A lot of the feedback I received from my recent request (Thank you again to everyone who replied) centered around how I cant be trusted because I have been negative on some of Chia Network’s strategic decisions and action in the past. And I have. And I will again, I’m sure. But I quite like the Chia Project, Chia Network team and a lot of things about the technology so I’m going to take a moment to expand on that a little here.
First, the technology. While the initial client implementation isn’t perfect, and I think it could be improved, its also really good. It is not built from a pile of Java applets, it is c wrapped in python, which is very high performance, and secure language – for running in properly secured infrastructure. It is easily auditable and with enough eyes on it and doing active development it will likely stay pretty secure. I do think there is a lot of room for improvement because of dependencies, and there is just a risk to running inbound ports into Windows PCs, but I don’t want that mistaken for thinking the entire setup is bad. It is not. As the ecosystem matures (we are still less than 6 months into mainnet here) I suspect this will continue to improve until the quality of the software meets my expectations.
The consensus mechanism itself is, in my opinion, truly next generation. While it isn’t perfect, it has all of the benefits of a Proof of Work (PoW) system while addressing some of the main problems. For all that we like to discuss the nuances of how much environmental impact Chia really makes, its blindingly obvious that the problems created by Bitcoin or Ethereum are on an entirely different level. And unlike proof of stake, which also solves the environment impact, Chia is not relegated to the very rich, or friends of the developers. In fact its even more accessible than ASIC-resistant PoW because you can build a farm on the power and tools available to people at home even in less developed areas of the world with less developed infrastructure. Digital Spaceport and I just touched on this, our traffic maps show an extremely diverse userbase for Chia. More more spread out than for other cryptocurrencies.
And to the diversity, I think this is another core strength of Chia that we should focus more on. From giant internship programs in Africa, to a highly active fanbase in China, to pools in Korea, Europe and around the world Chia has an international footprint from day one. People are excited about this technology everywhere because it meets the basic premise of Bitcoin better than Bitcoin does at this point. That doesn’t mean it will succeed for sure, but it does mean that if Chia does see wide adoption there is a good chance that we see it everywhere.
Something else I like is the fee structure, as in there isn’t one right now. They have no need to eliminate or redistribute coin right now when there is plenty of transaction space in the blockchain. Even though transactions accelerated to a great degree after the release of the on-chain pooling protocol, its still only around 10% of available blockspace.
As to the Chia team, this is another major strength. There is a lot of focus on Bram Cohen – too much focus, if you ask me. The entire team has been hired from successful software companies working on real world projects, not from some Crypto Pump telegram channel. The reason I am so critical on them is that they are a very real company with real aspirations to be an enterprise. They are held to a much higher standard than other cryptocurrency companies because they hold themselves to that standard. This is their pitch to investors, and it is their pitch to us as farmers. Take J. Eckert, Sargonas on social media. He is their Vice President of Ecosystem Operations. He came from Riot Games, as an Ecosystem Manager for League of Legends. If you are unfamiliar with the League of Legends ecosystem and player base, then just be assured that we are a fuzzy pile of kittens comparatively. This is not a person you hire if you think your community will be small, or short lived.
They are also extremely engaged with the community, sometimes to a fault. They don’t spend any time convincing people to buy Chia or inferring that the price is going to go “to the moon” or anything like that. They are mostly interested in having people use their network and build on their project. They are planning on deploying hundreds of thousands of real dollars to community project grants. They have made the point before that if they were going to run off with their pre-farm they wouldn’t have so many millions of dollars doing development before launching into production.
I don’t think they do everything right, not by a long shot, but I do think the things they do right outweigh they things they do wrong. And the things they do wrong are growing pains as they transition from a startup to an enterprise. All companies have them, it would be almost more concerning if they didn’t.
I am not a cryptocurrency fan in general. It interests me, but lots of things do, But Chia is different, and it has caught my attention. I think there is a lot of long term viability here. As you can see, I am just a small farmer.
