The Chia cryptocurrency went public in May of 2021 and shortly after, became popular in the storage industry.
Chia was founded by Bram Cohen who is also the creator of the BitTorrent network.
It is developing a better decentralized, more efficient, and more secure smart transaction and blockchain platform.
ChiaLisp, Chia’s new enterprise-level programming language, makes Chia powerful, transparent and secure.
Like other cryptocurrencies, it was created to be a global digital currency that is difficult to embezzle and is popularly called the greenest cryptocurrency because of the model it runs on.
Chia, like Bitcoin, is powered by the original Nakamoto Consensus algorithm, with the difference between them being in the way the coins are created.
This is because, while Bitcoin uses the Proof of Work model which entails people mining crypto by using powerful computers to solve difficult puzzles which is very energy-intensive, it uses Proof of Space and Time which entails using the bits of unused storage on almost any computer as a plot via a process called farming.
This makes Chia more sustainable and accessible to people who are just entering the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Its process is similar to actual farming but in this case, you clear a field (delete any files that are taking up space on your storage devices), then you plough and plant seeds on the field (compute a plot for Chia), then wait for yields.
Farming Chia is cheaper and it does not require extensive power to process neither does it need one-time-use hardware but one thing is for sure, farming Chia takes time.
It is farmed when the software writes a large chunk of cryptographic data (known as plot), to a computer hard disk.
Chia coins are won and like new currencies, it relies on the random numbers that miners fill in their storage space.
Then the Chia blockchain software announces a challenge to which you have to have a close enough answer to the challenge in order for you to win fresh Chia tokens.
Explicitly, what happens is that the its blockchain generates its own random number, while a miner with the closest match with what the Chia blockchain generated becomes the winner.
The amount of storage space you have available for Chia determines your chances of winning the blockchain and how hard the challenge gets.
When it comes to efficiency, it can be said that Chia is inarguably more energy-efficient than Bitcoin because Chia mining data centers will look like cold storage than Bitcoin mining centers that are known for being hot.
However, Chia has caused a scarcity of solid-state drive (SSD) which its initial plotting process is usually done on. Also, it produces huge quantities of e-waste due to the components of the SSDs which cause pollution because they are unrecyclable.
Looking to invest in crypto? ensure you conduct extensive research before investing as the crypto market is very volatile.
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