Bram Cohen

Cohen grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City, as the son of a teacher and computer scientist. He claims he learned the BASIC programming language at the age of 5 on his family's Timex Sinclair computer. Cohen passed the American Invitational Mathematics Examination to qualify for the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad while he attended Stuyvesant High School in New York City. He graduated from Stuyvesant in 1993, and attended SUNY Buffalo. He later dropped out of college to work for several dot-com companies throughout the mid-to-late 1990s, the last being MojoNation, an ambitious but ill-fated project he worked on with Jim McCoy.

MojoNation allowed people to break up confidential files into encrypted chunks and distribute those pieces on computers also running the software. If someone wanted to download a copy of this encrypted file, they would have to download it simultaneously from many computers. This concept, Cohen thought, was perfect for a file-sharing program, since programs like KaZaA take a long time to download a large file because the file is (usually) coming from one source (or peer).

Chia Network is a company founded by Cohen in 2017 that has implemented a proof-of-space-time cryptocurrency called Chia (XCH). Chia is intended to avoid the waste of energy involved in proof-of-work-based cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, and the vulnerability to state actors of proof-of-stake systems.

Chia Network has raised seed money from investors including Andreessen Horowitz. The use of storage media (hard disks and solid-state drives) as the cryptocurrency's mining medium has raised concerns over potential price surges and shortage of high-capacity storage devices, as well as radically reducing the lifetime of drives.

As of 2008, Cohen lived in the San Francisco Bay Area of the United States, with his wife Jenna and their three children. The couple divorced in 2022.

Cohen says that he has Asperger syndrome based on a self diagnosis.

Cohen's hobbies include original origami and juggling up to five balls, but his main interest is in recreational mathematics. Cohen maintains a blog where he frequently discusses trust metrics with software developer Raph Levien, as well as money systems, games of skill, and other math-related topics. He is also an assembly puzzle enthusiast. He has designed several puzzles including some in conjunction with Oskar van Deventer including several gear-based puzzles such as Gear Shift and a multiple Rubik's Cube variant called Bram's Fortress. Some of Cohen's puzzle designs are available for 3D printing via Shapeways.