BitTorrent Inventor to Create New Cryptocurrency

Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, has vowed to launch his own cryptocurrency in an effort to combat what he calls the “waste” associated with “centralization in Bitcoin mining.” Cohen, who recently took back control of BitTorrent Inc., told the Steal This Show podcast that his proposed cryptocurrency wouldn’t require sapping electricity to mine, and would instead rely on storage space.

“My proposal isn’t really to so something to Bitcoin, it really kind of has to be a new currency,” Cohen told Steal This Show’s Jamie King. “I’m gonna go make a cryptocurrency company. That’s my plan.”

“I have this plan, a slightly crazy plan, for making something that doesn’t have computers burning electricity as part of its mining,” Cohen explained. “The short of it is what you do instead of computers burning electricity to mine you have storage space that’s mining.

“The reason why this is a good thing is kind of subtle,” he added. “Every time there are economic resources that you can apply towards getting rewards people will just keep expending resources to keep getting those rewards, so it will still be wasteful.”

“But, if there’s already been waste that’s happened you are leveraging that waste at no additional cost. Basically, there’s already unbelievably huge amounts of storage purchased, manufactured, sitting there online not doing anything,” Cohen said. “Its value is much greater than the Bitcoin mining rewards that are handed out. So the idea here is to leverage that so there isn’t all this waste in mining.”

During the interview, Cohen also explains the problems encountered by BitTorrent over the last few years, including its disastrous branch-out into production and content licencing. The whole podcast can be heard here.