Bram Cohen, inventor of the world-disrupting Bittorrent peer-to-peer filesharing protocol, is now working on a new cryptocurrency.
He discusses it on an episode of the podcast Steal This Show, and you can hear him talk about the future of Bitcoin, the status of cryptocurrencies in general, and his own plans, from 57:30 onward: https://stealthisshow.com/s02e14/
The main concept Cohen appears to focus on is the notion of a "storage-based" currency validation model as opposed to a Proof-of-Work model like BitCoin's, which consumes a great deal of energy on the mining side in order to generate hashes and maintain the blockchain. This storage-based model could be called a "Proof-of-Capacity" model, which would both require less energy, and also reduce centralization (and hence potential 51% attacks on the network) in miners, since there would be a wider distribution of storage capacity than currently occurs with the specialized mining tools currently relied on for the BitCoin network.
There is coverage of Cohen's ideas at CoinTelegraph:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/altcoin-created-by-bittorrents-cohen-to-combat-bitcoin-flaws
And at FossBytes:
https://fossbytes.com/bittorrent-inventor-bram-cohen-bitcoin-alternative/
Plus TorrentFreak:
https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-inventor-bram-cohen-will-start-his-own-cryptocurrency-170424/
What's more, Cohen's speech at Stanford's Blockchain Protocol Analysis and Security Engineering 2017 Conference is available at this page:
https://cyber.stanford.edu/blockchainconf
which contains both a link to a PDF of Cohen's talk ( https://cyber.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/bramcohen.pdf ) and a link to a YouTube video of Cohen's talk (video ID aYG0NxoG7yw) -- or watch it below, starting at 1:00 minute, when audio turns on:
Those who start following Bram Cohen's progress now, and potentially hop onto the next big Cryptocurrency at its inception, could benefit greatly!