pretends to want to be
      - wyldfire 9y ago
        Yes, fair enough -- it is truly unique and difficult to compare w/credit cards. But to further the debate, how would you evaluate it in these terms ("waste"/"extravagance")? Would you stipulate that it has value or that it at least has utility? What sort of analogy or baseline would you compare it to, so that we could evaluate how efficient or wasteful it is?
Pirolita 9y ago
Filecoin and Burst already do that
jparse 9y ago
I don't see how this is better. It sounds like we have to waste power running hard drives now. Isn't Ethereum's Proof of Stake better?
- bglusman 9y ago
  I thought so too until I read this http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/#is-a-work-independent-protocol-possible http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/#is-a-work-indep... and, maybe there's counter arguments? But it seemed like a pretty good argument to me.
  - 1053r 9y ago
    Your linked argument is poorly formed. It's true that any system which periodically emits value will cause people to work towards achieving that value. However, it's not true that the work in question will necessarily be wasted in an arms race. Specifically, a (well constructed) Proof of Stake system will cause people to work to get a piece of the value by having them purchase the coin used for staking. This will cause the value of the coin on the open market to rise, which will increase the equilibrium market cap of the coin in relation to the world. Because "money is a veil" [1], this won't create or destroy any actual goods or services. It will just transfer value from some persons to other persons. Therefore, Proof of Stake is more efficient than Proof of Work, because it moves cryptocurrency from negative-sum (electricity wasted) to something that's approximately zero-sum. Another way of saying this is that you can't PRODUCE value by creating any currency with zero intrinsic value. However, you can WASTE value in this activity, and Bitcoin, as currently constructed (along with all possible Proof of Work systems) is wasteful. Proof of Stake wastes less value than Proof of Work. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_money
    - deevolution 9y ago
      How does proof of stake prevent double spending if there are no miners to validate blocks? I must be missing something here...
olegkikin 9y ago
So it's nothing new. Ethereum and Peercoin and Nxt do proof of stake.
- 45h34jh53k4j 9y ago
  Slight correction, Ethereum may do PoS in future, it currently does not, it is a PoW CryptoCurrency like bitcoin. Because of the state of miners ETH right now, I suspect it may take a long time to migrate, with several contentious forks. I suspect bitcoin will always be PoW.
codazoda 9y ago
I'm trying to understand... "The three best proofs of space rapidly the propagated through the whole network and proofs of time servers start working on top of them." Should that read, "The three best proofs of space rapidly propagate through..."?
- nashashmi 9y ago
  ... rapidly get propagated ...
amenghra 9y ago
Relevant talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYG0NxoG7yw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYG0NxoG7yw
pmlnr 9y ago
Yay, after pushing GPU prices into madness, now we push storage prices there as well!
- Houshalter 9y ago
  In the long run it will make them both cheaper.
  - akerro 9y ago
    YAY a GPU from a year ago that had 100% GPU usage for full 11months with cheap cooling is on sale now for 20% of its initial price!
    - dharma1 9y ago
      I think s/he means more volume leads to lower prices (in the long run)
      - akerro 9y ago
        and we see that on GPU marker were prices are going up all the time since 2 years ago...
durkie 9y ago
so this has been an issue that keeps coming up for a while, but i don't really understand the issue. * As others have asked, how much is bitcoin supposed to use? What's the right amount and why? How is that number better/worse than the amount of resources spent on existing financial infrastructure? * We are rapidly progressing towards an era of free (extremely cheap) clean power. Just today (https://electrek.co/2017/11/08/chilean-solar-down-26-as-important-as-saudi-arabia-at-1-79%c2%a2-kwh/ https://electrek.co/2017/11/08/chilean-solar-down-26-as-impo...) incredibly low bids for solar projects were submitted in Chile at 2.15c/kWh. That's insanely cheap. We're not there yet in having ubiquitous cheap clean power obviously, but neither is bitcoin "there" in being able to replace much of traditional financial infrastructure. But the point still stands: will bitcoin's energy usage still matter in the not-too-distant future?
- paulgb 9y ago
  The problem is that with a competitive mining market, Bitcoin energy use will rise until the cost of mining a block is equal to the reward for that block (i.e. market equilibrium). So if the cost of energy goes down but the price of Bitcoin stays constant, the amount of energy expenditure will be (approximately) equal. Likewise, if the price of Bitcoin goes up, the amount of energy used will go up accordingly. The reward amount will decrease over time and mitigate this, but not enough by a long shot IMO.
  - nas 9y ago
    This is a key observation. Now apply it to the "eco-friendly" and PoS schemes. The same economics apply. For Bram's coin and PoS systems, the costs spent will rise to equal the block reward. So, you are basically doing something more complicated to end up with the same amount of economic waste. In the proof of space version, maybe you will be building millions of hard drives, running them to failure and then throwing them away.
    - mopierotti 9y ago
      This answer written by the Ethereum team addresses why cost spent won't necessarily rise to equal block reward in their PoS formulation. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ#doesnt-mc--mr-mean-that-all-consensus-algorithms-with-a-given-security-level-are-equally-efficient-or-in-other-words-equally-wasteful https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ#doe...
goodroot 9y ago
I understand the argument regarding power consumption. However, if we're going to green wash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing) a cryptocurrency, we need to focus on more than power consumption. Given that power is getting cheaper and cleaner through solar[1, 2], this is asking people to further accumulate more waste and precious metals in the form of fixed drives. This is not eco-friendly and it's dubious to assert such. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-22/solar-power-to-grow-sixfold-as-sun-becoming-cheapest-resource https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-22/solar-pow... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/for-cheapest-power-on-earth-look-skyward-as-coal-falls-to-solar https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/for-cheap...
- freeloop3 9y ago
  Bitcoin adjusts difficulty based on how many people mine it. So cheap power doesn't reduce the cost, since it will just mean even more mining.
  - tpallarino 9y ago
    Exactly, the amount of money spent on energy to mine is equal to the amount of mining revenue. Energy consumption is more closely related to price.
    - jwilliams 9y ago
      Nod - I'm coming to the conclusion that the effective store of value is the mining infrastructure. Even if it's not that explicit, they move in lock-step.
      - fe2ijwe99 9y ago
        Isn't that true of basically any computing task? Can't generate AI, websites, etc with the computing infrastructure. No software patents if no computers to create software.
DonHopkins 9y ago
Proof of work is conspicuous consumption economics.
craigc 9y ago
There are already blockchains that do not require proof of work (Lisk, Nav, Dash, NEO, etc) and already storage based blockchains (Filecoin, Storj, Sia, Maidsafe, etc). It is unclear to me what Chia brings to the table that is really new.
- mandelliant 9y ago
  The storage based blockchains don't use storage space as a means of verification- they're storage product focused (you buy/rent/use/sell storage space on the platform as a commodity). That's not what Chia does; it seems like its primary use will be store of value/transactions like Bitcoin. It's the "green" alternative to BTC- I wouldn't call Filecoin, Storj, Sia, Maidsafe, etc. competitors to Bitcoin (and I don't think they're trying to be that). While Lisk, Nav, Dash, etc do use alternatives to proof of work, what Chia is doing, from my understanding of what they're saying, is using the lowest cost alternative to proof of work, which is proof of storage (disclaimer, I don't know the math behind proof of storage, just that it's their alternative to PoW). However, proof of storage alone has some inherent vulnerabilities so they compensate with another mechanism, proof of time (again, not sure of the math). Edit: punctuation
  - craigc 9y ago
    Ahhhh. I somehow missed that while reading the article. Thanks that makes more sense. When I saw Bittorrent and storage I think my brain immediately jumped to the storage based tokens. Curious to read about and see how that works
    - dpiers 9y ago
      My understanding is that your computer computes the answer to a difficult calculation ahead of time and stores the output up to a specified size (ex. 1GB worth of digits of pi) . Proof-of-Space asks you to respond with a segment of the output at a certain offset. The amount of time given to respond is less than the amount of time it would take to calculate the output, and so by replying you prove that you had it stored already.
kentiko 9y ago
Paper on proofs of space: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf
idibidiart 9y ago
"Capitalizing, Capitalizing, Capitalizing." Paraphrasing Fake Yoda (Mel Brooks) from Space Balls
xwvvvvwx 9y ago
What is the advantage (if any) of this over proof of stake?
- corford 9y ago
  <snark>it might actually work</snark> :)
giancarlostoro 9y ago
So... One thing I missed is, how do you mine Chia? Do you mine it? How much will there be... these are the questions, is it technically a cryptocurrency or just a digital currency?
placeybordeaux 9y ago
So instead of running through circuits that are stateless you'd run through circuits that are stateful. I don't see how this would assuredly reduce the total energy used.
nickik 9y ago
There already is delegated prove of stake algorithms that solves the power consumption problem.
- eof 9y ago
  I have never understood what stops POS algorithms from being havens for opportunistic cheating. There is no punishment for spending energy on attacking the network unsuccessfully because you are still also playing good with the majority. In POW schemes you can only use your mining power on a single chain; in POS it seems like you can "stake" every competing chain simultaneously.
  - wmf 9y ago
    you can "stake" every competing chain simultaneously This is called the "nothing at stake" problem and people have been proposing solutions for a few years but so far none of the solutions have stuck.
  - warbiscuit 9y ago
    Ethereum's Casper uses the solution that while validator A could double-vote for multiple blocks, validator B could take those multiple vote messages, and submit them as cryptographic proof of A's dishonesty. By submitting such proof, the protocol would allow slashing A's stake, and giving some portion to B as a reward for catching them. Thus validators are strongly incentivized to only vote for one block at the end of the chain.
mrb 9y ago
«A bitcoin transaction wastes as much electricity as it takes to power an American home for a week» This is false, or at best a deceptive statement.¹ A transaction does not consume energy. It's like saying each bit on a CD-ROM "use fuel" when it's shipped on a mail truck. Miners work on a hash of a block, so the number of transactions in the block is independent of energy use. For example the transaction rate could double tomorrow, without increasing energy consumption. [¹] Also, this metric is derived from Digiconomist, which is flawed as it overestimate consumption by a factor of 2: http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/
- SilasX 9y ago
  You're right, in a sense. However, mining is using a certain amount of energy per block, and each block has a limited amount of transactions. So it's reasonable to amortize the cost of the bitcoin network over the transactions and so, in another sense, each transaction maps to its share of the power consumed in a block. It would be equally fair (and it would be fair) to say that the shipping cost of a CD is equal to its mass- or volume share of the cost of the truck delivery, and indeed, that's how you'd correctly quantify e.g. the environmental cost of Netflix's DVD-by-mail (it doesn't work to just say "one more disc doesn't cost any more so the environmental cost is zero"): http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_lantern/2008/08/video_stores_vs_online_rentals.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_l...
  - mrb 9y ago
    But the limit in the number of transactions is not a technical limit, it's a political limit. We chose arbitrarily to set the limit to 4 million segwit weight units, however it could be changed to anything without impacting energy consumption. Therefore your analogy is incorrect: if the cargo capacity of a truck is increased, it will certainly impact its fuel consumption.
    - SilasX 9y ago
      >But the limit in the number of transactions is not a technical limit, it's a political limit. We chose arbitrarily to set the limit to 4 million segwit weight units, however it could be changed to anything without impacting energy consumption. It's at least partly a technical limit, because there are technical issues faced by scaling the Bitcoin network to the arbitrarily large number of transactions/sec you think it can handle. Each scaling solution has its tradeoffs[1][3], and therefore, to the extent that there's no "free [scaling] lunch", then there is inherent scarcity to what the miners can support, and therefore transactions should be attributed their proportional share of that limit when accounting for them. It only appears as a political limit because a) users generally don't want a fragmented network, and b) there's persistent disagreement on what tradeoffs are acceptable when scaling. >Therefore your analogy is incorrect: if the cargo capacity of a truck is increased, it will certainly impact its fuel consumption. What is that responding to? The issue was how to account for the cost of one unit that takes up a scarce slot in a known-cost thing. The fair (IMHO) solution, per previous comment, is "blame" each unit for its share of the total cost. How does an increase in the truck's capacity refute the analogy? The same logic would hold: if trucks could carry more Netflix DVDs at the same [environmental or whatever] cost, it would be reasonable to say that the cost per DVD shipped also went down. If trucks had infinite capacity, then it would be fair to say that the DVDs have no cost, since the cost inputs are independent of problem size (number of DVDs to ship). But -- per [1] and above -- we don't live in that world. [1] For example, if you simply said "each block can hold as many transactions as miners are willing to tolerate" [2], that risks making the ledger (blockchain) freakishly large. Since each node has to store the full ledger, that blowup, in turn, risks [excessive] centralization, where only a few miner-datacenters can run nodes, defeating the (or a major) point of Bitcoin. [2] which you think would make transaction capacity non-scarce [3] Wiki page for discussing the issues: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability
lossolo 9y ago
This is a copy of Burstcoin[1], this "inventor" had many other "ideas" in last years that all were copies of other people ideas and were total disasters, he is riding his reputation he got from bittorrent. It will probably end with ICO, people will invest money treating that just as financial instrument that you can speculate on, then when implementation will come it will end like all those others alt coins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstcoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstcoin
c-smile 9y ago
Can we just use IP addresses (or similar finite at time set) as coins then? And torrent alike distributed network that will support proof of ownership and transactions. Like I am owning 123.245.189.123 address and tons of peers nearby know that...
corford 9y ago
Just the fact it's Bram Cohen behind this is enough to get me excited. Watching https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/2006069823011271/ https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/200606982... I love when he talks about the off by one error in Bitcoin's difficulty reset calculation and how almost all other blockchains have mindlessly copied this :)
- marknadal 9y ago
  Hey, I was there at the event (I did the lightning talk at the beginning). Would love to answer any questions about Chia that anybody has, that I learned first-hand from Bram.
  - apexalpha 9y ago
    Going to watch the video in a bit but I've got a question: could I turn my home NAS into a farmer for this blockchain simply by reserving some of my storage space for it or does it still require a lot of computing power (CPU/GPU)?
    - marknadal 9y ago
      That should work :) although it would need to be connected up to the network so it could reply to proof queries and "thread the needle" of the time servers.
  - Cakez0r 9y ago
    How does the proof of storage work and will proof of time be decentralised across all nodes in the network, or a subset of trusted nodes?
    - marknadal 9y ago
      The paper on storage proof is here: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893 https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893 The proof of time is probably best described as being federated. Any peer can join, but it realistically will only be run by a very few peers with specialized hardware. This mistakenly trips up a lot of people as a "bad" thing, when it shouldn't. The only purpose of the proof-of-time servers is to make replay attacks impractical. As in, if the network is 10 years old, an attacker would actually have to spend 10 provable years to manipulate it. What if they collude with the time server? Well, they'd have to collude with all of them, which is unlikely, even if there are only a few. And second, it isn't worth the time server's work. Again, the details are a lot more complicated, but hopefully that is a quick off-the-top-of-my-head explanation that gives some intuition.
marknadal 9y ago
I met Bram just last week (and had the honor to do a lightning talk before his Chia presentation!), and I want to clear up some things that people seem confused about: 1. Power consumption. Bram brought up a good point if we take Bitcoin to its ultimate extreme, that it will be people with access to nuclear energy (aka governments) that will take over mining bitcoin, since that is the cheapest route. This does not look like a decentralized future, exactly the opposite. 2. Proof of Time. There are attacks that can happen against purely storage based proofs. Bram's brilliant addition here is a proof of time to get around those problems. I can explain more if people want. NOTE: Filecoin's "Proof of Time and Space" has nothing to do with, nor is remotely related to, Bram's. 3. Decentralized Storage. Despite Bram's prolific work in decentralized storage systems, Chia has nothing to do with storing end user data (like Storj, Sia, Maidsafe, etc.). The data that is stored is junk, but that is okay (see below). 4. Storage waste. One of Bram's points is that this will start an arms race to build better harddrives. If people are successful at that, this will only make Chia better, and also make storage in general cheaper for everyone. So sure, maybe the proofs are wasting storage space, but it will make storage in general more economical. Anything else I can answer in more detail? Here is the presentation he (and I) did at Berkeley: https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/2006069823011271 https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/200606982...
- formol 9y ago
  Any opinion on Nem ? Built from scratch, proof of importance, featureful (contracts, notary, supports currencies creation, fast..) It’s well tested in the banking sector... Chia announce sounds like : « hi, I’m another sh*tcoin with lots of big money from the crypto bubble »
- cstork12 9y ago
  One fundamental question, whose answer I must have missed: What's the incentive to process transactions?
petre 9y ago
If you think video cards are more expensive due to Bitcoin, just wait and see hard drive prices skyrocket if this cryptocurrency gains popularity. It isn't exactly eco friendly because hard drive manufacturers will try to fill that demand by producing more drives that will end up empty.
4714 9y ago
www.chia.network
m3kw9 9y ago
The power needed to create a HD need to be accounted for and the metal supply that it lowers could create issues that needs electricity to make up for, just a theory.
oever 9y ago
Is there an incentive to store the blockchain itself? A proof of space might be derived from the blockchain history. The would create an incentive to store the blockchain. That way the proof of space is a useful use of space.
pelasaco 9y ago
there is already a eco-friendly bitcoin. It's name is Peercoin.
imron 9y ago
I could have started mining Bitcoin back when you could mine them on a desktop PC, but never did. I think I'll try my hand at Chia farming until I have 1,000 or so on the off chance it hits $7,000 one day too.
apexalpha 9y ago
So could I run a node on my Home NAS/server thathas some TB left for storage? Or would it still require a decent GPU and or CPU to make it viable? Is there any site with more technical details?
mangecoeur 9y ago
I work in energy efficiency, so bitcoin makes me cry. Any sane clean energy transition plan requires significant savings (no you can't just build a bunch of PV). But while we are killing ourselves trying to get people to adopt green buildings and low energy appliances, along comes Bitcoin where people just burn energy for nothing.
- kenpomeroy 9y ago
  It doesn't sound like you really understand how Bitcoin works. If Bitcoin were to become widely adopted and supplant traditional financial institutions, the environmental impact would be enormously net positive. Sure, it takes energy to confirm transactions. But, we could massively decrease energy consumption by eliminating the need for: bank buildings, armored vehicles, physically printing money, etc.
  - albertgoeswoof 9y ago
    But you could eliminate all of those things without bitcoin, and they are actively being reduced already. There's nothing special about blockchains that will mean people suddenly won't use physical money, have a bank on their high street etc.
  - simias 9y ago
    I don't believe that at all. The idea that everybody would walk around with their own hardware wallet and sign transactions directly when buying bread seems as likely to me as having the average public drop facebook chat for IRC. People want simplicity, people want convenience. People don't want to risk losing their life savings because they get scammed or because their secret keys become compromised or destroyed. People want banks, or at least a subset of what banks do. People want insurance, people want chargeback. People want to get loans to buy houses and cars. Bitcoin solves a tiny portion of the service provided by banks. A lot of what bank does is getting automated anyway, now you have banks that are only available online who probably need a lot less personnel and obviously fewer buildings. Armored vehicles and printing money can be replaced by credit and debit cards, no blockchain needed. I personally use cash less and less, and I know it's a trend in many (albeit not all) countries.
vorotato 9y ago
If this is open source, I'll use it and if it's not I won't.
jancsika 9y ago
The incentives seem designed to make it not-so-profitable to have big rigs with lots of hard-drive space. That design seems to be an effort to keep the mining fairly decentralized so that it happens across a greater number of commodity machines. But if available drive space and, as Bram says in his talk, even unallocated space, can be efficiently leveraged to back this cryptocurrency, this suddenly creates an incentive for the companies like Microsoft, Oracle, or even Symantec to start doing shenanigans in the background in order to mine Chia coins on billions of machines. The only thing currently stopping them is the egregious resource-usage of extant POW-based cryptocurrencies. Plus, there are already cases where all those companies take advantage of users resources like screen real estate, installers, usage data, etc., when the resource usage is minimal (or, in some cases with Windows 10, even above minimal). So if you make a fungible cryptocurrency that consumes less power and targets commodity machines, aren't you essentially asking the big players to battle it out to control the unused space across billions of machines? Imagine the annoying oscillation between browsers for default primacy, except that battle is now between language vendors, os vendors, device vendors, etc.
daggerhashimoto 9y ago
The energy put into Proof-of-work is what makes the system immutable. People who complain about bitcoin's energy use, don't seem to grasp what makes the bitcoin Blockchain immutable. In order to change the Database, you have to go back and do the "work" which becomes practically impossible after approx. 10 blocks. You take that away and you'll make the system Tamper evident, and not Tamper Proof as it is right now. It's the only secure data base ever invented, and thats because of the energy used to secure it. I don't see these people complaining how much energy Las Vegas wastes. Or Hollywood. What about professional sports? How much energy does going to war cost? All of these are less important than the only sovereign moneys system in the history of man-kind. So, please, stop complaining about the energy use, i left my violin at home.
visarga 9y ago
Fun to see the heated Bitcoin discussion and imagine that much of that heat comes from people having invested previously and now defending their decision.
scotty79 9y ago
He should make a coin backed up by how much data miner shares through bittorrent.
orionblastar 9y ago
This sounds like what Richard proposed for Pied Piper in the HBO series Silicon Valley? Instead of power, use storage instead. Get a cheap PC, install Linux on it, get a 16T hard drive to store the Chiacoins and blockchain.

504 points by chriskanan 9y ago

One of the only things I dislike about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is the flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. With the proof of chia being used in storage, does that imply a lower power cost? I'm not sure what proof of time is either... Does anyone know more about this and can clarify things?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Squithrilve 9y ago
> flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. I don't get it. Why won't you complain about monitor pixels, that don't display content using/wasting power or various unused/reserved bits transmitted every second (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-abhi-covert-00 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-abhi-covert-00) that also waste power. Proof of work uses energy to meet some strict guarantees. This reminds me of complaining that SSL is computationally expensive and therefore plain HTTP is better. 10 years ago of course.
- joe_the_user 9y ago
  Uh, power that isn't used for bitcoin mining could be used to improve human lives in innumerable way - or not used at all and allow a decreased production of greenhouse gases.
  - Squithrilve 9y ago
    Why do you think the power is not already being used to bring useful services for people? It seems like people would want to bend thermodynamics and require that benefit is produced without spending energy... By the way mining is already used to heat houses in Siberia: https://qz.com/1117836/bitcoin-mining-heats-homes-for-free-in-siberia/ https://qz.com/1117836/bitcoin-mining-heats-homes-for-free-i...
    - imtringued 9y ago
      It doesn't really work this way... If a bitcoin costs $6000 people will spend physical resources worth $6000 (in theory) to obtain it through mining. Let's assume you are a miner in siberia and have a heating bill of $100 every month and spend $1000 of electricity to get $1100 worth of bitcoin. You now only pay $900 to get $1100 bitcoin. You will spend the excess savings of $100 on more electricity for mining. Now suddenly everyone starts heating their houses with bitcoin mining to save $100 until difficulty rises to account for the saved money. Every dollar you spend on the most efficient mining setup will only give you one dollar worth of bitcoin plus a small profit.
      - Squithrilve 9y ago
        Well it's obvious you can't heat your house and earn money at the same time continuously. Bitcoin is no magic perpetuum mobile zero-point energy bending-physics solution but it's true that you can minimize the waste. > Every dollar you spend on the most efficient mining setup will only give you one dollar worth of bitcoin plus a small profit. That sounds just like any other investment, or am I missing something?
        joe_the_user 9y ago
        Bitcoin basically is money (a store of value and medium of exchange, with some speculation on increasing future value thrown in that won't change the logic here). Increasing the amount of money in the world does not increase the amount of goods and services in the world. Thus turning energy into bitcoins will increase any other goods and services but instead results in more money chasing the same amount of goods and services. Just as one gets apparent economic benefits from paying people to dig holes and fill them, one can get some appearance of benefit from resources being diverted to bitcoin mining. This is OK as long as we imagine an unlimited external resource world we exploit however we want but once you get to a world we have finite atmosphere, finite biosphere etc and pumping enough C02 into these can kill all of us, this sort of approach is becoming untenable.
- eridius 9y ago
  If bitcoin's power usage is like a massive drain in the middle of the ocean sucking down millions of gallons of water per second, your comment is like complaining about the drip on your kitchen faucet.
  - Squithrilve 9y ago
    Maybe not exactly on my kitchen but rather all kitchens around the world as we all use monitors, TCP etc...
- gtrubetskoy 9y ago
  > Why won't you complain about monitor pixels or the Sun, what a waste of energy that is
  - traverseda 9y ago
    Yeah, we gotta get on that dyson {sphere,swarm,etc} thing.
  - imtringued 9y ago
    Bitcoin would happily consume it...
- traverseda 9y ago
  The problem is that coin incentivizes* the use of electricity, which is a dumb thing to incentivize. Sure, we can incentivize the use of electricity, but we can also decide to incentivize something else. A system like bitcoin but that only uses (all of) the CPU 10% of the time incentivizes a lot of cheap compute power for projects that need it. As an example. Algorithms that have similar loads to conventional software encourages more powerful general purpose computers instead of more powerful custom bitcoin ASICS. There are much better things to incentivize.
  - Squithrilve 9y ago
    > but we can also decide to incentivize something else. This needs a proper source. As far as I understand currently only Proof of Work is sound enough to use in real-world scenarios. Also see: http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/#is-a-work-independent-protocol-possible http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/#is-a-work-indep...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- free_everybody 9y ago
  You can't possibly be comparing SSL with bitcoin mining. SSL provides a service that is immediately valuable to all parties. Bitcoin mining is done by people who want to get rich by not doing anything. The price of bitcoin is EXTREMELY speculative no matter how you look at it. What if Bitcoin were to fail for some reason? All the computation dedicated to mining coins which were never spent would be wasted. Entirely different scenarios here.
  - Squithrilve 9y ago
    > SSL provides a service that is immediately valuable to all parties. And Bitcoin does not provide service that is valuable to all parties? > Bitcoin mining is done by people who want to get rich by not doing anything. Calculating SHA256 is hardly anything because we wouldn't be arguing about that, right? > What if Bitcoin were to fail for some reason? You're not concerned about SSL failing for some reason? Heartbleed? > What if Bitcoin were to fail for some reason? That's highly speculative. Besides Ethereum has several failures already and it's still doing fine because there are serveral mechanisms that can be used to resolve such problem (e.g. hardforks).
- kiddico 9y ago
  What are you even getting at here? That is a totally different use case. A display is supposed to always be on, while a cpu should turn off while not in use. When a cpu has no work it slows down to conserve power and reduce heat output. What happens when a monitor has no input data? It goes to sleep. It doesn't just display the last thing and continue processing a stream of data from it's input.
  - Squithrilve 9y ago
    Well Bitcoin is always on because people are constantly using it so it can't "conserve power" just as a constantly on display or CPU can't.
- viraptor 9y ago
  The comparisons fall short. - pixels are being optimised, with displays going closer and closer to true-off all the time - pixels: even whitespace is important next to information - RFC: we're wasting a few bits as a tradeoff for less complicated hardware and less processing power. Not sure if applicable anymore, but reserved fields and consistent parsing saved us some power/materials historically. - SSL provides security and privacy in your communication at a cost reasonable for the outcome. It's only logical they if we don't need to spend the energy to mine coins, we should stop doing that sooner then later.
  - Squithrilve 9y ago
    > - pixels: even whitespace is important next to information And protecting money is not important? > - RFC: we're wasting a few bits as a tradeoff for less complicated hardware and less processing power. Not sure if applicable anymore, but reserved fields and consistent parsing saved us some power/materials historically. Well so the RFC reserved bits are waste but also a benefit? Maybe the same is true w.r.t Bitcoin mining? > - SSL provides security and privacy in your communication at a cost reasonable for the outcome. The cost is reasonable in SSL case but unreasonable in Bitcoin case based on what criteria exactly? Remember that SSL relies on PKI that has a lot weaker security guarantees (see Symantec, DigiNotar and your favourite Chinese CA in your OS's trust store).
    - viraptor 9y ago
      > The cost is reasonable in SSL case but unreasonable in Bitcoin case based on what criteria exactly Next to nonexistent cost per connection in standard case of SSL. We can saturate gigabit links using modern hardware with AES-NI. Outside of special deployment cases, the cost is a rounding error. We can't provide this capability in a cheaper way at the moment (or we would do that) On the other hand, we've got Bitcoin which chugs energy/money by design, while other solutions like proof of stake / space / ... exist and are much more energy efficient. People concisely decide to burn money to keep this system running - that's why it's unreasonable.
      - 9y ago
sillysaurus3 9y ago
If Bitcoin reached 2 trillion dollars, it would use about 2% of the world's power. It seems tough to argue that a 2 trillion dollar GDP doesn't merit a 2% increase in power output.
- kiddico 9y ago
  Solid point. Unless of course we can do it with 1% of the world's power, which is what I hope something like proof of space would allow.
- txcwpalpha 9y ago
  Bitcoin's total value being 2 trillion dollars is not the same thing whatsoever as bitcoin being responsible for 2 trillion dollars of GDP. There is no "merit" here. We can have $2 trillion in GDP with paper money, too, and that uses 0% of the world's power.
  - yayitswei 9y ago
    Not 0% if you count the resources required to enforce that paper money.
  - simplify 9y ago
    To be fair, paper money requires banks & bank employees, bullet-proof transportation trucks, government regulation, anti-counterfeit research & technology, and perhaps more.
    - rspeer 9y ago
      Whataboutism is a form of propaganda, not of fairness.
      - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
        Comparing the consequences of alternative solutions to a problem is not whataboutism.
- 9y ago
gaetanrickter 9y ago
You can always create a token basket which could be made up of crypto's that are more eco-friendly. Systems for doing this are described here https://medium.com/@alexanderwestin/3-crowdsales-leveraging-token-baskets-c4c2f9cbe329 https://medium.com/@alexanderwestin/3-crowdsales-leveraging-...
toomim 9y ago
Yes, I watched Bram's talk in Berkeley two weeks ago. It indeed runs with much lower power costs. The cost is the power to do a hard-disk seek every long once in a while, rather than to compute sha256 over and over again. It does incentivize a buildup of physical disk drives. And if it becomes successful, it'll likely spur specialized datacenters and hardware (think specialized tape drives) to try to outcompete in space, so it might end up just as centralized as bitcoin mining. But the power costs will be much lower. There also is a proof-of-time component, that does computation, but it is designed to not be parallelizable, which means that throwing additional power at the problem doesn't help you as much. Instead, imagine that each participant must spend a deterministic length of time to compute a solution, and the person closest to the internet backbone wins. But this proof-of-time component is also smaller subsidiary role to the proof-of-space. So overall, it's a hybrid proof. Bram didn't go into enough detail explaining the actual proof-of-time or space in his talk, so I'm not sure if it all works, but if it does, then you can expect it to use less power. Proof-of-Stake should use even LESS power, though.
- kiddico 9y ago
  Thanks for the explanation. Does the proof of storage allow that storage to continue to be used?/does the proof use the space on a disk? Or is it sort of like mining bitcoin where a gpu is wholly used for mining?
  - tzahola 9y ago
    Certainly the latter. I can imagine proof of space implemented by requiring nodes to store terabytes of random bytes, and compute the hash of specific subsets of this huge blob based on the last block in the ledger.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Proof of Stake is worth being highly skeptical of. The fact that most people blindly support the idea when it seems to leave fundamental questions swept under the rug is worrying. I wish I could give a further critique, but I'm not familiar enough with the subject. There have been several persuasive comments posted to HN on the brittle nature of Proof of Stake, and the lack of hard answers to basic problems. Tacking it on as "this would use even less power" is a sign that perhaps these alternate schemes (including the one in the article) should be taken with a dash of salt and pepper.
zitterbewegung 9y ago
Proof of chia would use disk storage which at idle wouldn’t require processing . So yes because the other way is to use GPUs which would have higher costs for electricity than a disk.
nerdponx 9y ago
There were some attempts at actually doing useful work with all that proof of work: https://curecoin.net/ https://curecoin.net/ http://foldingcoin.net/ http://foldingcoin.net/ https://golem.network/ https://golem.network/ http://primecoin.io/ http://primecoin.io/ and a detailed article about it https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/primecoin-the-cryptocurrency-whose-mining-is-actually-useful-1373298534/ https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/primecoin-the-cryptocur...
- civilian 9y ago
  Aren't curecoin and foldingcoin both centralized? Isn't that a bad property to have as a cryptocurrency?
- chrisallenlane 9y ago
  I'll add Gridcoin, which is a cryptocurrency that rewards BOINC participation: http://www.gridcoin.us/ http://www.gridcoin.us/ I really wish coins like these would catch on more than they have. Proof-of-work is, to the best of my knowledge, the only system that provably works. If we could just harness that computational power to do useful work, we'd be in a great place.
colordrops 9y ago
> flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. This point keeps getting brought up and is patently ridiculous. It is computing something - a hash that is not easily reproducible that prevents attackers from modifying the ledger. And there is no other known way to do this, including proof of stake. I think people who say this are just naysayers that are implying that crypto currencies have no use or value.
- ghthor 9y ago
  And that hard to reproduce hash represents computational trust, which is a new type of resource that just happens to be very expensive in energy cost using our current technology.
  - empath75 9y ago
    It would be expensive by design no matter what the technology.
- jsmthrowaway 9y ago
  I read someone’s estimate — rough, I’ll grant you — that mining bitcoin (just bitcoin) consumes as much total electrical energy as an entire medium-sized nation. Divide network hashrate into how much power the most efficient ASICs use, and I don’t think it’s an unfair estimate. You can’t dismiss the argument that maybe we can do better as “naysaying,” nor that there is something about cryptocurrency that the people making the argument do not understand. How many joules go into making a bitcoin block? (Really, I’m curious.) It doesn’t take the entire output of a coal-fired generator to handle trillions in trade volume on traditional exchanges. Minting coins doesn’t require an entire nuclear plant dedicated to it. Even for newfangled cryptocurrency, the human race can handle a hundredish billion dollar market cap without using that much energy. It’s incredibly wasteful and destructive to our planet. How do you think the Chinese are throwing cheap electricity at all that mining gear? Provinces covered in solar panels? (For that matter, how do you think the Americans are?) Literally the entire concept of mining is brute force through the SHA2 problem space for nothing (to create the currency of value; nobody is saying bitcoin is worthless). Imagine if, instead, you dumped that energy into storage or even useful computation (again: proof of work, not the currency, is useless computation), and what you could do with it. There needs to be acknowledgment that brute force cryptographic hashing is a pretty serious design flaw. We just happen to be working around it now that bitcoin is a Big Deal. To drive this home, Bitfury is building out 30+ MW mining facilities that require immersion cooling in 3M Novec, because state-of-the-art datacenter CRACs aren’t capable of rejecting waste heat from that kind of power density. We are talking 150+ kW cabinet-equivalents, where anything over 15-20 kW per cabinet with CRAC is currently considered noteworthy. AIUI, they have to underclock their gear when relying on datacenter air. Two-phase immersion is a cool, efficient technology that will probably reimagine the datacenter and should be developed further, but machine learning and science workloads are barely starting to crack that nut. Bitcoin ran directly to the front of the line of “incredibly power-intensive workloads that we haven’t encountered in datacenter design before.” That’s good and bad.

gzou 9y ago

What are "proof of space"/"proof of work" ? How do they compare to proof of work/proof of stake ?

kanzure 9y ago
"Beyond Hellman's time-memory tradeoffs with applications to proofs of space" https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  Any ideas about the proof of time which Bram references?

dynofuz 9y ago

so we are going to go from spending energy for "work" to spending energy producing drives for "space". Time to buy some digital storage stock ;)

quickben 9y ago
Or gridcoin. At least Science is advancing with hydro bills there.

sschueller 9y ago

Sounds like IPFS. Why do we need an ICO. Can't we just do it like bitcoin and download a client to start 'mining'?

wyldfire 9y ago
We don't. But dev teams keep creating them. It's IMO much more appropriate for new coins to make an announcement, provide a whitepaper + source, and start the network at time X. But I can (somewhat) sympathize with their desire to be rewarded. What if someone just aims their ASICs/GPUs/cloud cycles at their new coin for the first months after the announcement and reaps the lion's share of the rewards? While that seems unfair to them, it is traditionally the fairest/most honest method.
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
Because nobody skilled is going to build this without payment? this thinly veiled criticism of ICOs has that obvious logical flaw. Computational proofs take a long time for the development team to get funded, and this delays go to market strategies. Look at the graveyard of mineable projects before this year's ICO boom, broke underfunded devs with no ability to mobilize a community to fund the tiniest things. Pitiful bounty systems where the payouts can't even motivate the imagined Indian developer. If you don't think current ICOs align economic incentives well ENOUGH, then discuss that particular nuance instead.
- jameskegel 9y ago
  Also, mining implies PoW, whereas this is not always guaranteed to be the case. It's my favorite, but it's falling out of fashion, unfortunately.
pdog 9y ago
Why would they do all that work for free?
- Domenic_S 9y ago
  Why wouldn't they just pre-mine a bunch of coins and reap benefits that way?

wyldfire 9y ago

> A bitcoin transaction wastes ^H^H^H^H^H^Hcosts -- FTFY. It's not a waste if you actually got something for it. e.g. your chemical ICE in your car produces heat that is useful in cold weather. Not waste heat if it has utility. Electric cars have to spend electrical energy to generate the same heat. That said, the fact that this keeps coming up would indicate that there's definitely a marketplace for a coin that costs less energy/emissions for the same features.

wbkang 9y ago
Waste: use or expend carelessly, extravagantly, or to no purpose.
- wyldfire 9y ago
  IMO it's none of those, and I think I'm being honest and fair here -- not just a bitcoin fanboy. What's the baseline for a corresponding transaction? Maybe that's a credit card which will cost (not waste here either) 1-2% of the purchase price. But even that's not quite fair because the merchant is taking some risk on this purchase that usually amounts to some additional cost. Also credit cards can't be used to secure transactions of >= millions of USD (and if they did it would be at a significantly higher cost). Bitcoin transactions at the low end of that spectrum are prohibitively expensive, though.
  - mrguyorama 9y ago
    Bitcoin doesn't replace credit card transactions or system. You have to judge it by it's actual value, not what it pretends to want to be
    - wyldfire 9y ago
      Yes, fair enough -- it is truly unique and difficult to compare w/credit cards. But to further the debate, how would you evaluate it in these terms ("waste"/"extravagance")? Would you stipulate that it has value or that it at least has utility? What sort of analogy or baseline would you compare it to, so that we could evaluate how efficient or wasteful it is?

Pirolita 9y ago

Filecoin and Burst already do that

jparse 9y ago

I don't see how this is better. It sounds like we have to waste power running hard drives now. Isn't Ethereum's Proof of Stake better?

bglusman 9y ago
I thought so too until I read this http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/#is-a-work-independent-protocol-possible http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/#is-a-work-indep... and, maybe there's counter arguments? But it seemed like a pretty good argument to me.
- 1053r 9y ago
  Your linked argument is poorly formed. It's true that any system which periodically emits value will cause people to work towards achieving that value. However, it's not true that the work in question will necessarily be wasted in an arms race. Specifically, a (well constructed) Proof of Stake system will cause people to work to get a piece of the value by having them purchase the coin used for staking. This will cause the value of the coin on the open market to rise, which will increase the equilibrium market cap of the coin in relation to the world. Because "money is a veil" [1], this won't create or destroy any actual goods or services. It will just transfer value from some persons to other persons. Therefore, Proof of Stake is more efficient than Proof of Work, because it moves cryptocurrency from negative-sum (electricity wasted) to something that's approximately zero-sum. Another way of saying this is that you can't PRODUCE value by creating any currency with zero intrinsic value. However, you can WASTE value in this activity, and Bitcoin, as currently constructed (along with all possible Proof of Work systems) is wasteful. Proof of Stake wastes less value than Proof of Work. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_money
  - deevolution 9y ago
    How does proof of stake prevent double spending if there are no miners to validate blocks? I must be missing something here...

olegkikin 9y ago

So it's nothing new. Ethereum and Peercoin and Nxt do proof of stake.

45h34jh53k4j 9y ago
Slight correction, Ethereum may do PoS in future, it currently does not, it is a PoW CryptoCurrency like bitcoin. Because of the state of miners ETH right now, I suspect it may take a long time to migrate, with several contentious forks. I suspect bitcoin will always be PoW.

codazoda 9y ago

I'm trying to understand... "The three best proofs of space rapidly the propagated through the whole network and proofs of time servers start working on top of them." Should that read, "The three best proofs of space rapidly propagate through..."?

nashashmi 9y ago
... rapidly get propagated ...

amenghra 9y ago

Relevant talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYG0NxoG7yw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYG0NxoG7yw

pmlnr 9y ago

Yay, after pushing GPU prices into madness, now we push storage prices there as well!

Houshalter 9y ago
In the long run it will make them both cheaper.
- akerro 9y ago
  YAY a GPU from a year ago that had 100% GPU usage for full 11months with cheap cooling is on sale now for 20% of its initial price!
  - dharma1 9y ago
    I think s/he means more volume leads to lower prices (in the long run)
    - akerro 9y ago
      and we see that on GPU marker were prices are going up all the time since 2 years ago...

durkie 9y ago

so this has been an issue that keeps coming up for a while, but i don't really understand the issue. * As others have asked, how much is bitcoin supposed to use? What's the right amount and why? How is that number better/worse than the amount of resources spent on existing financial infrastructure? * We are rapidly progressing towards an era of free (extremely cheap) clean power. Just today (https://electrek.co/2017/11/08/chilean-solar-down-26-as-important-as-saudi-arabia-at-1-79%c2%a2-kwh/ https://electrek.co/2017/11/08/chilean-solar-down-26-as-impo...) incredibly low bids for solar projects were submitted in Chile at 2.15c/kWh. That's insanely cheap. We're not there yet in having ubiquitous cheap clean power obviously, but neither is bitcoin "there" in being able to replace much of traditional financial infrastructure. But the point still stands: will bitcoin's energy usage still matter in the not-too-distant future?

paulgb 9y ago
The problem is that with a competitive mining market, Bitcoin energy use will rise until the cost of mining a block is equal to the reward for that block (i.e. market equilibrium). So if the cost of energy goes down but the price of Bitcoin stays constant, the amount of energy expenditure will be (approximately) equal. Likewise, if the price of Bitcoin goes up, the amount of energy used will go up accordingly. The reward amount will decrease over time and mitigate this, but not enough by a long shot IMO.
- nas 9y ago
  This is a key observation. Now apply it to the "eco-friendly" and PoS schemes. The same economics apply. For Bram's coin and PoS systems, the costs spent will rise to equal the block reward. So, you are basically doing something more complicated to end up with the same amount of economic waste. In the proof of space version, maybe you will be building millions of hard drives, running them to failure and then throwing them away.
  - mopierotti 9y ago
    This answer written by the Ethereum team addresses why cost spent won't necessarily rise to equal block reward in their PoS formulation. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ#doesnt-mc--mr-mean-that-all-consensus-algorithms-with-a-given-security-level-are-equally-efficient-or-in-other-words-equally-wasteful https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ#doe...

goodroot 9y ago

I understand the argument regarding power consumption. However, if we're going to green wash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing) a cryptocurrency, we need to focus on more than power consumption. Given that power is getting cheaper and cleaner through solar[1, 2], this is asking people to further accumulate more waste and precious metals in the form of fixed drives. This is not eco-friendly and it's dubious to assert such. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-22/solar-power-to-grow-sixfold-as-sun-becoming-cheapest-resource https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-22/solar-pow... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/for-cheapest-power-on-earth-look-skyward-as-coal-falls-to-solar https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/for-cheap...

freeloop3 9y ago
Bitcoin adjusts difficulty based on how many people mine it. So cheap power doesn't reduce the cost, since it will just mean even more mining.
- tpallarino 9y ago
  Exactly, the amount of money spent on energy to mine is equal to the amount of mining revenue. Energy consumption is more closely related to price.
  - jwilliams 9y ago
    Nod - I'm coming to the conclusion that the effective store of value is the mining infrastructure. Even if it's not that explicit, they move in lock-step.
    - fe2ijwe99 9y ago
      Isn't that true of basically any computing task? Can't generate AI, websites, etc with the computing infrastructure. No software patents if no computers to create software.

DonHopkins 9y ago

Proof of work is conspicuous consumption economics.

craigc 9y ago

There are already blockchains that do not require proof of work (Lisk, Nav, Dash, NEO, etc) and already storage based blockchains (Filecoin, Storj, Sia, Maidsafe, etc). It is unclear to me what Chia brings to the table that is really new.

mandelliant 9y ago
The storage based blockchains don't use storage space as a means of verification- they're storage product focused (you buy/rent/use/sell storage space on the platform as a commodity). That's not what Chia does; it seems like its primary use will be store of value/transactions like Bitcoin. It's the "green" alternative to BTC- I wouldn't call Filecoin, Storj, Sia, Maidsafe, etc. competitors to Bitcoin (and I don't think they're trying to be that). While Lisk, Nav, Dash, etc do use alternatives to proof of work, what Chia is doing, from my understanding of what they're saying, is using the lowest cost alternative to proof of work, which is proof of storage (disclaimer, I don't know the math behind proof of storage, just that it's their alternative to PoW). However, proof of storage alone has some inherent vulnerabilities so they compensate with another mechanism, proof of time (again, not sure of the math). Edit: punctuation
- craigc 9y ago
  Ahhhh. I somehow missed that while reading the article. Thanks that makes more sense. When I saw Bittorrent and storage I think my brain immediately jumped to the storage based tokens. Curious to read about and see how that works
  - dpiers 9y ago
    My understanding is that your computer computes the answer to a difficult calculation ahead of time and stores the output up to a specified size (ex. 1GB worth of digits of pi) . Proof-of-Space asks you to respond with a segment of the output at a certain offset. The amount of time given to respond is less than the amount of time it would take to calculate the output, and so by replying you prove that you had it stored already.

kentiko 9y ago

Paper on proofs of space: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf

idibidiart 9y ago

"Capitalizing, Capitalizing, Capitalizing." Paraphrasing Fake Yoda (Mel Brooks) from Space Balls

xwvvvvwx 9y ago

What is the advantage (if any) of this over proof of stake?

corford 9y ago
<snark>it might actually work</snark> :)

giancarlostoro 9y ago

So... One thing I missed is, how do you mine Chia? Do you mine it? How much will there be... these are the questions, is it technically a cryptocurrency or just a digital currency?

placeybordeaux 9y ago

So instead of running through circuits that are stateless you'd run through circuits that are stateful. I don't see how this would assuredly reduce the total energy used.

nickik 9y ago

There already is delegated prove of stake algorithms that solves the power consumption problem.

eof 9y ago
I have never understood what stops POS algorithms from being havens for opportunistic cheating. There is no punishment for spending energy on attacking the network unsuccessfully because you are still also playing good with the majority. In POW schemes you can only use your mining power on a single chain; in POS it seems like you can "stake" every competing chain simultaneously.
- wmf 9y ago
  you can "stake" every competing chain simultaneously This is called the "nothing at stake" problem and people have been proposing solutions for a few years but so far none of the solutions have stuck.
- warbiscuit 9y ago
  Ethereum's Casper uses the solution that while validator A could double-vote for multiple blocks, validator B could take those multiple vote messages, and submit them as cryptographic proof of A's dishonesty. By submitting such proof, the protocol would allow slashing A's stake, and giving some portion to B as a reward for catching them. Thus validators are strongly incentivized to only vote for one block at the end of the chain.

mrb 9y ago

«A bitcoin transaction wastes as much electricity as it takes to power an American home for a week» This is false, or at best a deceptive statement.¹ A transaction does not consume energy. It's like saying each bit on a CD-ROM "use fuel" when it's shipped on a mail truck. Miners work on a hash of a block, so the number of transactions in the block is independent of energy use. For example the transaction rate could double tomorrow, without increasing energy consumption. [¹] Also, this metric is derived from Digiconomist, which is flawed as it overestimate consumption by a factor of 2: http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/

SilasX 9y ago
You're right, in a sense. However, mining is using a certain amount of energy per block, and each block has a limited amount of transactions. So it's reasonable to amortize the cost of the bitcoin network over the transactions and so, in another sense, each transaction maps to its share of the power consumed in a block. It would be equally fair (and it would be fair) to say that the shipping cost of a CD is equal to its mass- or volume share of the cost of the truck delivery, and indeed, that's how you'd correctly quantify e.g. the environmental cost of Netflix's DVD-by-mail (it doesn't work to just say "one more disc doesn't cost any more so the environmental cost is zero"): http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_lantern/2008/08/video_stores_vs_online_rentals.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_l...
- mrb 9y ago
  But the limit in the number of transactions is not a technical limit, it's a political limit. We chose arbitrarily to set the limit to 4 million segwit weight units, however it could be changed to anything without impacting energy consumption. Therefore your analogy is incorrect: if the cargo capacity of a truck is increased, it will certainly impact its fuel consumption.
  - SilasX 9y ago
    >But the limit in the number of transactions is not a technical limit, it's a political limit. We chose arbitrarily to set the limit to 4 million segwit weight units, however it could be changed to anything without impacting energy consumption. It's at least partly a technical limit, because there are technical issues faced by scaling the Bitcoin network to the arbitrarily large number of transactions/sec you think it can handle. Each scaling solution has its tradeoffs[1][3], and therefore, to the extent that there's no "free [scaling] lunch", then there is inherent scarcity to what the miners can support, and therefore transactions should be attributed their proportional share of that limit when accounting for them. It only appears as a political limit because a) users generally don't want a fragmented network, and b) there's persistent disagreement on what tradeoffs are acceptable when scaling. >Therefore your analogy is incorrect: if the cargo capacity of a truck is increased, it will certainly impact its fuel consumption. What is that responding to? The issue was how to account for the cost of one unit that takes up a scarce slot in a known-cost thing. The fair (IMHO) solution, per previous comment, is "blame" each unit for its share of the total cost. How does an increase in the truck's capacity refute the analogy? The same logic would hold: if trucks could carry more Netflix DVDs at the same [environmental or whatever] cost, it would be reasonable to say that the cost per DVD shipped also went down. If trucks had infinite capacity, then it would be fair to say that the DVDs have no cost, since the cost inputs are independent of problem size (number of DVDs to ship). But -- per [1] and above -- we don't live in that world. [1] For example, if you simply said "each block can hold as many transactions as miners are willing to tolerate" [2], that risks making the ledger (blockchain) freakishly large. Since each node has to store the full ledger, that blowup, in turn, risks [excessive] centralization, where only a few miner-datacenters can run nodes, defeating the (or a major) point of Bitcoin. [2] which you think would make transaction capacity non-scarce [3] Wiki page for discussing the issues: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

lossolo 9y ago

This is a copy of Burstcoin[1], this "inventor" had many other "ideas" in last years that all were copies of other people ideas and were total disasters, he is riding his reputation he got from bittorrent. It will probably end with ICO, people will invest money treating that just as financial instrument that you can speculate on, then when implementation will come it will end like all those others alt coins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstcoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstcoin

c-smile 9y ago

Can we just use IP addresses (or similar finite at time set) as coins then? And torrent alike distributed network that will support proof of ownership and transactions. Like I am owning 123.245.189.123 address and tons of peers nearby know that...

corford 9y ago

Just the fact it's Bram Cohen behind this is enough to get me excited. Watching https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/2006069823011271/ https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/200606982... I love when he talks about the off by one error in Bitcoin's difficulty reset calculation and how almost all other blockchains have mindlessly copied this :)

marknadal 9y ago
Hey, I was there at the event (I did the lightning talk at the beginning). Would love to answer any questions about Chia that anybody has, that I learned first-hand from Bram.
- apexalpha 9y ago
  Going to watch the video in a bit but I've got a question: could I turn my home NAS into a farmer for this blockchain simply by reserving some of my storage space for it or does it still require a lot of computing power (CPU/GPU)?
  - marknadal 9y ago
    That should work :) although it would need to be connected up to the network so it could reply to proof queries and "thread the needle" of the time servers.
- Cakez0r 9y ago
  How does the proof of storage work and will proof of time be decentralised across all nodes in the network, or a subset of trusted nodes?
  - marknadal 9y ago
    The paper on storage proof is here: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893 https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893 The proof of time is probably best described as being federated. Any peer can join, but it realistically will only be run by a very few peers with specialized hardware. This mistakenly trips up a lot of people as a "bad" thing, when it shouldn't. The only purpose of the proof-of-time servers is to make replay attacks impractical. As in, if the network is 10 years old, an attacker would actually have to spend 10 provable years to manipulate it. What if they collude with the time server? Well, they'd have to collude with all of them, which is unlikely, even if there are only a few. And second, it isn't worth the time server's work. Again, the details are a lot more complicated, but hopefully that is a quick off-the-top-of-my-head explanation that gives some intuition.

marknadal 9y ago

I met Bram just last week (and had the honor to do a lightning talk before his Chia presentation!), and I want to clear up some things that people seem confused about: 1. Power consumption. Bram brought up a good point if we take Bitcoin to its ultimate extreme, that it will be people with access to nuclear energy (aka governments) that will take over mining bitcoin, since that is the cheapest route. This does not look like a decentralized future, exactly the opposite. 2. Proof of Time. There are attacks that can happen against purely storage based proofs. Bram's brilliant addition here is a proof of time to get around those problems. I can explain more if people want. NOTE: Filecoin's "Proof of Time and Space" has nothing to do with, nor is remotely related to, Bram's. 3. Decentralized Storage. Despite Bram's prolific work in decentralized storage systems, Chia has nothing to do with storing end user data (like Storj, Sia, Maidsafe, etc.). The data that is stored is junk, but that is okay (see below). 4. Storage waste. One of Bram's points is that this will start an arms race to build better harddrives. If people are successful at that, this will only make Chia better, and also make storage in general cheaper for everyone. So sure, maybe the proofs are wasting storage space, but it will make storage in general more economical. Anything else I can answer in more detail? Here is the presentation he (and I) did at Berkeley: https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/2006069823011271 https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/200606982...

formol 9y ago
Any opinion on Nem ? Built from scratch, proof of importance, featureful (contracts, notary, supports currencies creation, fast..) It’s well tested in the banking sector... Chia announce sounds like : « hi, I’m another sh*tcoin with lots of big money from the crypto bubble »
cstork12 9y ago
One fundamental question, whose answer I must have missed: What's the incentive to process transactions?

petre 9y ago

If you think video cards are more expensive due to Bitcoin, just wait and see hard drive prices skyrocket if this cryptocurrency gains popularity. It isn't exactly eco friendly because hard drive manufacturers will try to fill that demand by producing more drives that will end up empty.

4714 9y ago

www.chia.network

m3kw9 9y ago

The power needed to create a HD need to be accounted for and the metal supply that it lowers could create issues that needs electricity to make up for, just a theory.

oever 9y ago

Is there an incentive to store the blockchain itself? A proof of space might be derived from the blockchain history. The would create an incentive to store the blockchain. That way the proof of space is a useful use of space.

pelasaco 9y ago

there is already a eco-friendly bitcoin. It's name is Peercoin.

imron 9y ago

I could have started mining Bitcoin back when you could mine them on a desktop PC, but never did. I think I'll try my hand at Chia farming until I have 1,000 or so on the off chance it hits $7,000 one day too.

apexalpha 9y ago

So could I run a node on my Home NAS/server thathas some TB left for storage? Or would it still require a decent GPU and or CPU to make it viable? Is there any site with more technical details?

mangecoeur 9y ago

I work in energy efficiency, so bitcoin makes me cry. Any sane clean energy transition plan requires significant savings (no you can't just build a bunch of PV). But while we are killing ourselves trying to get people to adopt green buildings and low energy appliances, along comes Bitcoin where people just burn energy for nothing.

kenpomeroy 9y ago
It doesn't sound like you really understand how Bitcoin works. If Bitcoin were to become widely adopted and supplant traditional financial institutions, the environmental impact would be enormously net positive. Sure, it takes energy to confirm transactions. But, we could massively decrease energy consumption by eliminating the need for: bank buildings, armored vehicles, physically printing money, etc.
- albertgoeswoof 9y ago
  But you could eliminate all of those things without bitcoin, and they are actively being reduced already. There's nothing special about blockchains that will mean people suddenly won't use physical money, have a bank on their high street etc.
- simias 9y ago
  I don't believe that at all. The idea that everybody would walk around with their own hardware wallet and sign transactions directly when buying bread seems as likely to me as having the average public drop facebook chat for IRC. People want simplicity, people want convenience. People don't want to risk losing their life savings because they get scammed or because their secret keys become compromised or destroyed. People want banks, or at least a subset of what banks do. People want insurance, people want chargeback. People want to get loans to buy houses and cars. Bitcoin solves a tiny portion of the service provided by banks. A lot of what bank does is getting automated anyway, now you have banks that are only available online who probably need a lot less personnel and obviously fewer buildings. Armored vehicles and printing money can be replaced by credit and debit cards, no blockchain needed. I personally use cash less and less, and I know it's a trend in many (albeit not all) countries.

vorotato 9y ago

If this is open source, I'll use it and if it's not I won't.

jancsika 9y ago

The incentives seem designed to make it not-so-profitable to have big rigs with lots of hard-drive space. That design seems to be an effort to keep the mining fairly decentralized so that it happens across a greater number of commodity machines. But if available drive space and, as Bram says in his talk, even unallocated space, can be efficiently leveraged to back this cryptocurrency, this suddenly creates an incentive for the companies like Microsoft, Oracle, or even Symantec to start doing shenanigans in the background in order to mine Chia coins on billions of machines. The only thing currently stopping them is the egregious resource-usage of extant POW-based cryptocurrencies. Plus, there are already cases where all those companies take advantage of users resources like screen real estate, installers, usage data, etc., when the resource usage is minimal (or, in some cases with Windows 10, even above minimal). So if you make a fungible cryptocurrency that consumes less power and targets commodity machines, aren't you essentially asking the big players to battle it out to control the unused space across billions of machines? Imagine the annoying oscillation between browsers for default primacy, except that battle is now between language vendors, os vendors, device vendors, etc.

daggerhashimoto 9y ago

The energy put into Proof-of-work is what makes the system immutable. People who complain about bitcoin's energy use, don't seem to grasp what makes the bitcoin Blockchain immutable. In order to change the Database, you have to go back and do the "work" which becomes practically impossible after approx. 10 blocks. You take that away and you'll make the system Tamper evident, and not Tamper Proof as it is right now. It's the only secure data base ever invented, and thats because of the energy used to secure it. I don't see these people complaining how much energy Las Vegas wastes. Or Hollywood. What about professional sports? How much energy does going to war cost? All of these are less important than the only sovereign moneys system in the history of man-kind. So, please, stop complaining about the energy use, i left my violin at home.

visarga 9y ago

Fun to see the heated Bitcoin discussion and imagine that much of that heat comes from people having invested previously and now defending their decision.

scotty79 9y ago

He should make a coin backed up by how much data miner shares through bittorrent.

orionblastar 9y ago

This sounds like what Richard proposed for Pied Piper in the HBO series Silicon Valley? Instead of power, use storage instead. Get a cheap PC, install Linux on it, get a 16T hard drive to store the Chiacoins and blockchain.