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BitTorrent Inventor Bram Cohen Will Start His Own Cryptocurrency (torrentfreak.com)

Posted by msmash on from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.

Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, has showed deep interest in cryptocurrency in the past, and now it looks like he is going to start his own. From a report: Without going into technical details, Cohen believes that Bitcoin is wasteful. He suggests that a cryptocurrency that pins the mining value on storage space rather than processor time will be superior. In an interview with TorrentFreak's Steal This Show, Cohen revealed that his interest in cryptocurrencies is not merely abstract. It will be his core focus in the near future. "My proposal isn't really to do something to BitCoin. It really has to be a new currency," Cohen says. "I'm going to make a cryptocurrency company. That's my plan." By focusing on a storage based solution, BitTorrent's inventor also hopes to address other Bitcoin flaws, such as the 51% attack. "Sometimes people have this misapprehension that Bitcoin is a democracy. No Bitcoin is not a democracy; it's called a 51% attack for a reason. That's not a majority of the vote, that's not how Bitcoin works."

3 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. Obligatory XKCD by dysmal · · Score: 3, Informative

    https://xkcd.com/927/

  2. Re:Retard by Orgasmatron · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you control more than 50% of the nodes storing the blockchain, you can manipulate the currency to your heart's content.

    Except that you can't. If you have more hashing power than the rest of the world combined, you can: change the order of transactions. That's all that you can do.

    --
    See that "Preview" button?
  3. Re:Missing the point by slew · · Score: 3, Informative

    Sorry Bram, but you are missing the point. Hashing is used in bitcoin precisely because it is useless. It can't be faked, and it can't be stored for later. It is an irrevocable commitment right now.

    I wish you luck with monetizing distributed storage, or decentralized distribution, or whatever your new project ends up as. But the design of bitcoin is not a programming challenge for you to solve. It is a carefully interlocked design, made by someone (or some people) who has (or have) a far beyond average understanding of money and cryptography. Many people with less insight have attempted to "improve" things, and all have failed.

    Well, I'm not defending Bram on his quest, but I would say that based on this presentation at least he seems to know enough to know that he doesn't know how to do it yet (which is one step above those that don't even know what they don't know yet)...

    It all may be a failure in the end, but at least there is a germ of an idea in there (which is more than I can say for most snake oil).