[HN Gopher] Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plo...
___________________________________________________________________
Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and
farming
Author : ephesee
Score : 151 points
Date : 2021-05-20 17:53 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.scaleway.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.scaleway.com)
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| > Chia plotting is extremely I/O intensive and destroys most SSDs
| in under a few weeks
|
| Woah, really?
| ev1 wrote:
| Yes. The creation of the plot will eat through SSD TBW.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Yes, presumably as a measure to make it harder to scale the
| plotting process (to make it more "fair"), it apparently does a
| ton of reads and writes across the whole region being plotted,
| so it will quickly exhaust the total number of write cycles
| available on the drive. A cheaper drive will be effectively
| destroyed (high quality drives can survive more write cycles,
| so they're comparatively okay.) I would have assumed it just
| linearly computed the whole plot to be farmed, but presumably
| that would make it vulnerable to some sort of attack where you
| create a "winning" plot on demand.
|
| You could theoretically plot on a RAMdisk to avoid this
| problem, but the necessary amount of RAM would be incredibly
| expensive, so it's unlikely that many people will do it.
|
| See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twwyBdsRYL4
| scohesc wrote:
| From what I understand, newer consumer level SSDs are designed
| to have a lower TBW (TeraBytes Written) - mostly because any
| reasonable consumer doesn't write terabytes of data to their
| SSDs in any decent length of time. Enterprise/Higher end
| "GaMeR" SSDs have higher TBW ratings - I believe 1TB FireCuda
| Model NVMe SSDs have something insane like a 1800 TBW rating
| when I was looking a couple weeks back.
|
| These above mentioned consumer drives, when written to in
| massive amounts (I believe even the lower sized Chia plots
| thrash the SSD to the tune of at least a couple terabytes of
| write usage) cause it to degrade at a significantly higher
| rate.
|
| Long story short, consumer SSDs aren't designed for super high
| write tasks, while enterprise and higher-end ones are.
| ev1 wrote:
| > I believe 1TB FireCuda Model NVMe SSDs have something
| insane like a 1800 TBW rating when I was looking a couple
| weeks back.
|
| This is still only a couple hundred 100GB plots (the smallest
| possible size).
|
| "Chia SSDs" being made are something like 12000TBW.
| hogFeast wrote:
| Firecudas are terrible for Chia. TBW doesn't matter as much
| as people think. Some of the lower TBW SSDs will outlast the
| higher TBW ones (again, Firecuda is an example of the
| latter).
|
| The standard plot size uses 1.2TB of writes.
|
| You won't wear out your SSD in a few weeks with Chia...you
| just won't. If you use a 120GB one, maybe...but no-one is
| doing this.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| What is the expansion of the acronym "GaMeR"? I've not seen
| it before and I want to be sure I understand.
| tmathmeyer wrote:
| its "gamer" like "video game player". not an acronym.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| That's incomplete, it turns out; apparently it's a
| weirdly capitalized form of "gamer" with
| sarcastic/disrespectful intent towards the referenced
| group.
| cylde_frog wrote:
| I think he's making fun of the over the top gamer branding
| some technology products have.
| unwind wrote:
| It's not an acronym, it's the word "gamer" written in
| something akin to leetspeak [1].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet
| plttn wrote:
| They're just spongebob texting "gamer".
| bcjordan wrote:
| Believe it's use of Mocking Spongebob style
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mocking-spongebob
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Oh.
| [deleted]
| Glench wrote:
| Here's the official Chia answer to this:
| https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/1393988621921701889
| mirthflat83 wrote:
| > For some odd reason the 'Chia burns out hard drives!' is
| getting repeated as the fashionable fud.
|
| No one is claiming that Chia is burning hard drives. He is
| intentionally being misleading. Chia absolutely destroys
| consumer SSDs.
| makomk wrote:
| Yes and no. As I understand it, there are two parts: you create
| plots which take up a certain amount of disk space, and then
| farm those plots indefinitely, and only the first plot creation
| part is extremely I/O intensive. So what a lot of people seem
| to be doing is creating the plots on SSDs and then moving them
| to cheaper spinning rust hard drives once created, and it's
| this that can apparently destroy consumer SSDs relatively
| rapidly (so long as you have much more storage used for Chia
| than the capacity of the SSD). I don't think just creating a
| plot or two in the spare space of your consumer SSD and leaving
| it there farming away would be a huge problem.
| yashasolutions wrote:
| TIL people are competing for who's got the biggest hard drive...
| zdkl wrote:
| Oh you have no idea how far it goes
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/
| RachelF wrote:
| "it's a digital disease"
| hellow0rldz wrote:
| Not sure how this is a problem since I assumed most cloud
| providers severely control and throttle IO.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Somebody needs to invent a coin that works on proof-of-carbon-
| emission-reductions, or proof-of-global-poverty-reduction and do
| some real good for the world.
| imtringued wrote:
| Cryptocurrencies create a fictional kingdom that is being
| defended by an army of miners. The laws of the kingdom only
| apply inside the kingdom.
| arebop wrote:
| This defeats the purpose of disincentivizing adversaries who
| want to steal coins from other participants. The
| stake/spacetime/electricity isn't wasted; it is used to
| establish global consensus. You can't redirect those resources
| into "doing some real good in the world" the best you can do is
| to allocate resources directly to your good cause rather than
| trying to magically get the good done for free.
| zepto wrote:
| > The stake/spacetime/electricity isn't wasted; it is used to
| establish global consensus.
|
| In the case of PoS or PoW it is _spent_ to establish global
| consensus.
|
| It's certainly waste if there is no other productive work is
| done by the network that wouldn't have been done without it.
| mondoveneziano wrote:
| > The stake/spacetime/electricity isn't wasted; it is used to
| establish global consensus.
|
| I still would like everyone to understand how proof-of-work
| really works, I don't think many people do.
|
| The current Bitcoin hash rate means that all those miners are
| currently calculating on the order of
| 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 hashes per second.
|
| Of those, in Bitcoin only around 6 per hour have any actual
| effect. Six. Those are the ones that met the arbitrary
| target. The other 10^20 did not do any actual _work_ ,
| meaning that none of them did bring any miner, not even the
| same miner, the same chip, closer to the "answer". In that
| sense, they are wasted.
|
| Instead, it is literally a lottery. The difficulty is
| adjusted such that if you try 100.000.000.000.000.000.000
| random numbers per second, 6 per hour will randomly hit the
| target. It's more "raffling" that "mining".
| [deleted]
| lostmsu wrote:
| When the ultimate goal of zero emissions will be achieved, we
| will finally get a world where nobody is breathing :-D
| sschueller wrote:
| A tree with a distributed ledger. The one who plants the most
| trees wins.
| inopinatus wrote:
| So, a Merkle tree.
| dheera wrote:
| Set up a coin such that every time it goes up, some amount of
| reserve is sold, and 100% of profits donated to carbon
| reduction projects. Give away free electric cars. Plant trees.
| Whatever.
|
| Then hype up the coin. Make people bid it up endlessly just
| like they do other coins. Post lots of #moon #hodl crap on
| Twitter. Get the flock of sheep moving.
|
| Sell hype, use the proceeds for CO2 reduction.
| zepto wrote:
| According to Bitcoiners Bitcoin is green, so you you could
| use the proceeds to buy Bitcoin.
|
| https://bitcoinisgreen.org/
| [deleted]
| cageface wrote:
| This is one of the themes of Kim Stanley Robinson's "Ministry
| for the Future"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future
| jefftk wrote:
| _> proof-of-carbon-emission-reductions_
|
| That one is fun! First, I credibly claim to have plans to
| release ridiculous quantities of CO2, and then you negotiate
| with me to convince me not to. Then we can split the coins.
| zepto wrote:
| It's like proof of stake - you have to prove you have a track
| record of producing the emissions.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Burn tires for a year then reap the reductions the next.
| zepto wrote:
| Sure - that's pretty much how it works. If you own and
| can defend a jurisdiction where you can do that, other
| people will likely pay or trade things with you to stop.
| vkou wrote:
| A cheaper way to deal with you is to embargo/tariff your
| exports, until you come back to the negotiating table,
| hat in hand.
| mPReDiToR wrote:
| Not sure that always works.
|
| Hang on, Fidel Castro is on the other line.
| vasco wrote:
| This is being done right now in the Amazon without
| blockchain. First you start logging a lot more trees. Then
| the world is outraged at how many trees you cut, and you
| begrundgingly go to the negotiation table to figure out the
| carbon subsidies you're going to get in exchange for not
| cutting those trees. But wouldn't you know, estimates of how
| many trees you're able to not cut per year are based on how
| many trees you just cut so you get way more than you would've
| in the first place.
|
| Exchanging money for not doing things is fun.
| newsclues wrote:
| A smart bike that prints coins based on the energy put into the
| bike.
| deepserket wrote:
| i factory full of those bikes with motors to spin the wheels
| and gps spoofing
| [deleted]
| gre wrote:
| How about this: companies give out coins in exchange for useful
| labor contributions in the form of answering calls, stocking
| shelves, writing code...
| edoceo wrote:
| That'll never work :/
| c1sc0 wrote:
| That's actually pretty simple if you can live with
| centralization ... just certify CO2 offsets for example for
| each coin purchased. Then again ... what's the point of putting
| that on a blockchain?
| Zababa wrote:
| > just certify CO2 offsets for example for each coin
| purchased
|
| We have something like this in France. Energy providers (for
| example EDF, Electricite De France) must buy a certain number
| of CEE (Certificats d'Economie d'Energie, I think the concept
| is white certificates) every year, or face heavy fines (big
| enough that buying certificates is a big part of their
| activities).
|
| As an example: let's say I want to change my window to have
| more isolation, which will reduce my energy consumption. This
| can produce a CEE, that I can "sell" to EDF, which will help
| financing the change.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Then again ... what's the point of putting that on a
| blockchain?
|
| Marketing. :p
|
| > That's actually pretty simple if you can live with
| centralization ... just certify CO2 offsets for example for
| each coin purchased.
|
| We have this today, but "just certify" does a lot of work
| here. It's really hard to certify CO2 offsets in many cases
| (e.g., it's tough to verify that the trees someone plants
| weren't going to be planted anyway or that they will live to
| their expected potential and not get burned down
| prematurely).
| dragontamer wrote:
| Whenever you plant a tree, do the following.
|
| 1. Take a picture of the tree
|
| 2. Burn the tree down.
|
| 3. Create NFT of the picture of the tree burning down.
|
| 4. Use the NFT of the picture of the tree to certify the
| CO2 offset.
|
| Inspiration from:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56335948
| StavrosK wrote:
| I don't understand, the offset of a burnt tree is 0. I
| get that it's a joke, I just don't understand what the
| joke is.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Lets change the order of things then.
|
| 1. Take a picture of the tree
|
| 2. Create NFT of the picture of the tree.
|
| 3. Use the NFT of the picture of the tree to certify the
| CO2 offset.
|
| 4. Burn down the tree.
|
| --------
|
| Is it more obvious with this ordering? The NFT proves
| nothing. It doesn't matter when you burn (or otherwise
| damage) the tree. You have an NFT stating a carbon offset
| that is completely fake.
|
| I'm just making fun of the idea that NFTs prove...
| anything useful... in these circumstances. Its the same
| thing as people who want to use blockchain to certify
| supply chains or whatever. The "Blockchain technology"
| doesn't do anything aside from provide marketing points.
| meepmorp wrote:
| > As you can see, (the scale is in Petabytes), the space used is
| growing uncontrollably, and has already reached 7 Exabytes.
|
| Judging by the graph in the article, it was 1 exabyte in late
| April, under a month ago. Wow.
| Vespasian wrote:
| Who buys up all the farmed coins on these new cryptocurrencies.
|
| It is really just speculation fever?
| guimoz wrote:
| Yes. And miners tend to hold their coins so the supply
| remains moderately low. A bit like the OPEC.
| hn8788 wrote:
| I came across a subreddit, I forget its name though, thats
| sole purpose was pumping up new cryptocurrencies, hoping it
| would catch the attention of casual crypto investors. They'd
| pick a day to sell off whatever cryptocurrency they had
| pumped up, then repeat it was some other no-name
| cryptocurrency.
| scohesc wrote:
| There's been an absolute metric crap-ton of interest generated
| since the media has started picking it up and taking about it
| 2-3 weeks ago. It seems like it's one of the first crypto
| offerings that relies not on constant CPU/GPU usage, but just
| proof of "storage" from what I understand.
|
| Very interesting.
| jude- wrote:
| Proof of Space is just Proof of Work by another means. Honestly,
| I'd rather just have (electric) PoW -- at least the energy source
| _could be_ green, and any green energy capacity built out for PoW
| can be repurposed.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I'm sure eventually we'll see articles about the amount of
| garbage produced by Chia. I'm imagining pallets of dead SSDs.
| awat wrote:
| I'm really not one for conspiracies so I won't go that far but If
| I was a drive manufacturer this would certainly be my favorite
| cryptocurrency.
| wmf wrote:
| _Chia plotting is forbidden on all SSD and NVMe powered
| instances_
|
| Translation: Scaleway didn't take SSD wear into account when
| designing their cloud.
|
| _Chia farming is allowed on Scaleway Object Storage providing
| prior request has been both made and authorized by our sales
| team_
|
| Translation: They can't expand their object storage fast enough
| to keep up with demand.
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| > Translation: Scaleway didn't take SSD wear into account when
| designing their cloud.
|
| I don't think many cloud providers expect all their disks to
| fail every 1-3 months, which is what happens when you mine Chia
| on a SSD/NVMe.
| viraptor wrote:
| Yup, all cloud (well, all rental) business relies on rented
| resources to not be 100% utilised. Oversubscription is how
| they can offer prices cheaper than buying the resource
| yourself.
| cbdumas wrote:
| Perhaps the "paperclip maximizer" doomsday scenario was right in
| was right in its broad strokes but just wrong about the agents
| involved? They were worried about a super-competent AI that burns
| resources producing low-utility widgets. In fact we have created
| an system (a combination of societal incentive structures and
| technological tools) that burns resources producing low-utility
| pseudo-random numbers.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| Hasn't the paperclip optimizer always been a euphemism for
| capitalism?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Even so bitcoin takes it to its logical extreme. You put
| valuable resources in one end and get money out the other
| side. In between, no useful work is done. It's the essence of
| capitalism without any of the beneficial side effects we've
| come to expect.
| robocat wrote:
| Gold mining is similar, although obviously not to the same
| extreme. Only 8% of the output is used industrially.
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-
| in...
|
| So gold mining is only 90% waste, whereas Bitcoin mining
| gets close to 100% waste.
|
| Then again, perhaps printed dollars could perhaps also be
| considered highly wasteful?
| imtringued wrote:
| No, it's purely about AIs and the control problem.
|
| The problem boils down to "How can I control superior AIs
| through mere power of inferior humans?".
|
| The assumption is that the superhuman nature means there is
| no way disable a superhuman AI because deactivation will not
| fulfill its cost function and therefore must be avoided at
| all costs, the superhuman AI will always outsmart humans and
| prevent deactivation, the same way a skilled soldier will
| always beat an untrained civilian in combat.
|
| We have solved it for humans by accepting that the victor
| gets to lead humanity. Can we accept AI rule? Probably not.
| sneak wrote:
| No. The fable long predates the current anticapitalism trend.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer%27s_Apprentice
| supergirl wrote:
| is it not feasible to plot on AWS? would be interesting if they
| are also forced to ban this.
| netflixandkill wrote:
| This is mostly a problem for low-cost hosting that had some
| implied assumptions about how heavily used various components
| would be relative to the rest.
| Mooty wrote:
| Did some, transfer costs beetween instances that serves as plot
| generators are f** expensive. You need TB of data transfers,
| for example 15TB to transfer on the internet is somewhere
| around 1500$.
| xuki wrote:
| AWS/Azure/GCP are significantly more expensive compare to these
| providers.
| scohesc wrote:
| From what I understand, the network/algorithm is designed to
| prevent this from happening - either due to massively huge
| egress costs (I think you need to 'upload' the whole plot to
| the network after you have a verified proof), or for sheer data
| storage cases (some farmers/miners have tens of petabytes of
| plots already - i wonder how much that would cost to store
| monthly?)
| benmanns wrote:
| You don't have to upload the plot after you have a verified
| proof. You do have to pay to store it, though, and that can
| be pretty expensive on AWS. If you just plot on AWS and store
| the plots elsewhere to save storage costs, you have to pay
| outbound charges on the plot files.
| [deleted]
| jakedata wrote:
| I read the headline as China rather than Chia and was wondering
| what China was plotting to farm now. Frankly it was much more
| interesting than Chia bad, no Chia for you.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| I initially thought it was some agricultural issue similar to
| palm oil farming but for chia seeds.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| Seems fair.
| yoink32 wrote:
| the time to farm chia was three months ago
| hogFeast wrote:
| You couldn't farm it three months ago. Mainnet opened in mid-
| March.
| jl2718 wrote:
| > Chia plotting is extremely I/O intensive and destroys most SSDs
| in under a few weeks
|
| I need to look into this more, but I think this is an
| implementation issue. It should buffer in RAM to require only one
| write pass.
|
| Edit: I was wrong. They set a minimum k that wouldn't easily fit
| in ram.
| cookguyruffles wrote:
| Any idea why the minimum plot size needs to be so damn huge?
| Really killed the attractiveness of the whole scheme for me
| retzkek wrote:
| If the plot were smaller there's the risk that someone could
| calculate plots "on the fly" within the 30-second claim
| window, thus reducing Chia to proof-of-work (or even breaking
| it entirely? the "green" paper [1] is a bit too dense for
| me). It's expected and planned that k will have to increase
| to 33 in a few years to stay ahead.
|
| [1]: https://www.chia.net/assets/ChiaGreenPaper.pdf
| deepserket wrote:
| it is possible, the problem is just that you need around 240GiB
| of temporary memory
| VectorLock wrote:
| Now you just need terabytes of RAM.
| mvanaltvorst wrote:
| You need a relatively large amount of storage space for
| plotting, more than most RAM disks. It has proven to be more
| cost effective to consume SSD's than to use slower HDD's or a
| RAM disk.
| kelp wrote:
| This reminds me of how Steve Jobs would talk about the need for
| liberal arts influence in technology. I feel like so much of this
| blockchain and cryptocurrency stuff is made purely looking at the
| tech, with either no thought to the actual incentives involved,
| or a total misunderstanding of them.
| mikl wrote:
| I'm sure all the crypto fans are lining up around the block to
| tell us that their pet technology doesn't waste valuable
| resources, it just uses storage that would otherwise have gone
| unused, as they do with Bitcoin and electricity.
| temp8964 wrote:
| So every conclusion to hard drive also applies to electricity?
| How do you establish the equivalency?
| cageface wrote:
| I'm extremely disappointed Bram Cohen is behind this. I used to
| really admire him for his work on Bittorrent but this is going
| to be an indelible asterisk on his legacy as a coder.
| liaukovv wrote:
| Computational resources too Actually pretty close to what some
| scifi writers envision(The Golden Oecumene by Wright comes to
| mind)
| scohesc wrote:
| I think it's funny how the world as a whole just simply moves
| the problem (excess resource usage for something a lot of
| people have deemed 'excessive' like bitcoin mining) from one
| type of resource to another. Now we're going to see storage
| costs skyrocket, which will (hopefully not) affect cloud
| storage providers, datacenters, etc. etc. etc.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| That would be a bummer, but if it doesn't exacerbate the
| energy/co2 problem I consider it a net benefit.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Manufacturing SSDs and platter drives is definitely not
| carbon neutral. Let's not even get into the problems with
| rare earth material extraction...
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| In order to be considered a net benefit, it only needs to
| emit less carbon than compute-based mining. It doesn't
| need to be carbon neutral (and indeed, I don't think
| anyone posited that it was).
| AlexandrB wrote:
| That's a pretty low bar. To be a net benefit it should
| emit less carbon than traditional payment processing. If
| you set my house on fire you don't get to call saving my
| cat a "net benefit".
| spentrent wrote:
| How much carbon is emitted by traditional payment
| processing?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| As an example:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-
| energy-co...
|
| I'm sure modern, all digital, methods like Venmo or
| PayPal use even less.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Less than the carbon that would be emitted by doing
| everything with physical banknotes, coins, and precious
| metals?
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Can anyone explain a simple explanation of how chia works? I
| tried reading the White Paper ("green paper"), but its a little
| dense and math-y.
|
| What is plotting? How does farming a plot work?
|
| Edit: Why do people plot with SSDs? Is there a speed element to
| it?
| zamalek wrote:
| Farming: you hold massive (101GB) bingo cards of mathematical
| proofs on your hard drive. When you receive a challenge, you
| first do a pre-filter on your bingo cards to see which of them
| _could_ contain a proof. Within that filtered list, you find
| the closest proofs. The peer with the closest proof available
| wins the challenge and [currently] gets 2XCH.
|
| Plotting: you fill your free space with bingo cards. You need
| 300-400GB of free temporary space and TBs of writes in that
| space. This uses a lot of compute and eats SSDs for breakfast.
|
| Once you have filled your space (assuming you don't go out and
| buy more disks), you can stop plotting. This is where the
| claimed "greenness" of Chia comes into play: you eventually
| stop using compute resources. Of course, there are whales who
| are adding drives to their servers daily.
| popotamonga wrote:
| I have 512GB Ram, cant it be used for plotting without ssd?
| mvanaltvorst wrote:
| You could. But someone else could add 8 SSD's for the same
| money and plot multiple times as fast as you, until the
| SSDs break.
| dstick wrote:
| And what happens if the SSDs break? You lose your plot?
| Has to be right - since it's proof of space? But what
| then is the use of burning through SSDs so fast?
| deepserket wrote:
| the SSDs are used just to create the plots, once the
| plots are created they can be moved into HDDs where they
| get farmed (checked to see if they can solve blocks for
| the blockchain)
| VectorLock wrote:
| You could do 1 plot at a time.
| zamalek wrote:
| It can be, just set up a RAM disk and use that as your
| temporary drive. It's exactly what I'm doing to fill my
| tiny 12TB Raspberry Pi farm. Your plotting rate won't be
| competitive (plotting in parallel on NVMEs turns out to be
| much faster).
| lozaning wrote:
| Yeah, I plot an a DL580 with 512GB. Other than not having
| to worry about write durability there's not much gained
| though. GB per GB my ram drive is faster, but i can plot in
| parallel on my NVME drive because it's considerably larger.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Can you explain the "bingo card" analogy in a bit more depth?
|
| is this like pre-computing the values to a hash function
| against different inputs? Where is the write thrashing coming
| in? If you only need X hundred gigs, why do you write
| terabytes? Because you can't store intermediary values in RAM
| (since ram is expensive and small in comparison)?
|
| I get how bitcoin style block-chains use hashing to secure
| the transaction chain, and the POW factors into hashing...
| how do responding to the challenges factor into a currency?
| zamalek wrote:
| > Where is the write thrashing coming in?
|
| This happens during plotting (not farming). The plots are
| sorted, which is where the write thrashing happens. Once
| you've completely plotted a farm, it is never written to.
|
| Everything else you said is basically spot-on.
| Vespasian wrote:
| Is there an expected limit of storage where your average
| drive would die of old age before it yields enough income?
| zamalek wrote:
| No. Once you are farming, the drive is exclusively _read._
| Of course there is bitrot /cosmic rays flipping bits,
| effectively rendering some portions of the plot corrupt.
| duskwuff wrote:
| In short:
|
| Plotting is an compute- and IO-intensive process which
| eventually generates a ~100 GB block of data after a large
| number of read/write operations to that data. This is the part
| of the process that involves (and destroys) SSDs.
|
| Farming is a slower process which is performed on those blocks
| of data, which involves occasional read operations on small
| sections of that data. The data blocks are typically
| transferred to slower bulk storage (like hard disks) for this.
| fbcpck wrote:
| If you'd like it in video format, [this one][1] explains it in
| layman terms quite well and covers possible ways to mitigate
| the ssd endurance problem, as well as expected profit rates
| with the right "commodity" hardwares.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twwyBdsRYL4
| 1-more wrote:
| Extreme cutting-the-last-tree-on-Rapa-Nui vibes
| ksec wrote:
| Some people think Chia is so much better because of it uses SSD /
| Storage rather than GPU. I think this could be far worse.
|
| Not everyone needs a GPGPU, but everyone need NAND and SSD. And
| it already causes price hike for SSD we will soon see something
| similar to chip shortage. The DRAM Fab which could be quickly
| retooled to NAND will be part of this equation as well.
|
| This is not good.
| ulzeraj wrote:
| And you didn't even touched on the e-waste issue.
| imhoguy wrote:
| Not good indeed. Small hosting businesses and consumer storage
| will suffer, because big cloud companies usualy have HW
| production customized and contracted ahead.
| marcusverus wrote:
| > And it already causes price hike for SSD we will soon see
| something similar to chip shortage.
|
| Nah. The expected ROI on a given TiB of storage is halved with
| each doubling of Netspace[0][1]. The current return is
| ~$1.50/TiB/Day. As the expected return declines, farming CHIA
| will become less attractive than other crypto 'investment'
| opportunities, and the whales will turn their attention
| elsewhere.
|
| I'm guessing that netspace starts to level out after another
| doubling or two--assuming the exchange rate remains the same.
|
| [0]https://www.chiaexplorer.com/charts/netspace
| [1]https://www.chiaexplorer.com/charts/xchTib
| imtringued wrote:
| Yeah, the problem is actually worse. Bitcoin is energy
| intensive. Chia is capital intensive. Producing capital costs
| energy so it effectively boils down to proof of work (burning
| energy to produce HDDs and SSDs). However, scaling energy is
| very easy, scaling HDD production is very difficult.
|
| The only benefit is that storage can be repurposed very easily,
| thus booms and busts may cause temporary oversupply of storage.
| dheera wrote:
| Chia isn't worth farming anymore.
|
| I have a pile of old spare 512GB SSDs and it looks like I would
| able to make something like $2/day. Not even enough for a
| coffee.
|
| Same with Ethereum. Tried to mine with my Titan V. 31 MH/s.
| Also not even enough for a coffee.
|
| This is meaningless, and cryptocurrencies are effectively
| centralized around mining farms with ASICs.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| I don't believe that an ASIC has been developed for Ethereum,
| but I'm not too familiar with cryptocurrency.
| jl2718 wrote:
| Long ago. See the hash rate chart and guess when that might
| have happened. Hint: long before they were offered for
| sale.
| imtringued wrote:
| I bought a 512GB SSD for around 60EUR some time ago. Let's be
| generous and assume 40 days pay back. It could be 90 days and
| it still would be worth it. I don't know how fast SSD wear
| out when used for Chia though, it could be unprofitable for
| all I know.
| dheera wrote:
| I'm 90% sure as of this week you can get more money by
| selling the SSD than farming Chia on it before Chia wears
| it out.
| devwastaken wrote:
| That's not how chia rewards you though. It's a lottery, and
| though chia may be around 1000 or so right now it could
| massively increase in the future. Current projections are
| something like 3-4 months to get a single reward. But if you
| could make potentially an extra 50K a year with some
| harddrives that's not a bad deal.
| dheera wrote:
| That "3-4 months" is going up at an exponential rate, and
| it's so bad now that by the time 3 months comes by the
| expected time to reward is 6 months. Even if you get 1
| reward, you won't get a second reward unless you
| continuously keep buying drives and racks for them. You
| can't really get continuous passive income on a fixed set
| of hardware.
|
| 50K/year is impossible at this point with a consumer rig.
| hellow0rldz wrote:
| BitCoin mining is also a lottery. I could stumble on a good
| hash using my own CPU. But the odds are in favour of the
| farms with ASICs.
| hi5eyes wrote:
| btc can only be mined on asics
| lozaning wrote:
| > Current projections are something like 3-4 months to get
| a single reward
|
| You cant project time to win without knowing how many plots
| a farmer has. You've gotta have 100+ TB plotted (prolly
| closer to 140actually) at this point to have a chance at
| winning every 3-4 months.
|
| A single plot would put you closer to 7 years.
| tomlagier wrote:
| That's just not accurate. See https://chiacalculator.com/
| for more.
|
| 3-4 months is currently around 18 TB.
|
| EDIT: 100 TB would get a coin every ~ 18 days on average.
| dheera wrote:
| > 3-4 months is currently around 18 TB.
|
| That number does't account for how many more Chia farmers
| will exist in 1,2,3 months. It doesn't even account for
| linear extrapolation of total plots in the world, let
| alone exponential.
| kelp wrote:
| I currently have two plots farming and it looks like
| this: Farming status: Farming Total
| chia farmed: 0.0 User transaction fees: 0.0
| Block rewards: 0.0 Last height farmed: 0 Plot
| count: 2 Total size of plots: 202.674 GiB
| Estimated network space: 7357.090 PiB Expected time
| to win: 20 years and 1 month
| tpetry wrote:
| Hetzner has forbidden Chia yesterday too because the disk are
| used a lot when chia farming.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Technically plotting is the really bad part, farming mostly
| just occupies storage and uses a bit of CPU. Not that I
| personally am a fan of either, but plotting is the destructive
| part and then you 'farm' the completed plot forever and that
| can be done on inexpensive spinning rust drives by a cheap PC.
| meltedcapacitor wrote:
| Can you "plot" at the chip factory (producing some sort of
| pre-plotted ROM) or does it have to be updated in some way?
| guimoz wrote:
| A plot is basically a 100GB file (or file) that is
| associated with your public key. You can move it around how
| you want. Many people are creating them on machines with
| nvme disk and then they are copied over a network storage
| somewhere else.
| duskwuff wrote:
| The plots are each unique, and are too large (hundreds of
| GB) to represent as a ROM.
| blibble wrote:
| if you can build an SSD that's hundreds of GB you can
| certainly build a ROM...
| duskwuff wrote:
| Flash memory is uniform. Every flash memory die is
| (hopefully) identical to the next one. Once you know how
| to produce a flash memory die of a given size, you can
| produce a million of them, and that's worth a million
| times more.
|
| Chia plots are unique. Producing two copies of one isn't
| just pointless, but undesirable; it means that someone
| else might get a copy and reap the rewards instead of the
| person who plotted it.
| viraptor wrote:
| Sounds like it's only a matter of time. We didn't have an
| incentive to create chips like the before, but just like
| with the specialised mining ASICs, we may see one soon.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Wonder if that's why their backup storage box performance has
| been so bad for the last few weeks.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Likely. They specifically mentioned their storage boxes in
| the announcement; I suspect they had customers using them to
| store farmed blocks for Chia.
| gok wrote:
| > Chia plotting is extremely I/O intensive and destroys most SSDs
| in under a few weeks
|
| Ok Chia is stupid but this means that you are not pricing your
| SSD I/O properly.
| Thaxll wrote:
| "Chia plotting is extremely I/O intensive and destroys most SSDs
| in under a few weeks"
|
| wow.
| rfrerebe wrote:
| You can see what remains of their _cheap_ STORE servers:
| https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/pricing/?family=STORE
| crazypython wrote:
| Is it possible to optimize plotting to use I/O less and RAM more?
| Or is it an inherent boundary of the protocol like energy use is
| in PoW?
| wmf wrote:
| If you have ~300 GB of RAM you should be able to plot directly
| in RAM.
| crazypython wrote:
| Imagine a cloud provider has 300GB RAM. What if they plotted
| and let other people later download the plot?
| wmf wrote:
| I think bandwidth charges kill that idea.
| crazypython wrote:
| On AWS, yes.
|
| On Scaleway and Hetzner, there is unmetered 100Mbps
| bandwidth.
|
| On Linode, Vultr, and DigitalOcean, there is a 1-month
| 1TB limit.
| r1ch wrote:
| The reference implementation is Python, so there's lots of room
| to optimize. I wonder if you can eventually build an ASIC that
| replaces the disk based lookup with in memory calculations of
| the same data.
| crazypython wrote:
| Can you send a link? I'd like to help.
| imhoguy wrote:
| To me the only explanation of this fad (or scam) is pure greed.
| That information smog producing period of time will be recalled
| in history books like the coal race with smog cities of early XX
| century.
|
| Useful Proof of Storage cryptos like Siacoin or Filecoin should
| be more incentivised. They store meaningful data.
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| If you were an alien species worried about the rise of humans,
| you couldn't invent a better technology than crypto currency to
| cause us to kill ourselves.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-05-20 23:02 UTC)