BitTorrent Creator Says Vitalik’s ASIC Resistant PoW Is A Bad Idea

BitTorrent Creator Bran Cohen, mostly known for his authorship of the peer-to-peer BitTorrent protocol, responded to some of the opinions that Vitalik Buterin had about the state of technology around cryptocurrencies and we are about to find out more in the latest cryptocurrency news.

Cohen who is now the CEO of Chia network explained on Twitter why he believes that many of Vitalik’s opinions on his blog post which addresses the ‘’hard-problems’’ in cryptocurrency are ‘’wrong-headed.’’

The BitTorrent Creator started out by punching a few hits at Vitalik’s views on blockchain scalability and sharding where the Ethereum co-founder pointed out that a fully sharded blockchain still has not been seen in action despite the sharded Zilliqa which started running as of recently. Sharding is not the only option that is able to solve blockchain scalability as Cohen explained. He pointed out to the payment channel networks which are much more appealing and are becoming a ‘’real thing’’:

 “What Ethereum’s proposing for sharding further breaks this by essentially requiring miners to have all the shards, which is… not sharding, it’s just further redefining ‘full node’ to mean less than it did before.”

Ethereum settled on the ASIC-resistance proof-of-work algorithm EthHASH back in 2015 which according to Vitalik prove to be extremely successful at resisting ASIC. However, Vitalik’s view on the ASIC-resistance POW is that there is a growing consensus that the resistant algorithms have a limited lifespan and that the ASIC resistance has downsides as they make 51% attacks much cheaper. Choen seems to agree that the ASIC-resistance PoW is a bad idea since it is much smarter to be ASIC-friendly because ‘’ASIC resistance just creates more centralization around manufacture when it inevitably fails.”

Bran Cohen’s tech firm Chia Network released its green paper that describers an eco-friendly mean of mining crypto. Chia proposed a farming method rather than mining to verify the blockchains that issue cryptocurrencies. According to the paper:

 “Instead of using proofs of work, Chia alternates proofs of space with verifiable delay functions. This results in a chain than in many aspects is similar to Bitcoin, in particular, as in Bitcoin no synchronisation is needed and we can prove rigorous security guarantees assuming a sufficient fraction of the resource (space in Chia, computation in Bitcoin) is controlled by honest parties.”