Bram Cohen
A fundamental character for the crypto world for having developed the Peer to Peer system, one of the foundations of the current crypto world, since Bitcoin and almost all cryptocurrencies work with some version of the “Peer to Peer” protocol, or P2P.
Who is Bram Cohen?
Bram Cohen is an American programmer born in 1975, best known for being the famous author of the BitTorrent point-to-point (P2P) file exchange protocol, also for being the creator of the first program to use that protocol. In addition, he is the co-founder of CodeCon, organizer of “San Francisco Bay Area P2P-Hackers” and co-author of Codeville.
His interest in programming appeared very young, since by the age of 5 he had already learned his first BASIC programming language on the family computer. He was born and studied in New York, Manhattan, at Stuyvesant High School and at the University of Buffalo, but did not graduate as he began working in dot com companies.
In his last years in these companies, his last project, was in a company called “Mojo Nation”, it would allow to separate confidential files into several encrypted pieces that he distributes on computers with this software. This project was thought to be the best program to share files since the programs with that objective at that time took a long time to share large files since they came from a single source, peer.
Consequently, Cohen designed BitTorrent to be able to download files from various sources and thus reduce download time. So the more people owning a file the faster it is to download it.
It is what began to be called a “torrent” (torrent in English) of shared information.
BitTorrent
After resigning from Mojo Nation in 2001, Cohen devoted himself fully to his BitTorrent project. And in Codecon the first idea or “sketch” of this project was presented. After three years, in 2003, the company BitTorrent, inc. Was created. with his brother Ross Cohen and partner Ashwin Navin.
For a time, before founding BitTorrent as a company, he dedicated himself to video game programming but it didn’t pay off. I work together with Valve Software for the development of the game Half-life 2.
The first BitTorrent client application was in the Python language, and since then many programs have chosen that same language.
BitTorrent is a tool for a distribution file that I wrote. It allows people who are downloading something to automatically upload it at the same time, so a long piece of content can be delivered to many people without costing a large amount of money to whoever made it available initially. It works great, so you ended up with a lot of bandwidth.
Bram Cohen
BitTorrent gained popularity for sharing large music and movie files online. By 2005, BitTorrent was funded by David Chao of Doll Capital Management, and that same year an agreement was made with MPAA to remove all links with illegal content from the platform, this meant that the site had to comply with Digital Millennium procedures Copyright.
Today BitTorrent has 160 million users and 35% of internet traffic, making it one of the most popular P2P networks.
Bram Cohen and Chia
The genius of this crypto character does not stop and has developed a new project that is revolutionizing the cryptographic space due to the revolutionary nature of its mining mode and efficiency: Chia Network.
As it is stated on their website, they -the China Network project- think that cryptocurrency should be simpler to use, more difficult to lose, and almost impossible to steal than cash. Anyone who wishes to validate transactions should be able to do so without using single-use hardware or spending a lot of money on power.
Bram Cohen founded Chia Network, which creates a blockchain and smart transaction platform. It is the first time since Bitcoin in 2008 that a new Nakamoto consensus algorithm has been implemented. Proofs of Space and Time have taken the role of labor-intensive “proofs of work.”