Chia Blockchain mainnet successfully launched today at 14:00 UTC | Hacker News Reader

Chia Blockchain mainnet successfully launched today at 14:00 UTC

chia.net

27 points0x12345614 comments

Super glad to be a part of the engineering team that built this chain. It's built on solid principles and with an amazing growing community too. Thousands of nodes running already on launch date, hopefully it will be super decentralized :)

This project may appeal to people who are critical of proof-of-work blockchains (like Bitcoin) due to their high energy consumption.

From chia.net: Chia Network develops a blockchain and smart transaction platform created by the inventor of BitTorrent, Bram Cohen. It implements the first new Nakamoto consensus algorithm since Bitcoin in 2008. Proofs of Space and Time replace energy intensive “proofs of work.”

I remember hearing Cohen was working on a crypto ages ago and filed away in the "Neat, wake me up when it's actually real" category. Now it looks like it's actually real.

I'm massively jaded about any and all crypto at this point, but I've always felt if any of them were to really take off, they'd have to be more "practical", down-to-earth in solving solvable problems rather than trying to conquer the whole earth as most of them try to do. This feels very much like that. The #1 issue with Bitcoin IMHO is that it can't be used as everyday currency because it's wildly unstable (speed is a close #2). This cripples adoption massively. In contrast, Chia seems to be deploying several strategies right out of the gate to try to squash wild value fluctuations. Will this work, and will anyone care? Who knows, but it at least seems to be on the right track.

First block: https://www.chiaexplorer.com/blockchain/block/0x7357071bb77d...

This is huge. An alternative to proof of work using extra hard drive space instead of CPU. And anyone with hard drive space can mine/farm! No special hardware needed. Seems possible that this will be a basis for other crypto projects too.

Ha, sadly my measly k32 plot is saying I'll win a block in 8 months. Still, it's a promising alternative to the Bitcoin blockchain. I think this might actually go somewhere. Their GUI is wonderful and dead simple to use.

The GUI is shockingly competent for a 1.0 crypto client. Everything is clear and easy to find. No lag. And it looks pretty to boot. This feels like a product made by people who may have actually known what they were doing. That said, well-designed products fail all the time. Time will tell.

I just heard the creators on the launch livestream say that hey, even if you win one XCH a year that might be enough to pay for a new computer depending on how the market ends up pricing chia so that's not so bad!

Probably cheaper to just buy one XCH then...

Not if you already have extra space on your hard drive! For example I had a couple terabytes lying around from old computers I wasn't using. It's really easy to farm on Chia — people have petabytes running off a raspberry pi.

I wonder if this means more CPUs/GPUs available in the next future, and less HDDs available. Given the current GPU craze, this might be a good time to invest in large HDDs.

So why is this a thing that has to be posted here? Any context?

This is an energy efficient alternative to proof of stake blockchains developed by a team led by Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent. The consensus mechanism is similar to proof of work, except that it basically recycles the computational work by storing an indexed cache of intermediate calculations so they can be reused each block until they manage to solve a block puzzle. While the initial "plotting" takes some computational power, once the plots are finished, doing the lookups on these cached intermediary computations is many orders of magnitude more efficient than recomputing then every block. It can be done on a raspberry pi over many terabytes of cached computations.

The inventor of of BitTorrent invents an alternative of proof of work. And implements it.

The only reason this hasn't got more upvotes is because most people can't discern the difference between "another random crypto" and something actually new.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com