Odd Lots
BitTorrent Founder’s New Cryptocurrency Sends Shares of Hard-Drive Makers Soaring
A Seagate Technology employee moves disk platters at the company's hard-disk-drive assembly plant in Singapore.
Photographer: Jonathan Drake/Bloomberg
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Chia is a brand-new cryptocurrency developed by Bram Cohen, who most people know as the creator of the p2p filesharing protocol BitTorrent.
The timing of the launch is auspicious. Because we’re in this huge crypto bull market (the last few days notwithstanding), the new coin already has a fully diluted market cap of nearly $28 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. Even more notable, perhaps, is that Chia uses a security model that advertises itself as less energy-intensive than traditional mining, which, thanks to Elon Musk, is suddenly a thing that a lot of people are very focused on.