[HN Gopher] Bitcoin rival Chia 'destroyed' hard disc supply chai...
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Bitcoin rival Chia 'destroyed' hard disc supply chains, says its
boss
Author : sebmellen
Score : 23 points
Date : 2021-05-27 21:22 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newscientist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newscientist.com)
| dom96 wrote:
| I don't get Chia. With Proof of Stake on the horizon, is there
| any real advantage that Proof of Space-Time has over it?
| skybrian wrote:
| I don't know because I don't understand Proof of Stake well
| enough to know its weak points and vulnerabilities. I hope it
| works out, but what do we really know about its security and
| power dynamics?
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| If people invest time/money mining coins, they're going to
| promote those coins in order to justify their mining operation.
|
| From this initial organic buzz, speculative markets take over
| and the whole thing becomes a positive feedback loop.
|
| Crypto is fundamentally a huge waste of advanced manufactured
| goods, electricity, and time, and enables tax avoidance and
| money laundering. The correct response from Governments is to
| simply ban the formal exchange of all of them in the same way
| that the USA bans online gambling and pyramid schemes.
| dporter wrote:
| I find it hard to get on board with Chia being a better
| alternative to Bitcoin because it uses less energy when the
| tradeoff it makes is the manufacturing and waste of millions of
| terabytes of hard drives. Does not seem very environmentally
| friendly to me.
| vmception wrote:
| Aren't they going to be using that space eventually for another
| distributed file system?
| progval wrote:
| You are probably confusing Chia with Sia
| iand wrote:
| No, Bram Cohen has said that will never happen.
| zoltrix303 wrote:
| I always thought that if bitcoin crashed, the mining centers
| could be refactored someway into other use for computing power
| alone.
|
| Now with this new currency, you could maybe even run cloud
| storage. Maybe we are accidentally building the futur
| alternatives to Amazon cloud services.
| sneak wrote:
| > _the mining centers could be refactored someway into other
| use for computing power alone_
|
| The chips that are mining bitcoin are not general purpose
| computers.
| rabidrat wrote:
| But the hard disks are general purpose storage devices,
| right? Any chance they will become custom ASIC storage that
| can't be repurposed too?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| You don't want _any_ components that have been used in
| coin mining. Generally, GPUs, desktop CPUs, RAM, consumer
| disks (both solid stats and spinning rust) and even power
| supplies are _not_ designed for years of 24x7 100% load.
|
| This is a part of why NVidia cracked down on gpu mining
| recently - when ASIC mining became more profitable than
| GPUs, the secondhand market got flooded with cheap high
| quality cards (thus ruining the primary sale market for
| new GPUs) and people flooded NVidia support with support
| queries for slow or unreliable GPUs.
| chrisacky wrote:
| How does "Proof of Space" actually work. How do they prove the
| disks exist?
| [deleted]
| nitrogen wrote:
| I haven't read any papers about this, so this is just a first
| speculative guess that I will update if/when I learn more:
|
| I suspect nodes ask one another to perform computations on
| random subsets of very large amounts of data. Since the subsets
| requested would be random, nodes can't predict the requests and
| thus have to store all the data. The data would then be
| augmented with the consensus results of these computations, so
| that future computations would be able to reference them.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| whose boss
| lreeves wrote:
| >Gene Hoffman, the president of Chia Network, the company
| behind the currency, admits that "we've kind of destroyed the
| short-term supply chain", but he denies it will become an
| environmental drain.
| ggggtez wrote:
| > Bitcoin requires so-called miners to do vast amounts of useless
| calculations
|
| finally someone calling it like it is
| meesterdude wrote:
| The thing with hard drives: if chia bombs, you can still turn
| around and sell them on Ebay. And when they're 14tb+ drives,
| they'll retain their value for a decent time.
|
| you can't do that with miners, and GPU's are still fairly
| specific components. But plenty of companies and people have all
| sorts of needs for extra space.
|
| I mean - if we're going to be scaling anything... hard drives are
| the thing. And if there are any storage optimizations people come
| up with, those will only benefit the storage industry overall;
| unlike ASIC miners, for example.
| tracedddd wrote:
| The drives are reportedly destroyed from the process relatively
| rapidly. So no, I'd probably not plan to be able to resell
| drives on eBay later.
| wmf wrote:
| SSDs are destroyed but HDDs are not.
| okareaman wrote:
| Something is wrong with this picture
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| To clarify, it's the supply chain that is destroyed, not the hard
| drives themselves. Most Chia miners appear to be using enterprise
| SSDs to "farm" a plot. And consumer SSDs can't really stand up to
| this process long term, so they get killed relatively quick.
|
| A typical plot is around 100GB and officially takes around 356GB
| (and a lot of SSD thrashing) to farm. Then that plot is copied
| off to long term storage (larger, slow hard drives via SATA, USB,
| etc) where it sits until a given plot of yours "wins". You can
| run one of these collections of hard drives off a Raspberry Pi.
|
| Fun fact: In other crypto there are pools so that everyone
| contributing work gets a share of the profit. There are no pools
| in Chia. You're farming a digital lottery ticket that then sits
| there using up hard drive space and an always on PC hoping one
| off your tickets wins.
|
| I researched it a bit so I'd understand the basics and the cost
| to earnings setup. It's so wasteful of hardware and space that I
| didn't want to set up a rig, though.
| antisthenes wrote:
| So, question from a complete noob:
|
| Can the thrashing of space be done on a RAMdisk, preventing SSD
| wear? Thereby only the 100GB would be moved onto long term
| storage, e.g. primary SSDs.
|
| Is that worthwhile? Does RAM speed matter in this case?
| xtracto wrote:
| Yes, ram speed matters A LOT . That's what is called
| "temporary storage" in Chia, and people who mine look for the
| fastest SSDs to mine faster.
|
| The big problem is whether you can setup a 400GB Ramdisk?
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