Chia built its entire identity on being the clean alternative to Bitcoin. No energy-hungry mining rigs, no warehouse-sized data centers running around the clock - just unused hard drive space doing gentle, planet-friendly work. A new academic study says that story doesn't hold up.
Researchers found that Chia Network's actual carbon emissions are 18 times higher than the company's own claims, with real-world output measured at 0.88 million metric tons of CO2 per year. Chia Network, for its part, reportedly acknowledged the figure is "not far off."
The Promise Behind Chia
Chia was designed by BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen as a direct response to Bitcoin's notorious energy footprint. Instead of Proof of Work - where miners race to solve computationally expensive puzzles - Chia uses Proof of Space and Time (PoST). The idea is that you allocate unused storage capacity on hard drives, and the netwo...
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