Decentralized, digital currencies will soon evolve from being a futuristic concept to a mainstream reality. They’ll offer liquidity to those who live in countries with poorly run or corrupt central banks, and offer a universal currency for streamlined financial transfers. Currency not tied to the banking system is an idea whose time has come.

But like any new technology, digital coins bring new complications. The biggest thorn in this new wave of digital money? Sustainability.

Most digital currencies, including bitcoin, are created by solving “proofs-of-work,” which means servers working at full capacity to solve complex equations. …

Thank you to everyone who participated in the first round of Chia Network’s Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) competition. The round concluded on January 3rd, 2019 with many excellent submissions from the participants. The quality of the entries exceeded our expectations, and we’re happy that the competition format proved successful. The teams used a variety of approaches, contributed to interesting discussions on our Keybase channels, and massively improved upon our reference implementation. The entries are helping us learn a lot about how to create a better VDF.

We’re excited to announce the results of Track 1 for this first round of…

Chia Network recently launched a three month long competition to create faster implementations of our proofs of time and get a better handle on its security requirements. The Verifiable Delay Function Competition (VDF, aka proof of time) is open to anyone, has $100,000 in total prize money, and is running until January 3rd, 2019.

In the interests of making it as easy as possible to join the competition, this post gives an overview of the different tracks, as well as step-by-step instructions one how to submit an entry. The full details of the competition are available on our Github page.

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A recent podcast speculated quite a bit about the economics of Chia Network’s new proof of space and time consensus algorithm.

Let’s discuss the assertion that there are optimizations in storage technology allow for the creation of specialized Chia farming hardware that costs an order of magnitude less than commodity disks.

Even if it were possible to make such advantaged specialized hardware, it would likely be unprofitable to purchase storage solely for the purpose of farming. There’s $140 billion in storage capacity sold every year and a large fraction of that is unused and can easily be made to farm…