"The U.S. federal government just awarded a grant to the blockchain startup Key Retroactivity Network Consensus (KRNC)," reports Futurism.com, " to study the feasibility of integrating cryptocurrency into the economy."
That doesn't mean that the U.S. is going to pivot to a digital blockchain dollar, CoinDesk reports. Rather, the National Science Foundation funded KRNC because it's interested in exploring new ways to improve the security of digital transactions.
The protocol KRNC is developing would meter out a new cryptocurrency in proportion to a user's existing wealth, CoinDesk reports, instead of requiring them to purchase or actively mine new crypto. In other words, it wouldn't make people richer, but it would grant them an alternative means to transfer funds online.
"Bitcoin, which runs on the principle of Proof-of-Work, is wasteful," KRNC CEO Clint Ehrlich told CoinDesk. "It requires people to waste money and computing power solving pointless problems."
Great