Hacker News Reader

Comment by dchuk | Hacker News Reader

This new crypto project just launched its mainnet a few weeks ago: https://chia.net

It's a novel "Proof of" algorithm (Proof of Space and Time) that front loads the resource needs into a Plotting phase, with a very efficient Farming phase after that to process blocks with transactions. Seems like a much more fair, sustainable model for having a secure digital currency.

It also has an interesting, Lisp based programming language on it.

But what excites me is that it's lead by Bram Cohen, the dude who invented BitTorrent, one of the best pieces of tech I've used nearly my whole tech life.

View on HN

I think you mean https://www.chia.net

yep, you're right. I'll fix.

Thank you very much! The idea to have all the computations already in place and just play bingo/lotto is awesome. This is the true spirit of defi

The people who have the most hard drive space will mine the most Chia. How is that any different to just paying with USD to get more? In terms of it being a "much more" fair model.

I think the big part is that farming with hard drives is a much more approachable thing to do than to try and mine BTC/ETH, considering both of those at a minimum require crazy GPU hardware, if not full blown custom chips, that no normal people will buy. Also, insane energy usage too, which Chia doesn't really have.

That being said, yes, with the right amount of investment, someone could try and take over the network. That being said, look how many Full Nodes are already in the network...

https://www.chiaexplorer.com/charts/nodes

Not just the most hard drive space, but the very specific fast kinds of hard drives you need to farm it efficiently.

The idea that you can do a sustainable cryptocurrency that remains sustainable no matter how valuable the tokens become in real money terms is self-evidently ridiculous. There's always some limiting resource you'll hit first, and if the cryptotokens are worth real money, that resource will get scarce.

But Chia is a good example of a brilliant person being so seduced by a challenging technical problem that they lose any ability to see foundational problems that people with a tenth of the brampower would be able to spot instantly.

Like you, I'm struggling to see how this is substantially different from proof of work, besides trading one limited resource (GPUs and power) for another (disks). It surely still comes down to real-world money - whoever can afford to buy the most disks can mine the most crypto.

"Good artists copy, great artists steal".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_space

Reply on news.ycombinator.com