[HN Gopher] What is Chia cryptocurrency - and why is it bad news...
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What is Chia cryptocurrency - and why is it bad news for hard
drives?
Author : fortran77
Score : 27 points
Date : 2021-05-01 21:09 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomsguide.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomsguide.com)
| Havoc wrote:
| I can see Eth existing in 10 years time. I can't see Chia
| existing in 10 years time.
|
| Crypto verse in general feels like a 50/50 bet...but the storage
| based stuff feels like significantly worse odds
| lousken wrote:
| oh great, another item that will be impossible to buy soon
|
| thanks, miners
|
| the sooner someone introduces the law to ban all proof of work
| crypto, the better - or at least banning companies from taking or
| using PoW crypto would be a good start
| theshadowknows wrote:
| I asked this recently but the topic died before I got many
| answers. Basically, I'm not a cryptocurrency denier. I just don't
| understand it. Do people want cryptocurrency because they want to
| spend it on stuff? Or do they want cryptocurrency because they
| want to sell it for other currencies? In other words, at what
| point will a cryptocurrency stand on its own as something that's
| worth a pair of shoes? Instead of being something that people
| invest in to eventually sell for dollars with which they they buy
| shoes? Again- I know I just don't understand. My original
| question:
|
| 1 point by theshadowknows 4 days ago | parent [-] | on: The Last
| Days of Satoshi: What Happened When Bitco...
|
| Bitcoin and other crypto/alt currencies are so interesting to me.
| Partly because I do not understand them: If I mow your lawn and
| you pay me in the locally accepted fiat then I can use that fiat
| to buy hotdogs and fuel for my lawn mower because the gas station
| itself will accept that fiat. The gas station will accept that
| fiat because its vendors, creditors, and employees also accept
| it. And the chain goes on. If however I mow your lawn and you pay
| me in bitcoin I'll need to find a gas station that accepts it.
| Many likely exist. But, how many of their vendors, creditors, and
| employees also accept it? Some, no doubt, but I'd wager not all
| would. So, even though these currencies no doubt represent
| massive potential they're still somewhat limited in terms of
| adoption. Obviously this is becoming less true over time which I
| think is a good thing - competition isn't something fiat
| currencies tend to have to deal with, but they sure could use it.
| My real misunderstanding is 'why' people accept these currencies
| in the first place. In other words - people accept a United
| States dollar because it is worth one United States dollar.
| However, it seems that most people accept bitcoin (or bitcoin
| fragments) not because they are worth some percentage of bitcoin
| but exactly because they are worth some amount of United States
| dollars. Is that true? Is the primary reason that bitcoin has
| become more popular that an investor can spend 10,000 fiat on it
| - wait a year - and then extract 15,000 fiat from it?
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > Is the primary reason that bitcoin has become more popular
| that an investor can spend 10,000 fiat on it - wait a year -
| and then extract 15,000 fiat from it?
|
| It seems to be true.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| > Do people want cryptocurrency because they want to spend it
| on stuff?
|
| Some of us did. Last month marks 10 years since I was
| introduced to the community and registered on the bitcoin-otc.
| We bought and sold all sorts of random crap (food items,
| laptops, gadgets, one regular even paid people bitcoin to have
| them buy him lunch. A brief time existed where some of the more
| idealists expected bitcoin to replace Paypal. That obviously
| didn't happen.
|
| Starting with Satoshidice gambling the network performance
| started to crap up and fees began to climb. Eventually it
| became worthless for any sort of fast/cheap transacting and
| everything centralized onto a few exchanges. Every asshole in
| the world has proposed ways to improve this issue, but with all
| the money sunk into bitcoin and a lot of arguments we aren't in
| a better situation today.
|
| Now every naive person from 20-some year olds to 70-year olds
| are hitting me up and asking what I think of NFT's and the
| shitcoin of the week because they saw some heads on Bloomberg
| gushing over it and I'm just tired of it all.
| beambot wrote:
| Here's an alternative mental model... Let's talk about Filecoin
| (related to Chia) for file storage. Assume for the moment that
| all 2 billion tokens are in circulation. At any given time,
| there is a market of people looking to store files and people
| willing to store those files for a fee. You're transacting
| (roughly) in Gb-years at today's level of technology -- i.e.
| willingness to store 1Gb of data for 1 year. Regular market
| forces apply. You could also pre-purchase credits for later
| use... either to get higher priority for your data when you
| want to use your tokens, or as an investment in said ability.
| And the prices you'll pay will automatically flex based on
| improvements in technology since the global supply of tokens is
| fixed.
|
| You could then reasonably think of Filecoin as a futures
| contract on generic file storage capacity. Ethereum is a
| futures contract on computational horsepower. Bitcoin is
| something else(?) - perhaps a futures contract on a general
| long-term abstract form of value storage. In short: Some of
| these tokens act as futures contracts for decentralized compute
| capabilities. The most-common current use case happens to be
| heavily related to finance (DeFi); applications for censorless
| content networks are also in development; and the applications
| are really quite general purpose.
|
| Anything today that requires a ledger is a reasonable problem
| to tackle too, where eliminating centralization _could be_
| beneficial. E.g. ENS instead of ICANN for domain names,
| tokenized stock certificates instead of relying on opaque
| organizations owned by major banks (e.g. the DTC and problems
| around naked shorting).
| wmf wrote:
| These velocity of money models can't account for even a small
| fraction of cryptocurrency valuations. For example, if your
| model says Filecoin is worth $10 but it's currently trading
| for $160... clearly the buyers are not pre-purchasing
| storage.
| wmf wrote:
| It's more like the promise that you could spend $10,000, wait
| five years, then retire. Bitcoin's historical >10,000x returns
| have triggered massive amounts of envy, greed, and FOMO.
| m00dy wrote:
| Do they have a benchmark for how many tps that Chia can handle ?
| CharlesW wrote:
| Bram Cohen has been quoted as estimating ~20 TPS at Layer 1.
| rovr138 wrote:
| Just bought a new Synology NAS this week and started putting
| together disks and they're scarce and the prices are through the
| roof.
|
| Couldn't find what I was planning on buying. What I found was
| through the roof. I bit the bullet and bought 4 new ones. Not
| enough to fully populate the NAS, but at least it'll give me some
| space for now to do what I need.
|
| We've seen scarcity and what it does for prices after the
| flooding in.. 2010?(ish).
| ChrisClark wrote:
| Why would Chia be the threat here? Filecoin(IPFS) is already a
| threat, it already has a capacity of 4.81 EiB of data, 4810
| PetiBytes! (Is that how you spell it? In contrast to Petabytes)
|
| And to store 1 GiB of data per year it only costs the user
| $0.00082 USD.
|
| That shows harddrives are already being gobbled up by miners at
| an incredible rate. Has this made a noticeable rise in storage
| prices? Anyone know of any data that can show that?
| i_have_an_idea wrote:
| I hold no Chia or crypto at all, however, from what I am seeing
| around me, Chia is going to be really, really big.
| Hjfrf wrote:
| We can always hope that trading Chia is made illegal, along
| with proof of work algorithm based currencies in general.
|
| Governments so-far failing to regulate existential threats to
| themselves is honestly odd.
| gruez wrote:
| >Governments so-far failing to regulate existential threats
| to themselves is honestly odd.
|
| Is it the job of the government to hang onto power at all
| costs?
| CharlesW wrote:
| Chia is not Proof of Work, FWIW. Their technical and business
| whitepapers are helpful resources for learning more about
| what they call "Proof of Space and Time".
| gruez wrote:
| From people hoping to mine and then immediately sell it, or
| from people who are planning on buying and holding?
| mrfusion wrote:
| Can anyone explain the algorithm a bit?
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Here's the whitepaper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf
|
| Unfortunately, it's a lot harder to follow than Satoshi's at
| least for me.
| Igelau wrote:
| Field Notes, Terran Expedition 6, Chief Archivist Blaxarll:
|
| "Terran life took a sudden dramatic shift after the fall of
| Hominid dominance. The turning point appears to have occured when
| the sacrificial demands of Blockchain worship spiraled out of
| control after fuel-based offerings were supplanted by info
| storage based offerings. This, in and of itself, was not terribly
| harmful, but the model was used by the Cult of Aquaricoin. The
| so-called Water Miners enshrined a marketplace for non-fungible
| indulgences depicting popular figures. This was backed by a
| _Proof of Potable Water_ algorithmic catechism, and swiftly
| resulted in total extinction for the species.
|
| It is this researcher's opinion that we are fortunate the Terran
| Hominids had only just discovered space travel, for they very
| well could have extinguished the resources of our own homeworlds
| for such religious decadence."
| rektide wrote:
| this is one of the best things i have ever read thank you
| surround wrote:
| It took me a while to actually understand how proof-of-work
| mining works because seemingly every article one the subject
| gives too abstract of an explanation. Turns out it's not that
| complex if you understand what a cryptographic hash is. Just take
| a block (a list of recent transactions) and take a SHA-256 hash
| if it over and over with slight variations until you get a hash
| that starts with enough consecutive zeroes.
|
| I'm having the same issue with understanding proof-of-space.
| Could someone give a technical explanation for those of us that
| understand basic cryptography (but aren't professional
| cryptographists)?
| chade wrote:
| Proof-of-space is essentially stored Proof-of-work. You are
| pre-filling your drive with many cryptographic hash's. When a
| challenge comes in the software will do a quick check to see if
| any of your plots could possibly have a proof (a hash with
| sufficient zeros for that challenge). If any of your plots pass
| this filter then the plot is looked up on the HDD to check if
| it does indeed contain a proof. The difficulty, the number of
| zeros needed for a hash to be considered a proof, adjusts as
| the network grows to ensure a steady supply of coins. With
| proof-of-work you are printing lottery tickets every time a
| challenge comes in, then throwing them away and starting again,
| with Proof-of-space you are printing your tickets once and then
| storing them for years. There is extra layers, Chia is actually
| proof-of-space-and-time, so that you can't win by faking proof-
| of-space with proof-of-work.
| wmf wrote:
| There are multiple flavors of proof of space and they seem to
| be based on quite complex math to the extent that a simple
| explanation may not be possible.
| maks25 wrote:
| I don't think I have ever heard of proof of space, is it the
| same as proof of stake?
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Completely different things.
|
| In Proof of Stake, the network (roughly!) allocates rewards
| for validating transactions based on the amount of coins
| you have, i.e., your stake in the network.
|
| In Proof of Space, the network allocates rewards based on
| you proving that you are really storing the data you were
| supposed to store. If you fail to produce a proof for some
| data item the network expected you to have stored, you lose
| the reward.
|
| More info:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_space
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake
| CharlesW wrote:
| They are different. Chia isn't Proof of Stake because how
| many XCH has no impact on your odds of winning more.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_space
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake
| gojomo wrote:
| No - it's a bit more like preprinting big ranges of lottery
| tickets, that require giant look-up tables moreso than raw
| computation.
|
| So it requires the dedication of some hard/rivalrous real
| resource, storage space, other than either strictly
| energy/CPU (PoW) or the protocol's own tokens (PoStake).
|
| See the Chia 'Green Paper' for more details.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Proof of space means you can prove you have hard drives
| full of data. Proof of stake means you can prove you have
| coins in your wallet.
|
| The basic idea is that you do a slow and complicated
| calculation to fill the drive with a particular pattern.
| Then when it comes time to prove you have the drive, you
| have to use random pieces of that data to calculate a
| number within a strict time limit.
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(page generated 2021-05-01 23:00 UTC)