Coronavirus Second Order Effects and Improving on Bitcoin With BitTorrent Creator Bram Cohen

The best Sundays are for long reads and deep conversations. Last week the Let's Talk Bitcoin! Show spoke with BitTorrent Creator and Chia CEO Bram Cohen to discuss the lasting effects of Coronavirus lockdowns and how he believes he's improved on Satoshi's approach to distributed consensus.

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See also: PODCAST: ‘Let’s Talk Bitcoin!’ Hosts Discuss Libra, China and Cargo Cults

On this episode BitTorrent creator and Chia CEO Bram Cohen joins the hosts of Let's Talk Bitcoin! to discuss:

• Topic 1 - Second Order Impacts of Coronavirus Lockdowns
• Social distancing and the revenge of the Hikikomori
• Coronavirus second order effects
• It’s an extroverts world but we’re all introverts this month
• The AOL moment for Zoom meetings and arguing the potato
• Interpersonal compression, 'zoomers' and enforced quality time
• Will overall deaths go down because of pandemic lockdowns?
• The end of “Bus Mode” for Lyft and Uber
• Autonomous vehicles, grocery deliveries and the last mile problem
• Tampons, cocktail sausages and a very weird month
• This episode is sponsored by eToro
• A friendly government delivery service?
• Opportunities in sterilization and social changes that’ll last
• Automated cleansing cycles and Far-UVC
• Internet infrastructure, Netflix social signaling and the recycling dilemma
• Masks, headphones and the changing standard of social isolation
  
• TOPIC 2 - How the creator of BitTorrent thinks he’s created a less wasteful, more distributed, more secure approach to Nakamoto Consensus
• Decentralized systems and the critical success of BitTorrent
• Naming projects, vegetables and a list of grains
• Proof of Space and Time
• Warehouses of computers, competitive money burning and Keynesian stimulus
• Proof of Work works and that’s a huge accomplishment, but could be better
• Centralization, Nakamoto consensus and Proof of Stake
• Moats and losing the battle with ASIC-hard consensus algorithms
• “Grinding attacks” as the competitive strategy
• Fundamental economics, storage capacity and the loophole
• Airdrops for something over-resourced and under-provisioned
• Losing money on buying “farming” hardware
• The early days of bitcoin mining with CPUs
• Power and CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs
• Hard Drives, hard drives, hard drives and hard drives
• Storing data as proof, but not peoples data is like Proof of Work; the work isn’t useful, it’s just a measuring stick that doesn’t need your name or a long term commitment
• Printing lottery tickets with ASICs vs. a hard drive full of bingo cards
• Proofs of Space need Proofs of Time
• Less wasteful by using an underutilized resource
• More distributed because excess hard drive capacity is already distributed and there is no “ASIC” equivalent possible for hard drives. Just better or faster hard drives
• More secure because less wasteful and more distributed equal better security in distributed consensus
• Breaking, tweaking and proving proofs of time and space
• Miners don’t run data centers
• UTXOs, message passing on-chain programming environments and walking a fine line between Bitcoin and Ethereum
• Rate limiting wallets and reversible paper wallets
• Improving colored coins
• Decentralized exchange doesn’t need decentralized exchanges
• Farming, pre-farming, farming rewards and trailing emissions
• Why pre-farm?
• Is it viable to farm with AWS?
• Carrying hundred dollar bills and Chia’s business model involves loaning Tokens To Large International Companies
• Covenants replicate many banking system benefits without requiring banks or centralization
• Complexity, Bitcoin Script and Protocol Level Improvements

This episode was sponsored by eToro.com, with music by Jared Rubens, Gurty Beats and Adam B. Levine. Today's show featured Bram Cohen, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Stephanie Murphy, Jonathan Mohan and Adam B. Levine with editing by Jonas.

Listen/subscribe to the CoinDesk Podcast feed for unique perspectives and fresh daily insight with Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocketcasts, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Stitcher, RadioPublica, IHeartRadio or RSS.