How much of it is currently utilized?
AFAIK unlike storage coins (eg. sia or storj), it's not being used for anything, it's just "burned". Proof of work burns compute cycles. Proof of storage burns storage space.
Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
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Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#12People are always asking me, "How much will 1 XCH be worth?". $13.51 on May 3rd is my answer.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#13Chia pre-mined 6 years worth of block rewards. Proof-of-space may be the closest thing we have to a viable proof-of-work replacement but this instantiation of it feels like a get rich quick scheme for its founders.
Edit: My calculation was based on the initial reward schedule of 64 units per block, but when you take into account the fact that it ramps down to 4 units per block shortly thereafter, it's actually a premine of 21 years: https://www.coindesk.com/5-takeaways-from-chia-networks-new-...
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But I haven't really seen prices going up. [...] And my coworker has not been getting the same news stories about hard drive prices. because 1EB is a minuscule amount of the hard drive capacity, compared to the total amount produced per year. According to seagate's blogpost[1], they ship at least 500 EB per year. If you add in capacity from WD/toshiba, it's probably closer to 1000EB if not more. That would make chi…
1. Exponential growth. 2. Started with around 120 PByte. Seven weeks later and it'll be already a decimal order of magnitude bigger. 0.1 percent isn't minuscule.
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Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#15chia claims that its proof of work alternative is "eco-friendly"[1]. This is also reflected in their advertising material, eg. instead of having a whitepaper they have a "greenpaper", and rather than mining they have "farming. While it's true that proof space is less energy intensive to "farm", wouldn't economics dictate that the resource consumption is equal to proof of work's resource consumption? All you're doing…
The key difference is that there is a lot of overprovisioned storage out there currently sitting idle which could be used to farm Chia with only a marginal increase in energy usage. The theory is that as this overprovisioned storage comes online it will make stockpiling storage explicitly for farming unprofitable.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#16chia claims that its proof of work alternative is "eco-friendly"[1]. This is also reflected in their advertising material, eg. instead of having a whitepaper they have a "greenpaper", and rather than mining they have "farming. While it's true that proof space is less energy intensive to "farm", wouldn't economics dictate that the resource consumption is equal to proof of work's resource consumption? All you're doing…
To speculate, it seems like the lowest-cost supplier will win and that’s likely to be used drives from data centers. Chia farming uses storage, but not necessarily reliable storage so maybe any drives that start looking flaky could be rented out to Chia farmers, to get a bit more use out of them?
At least some data centers destroy their old drives for privacy reasons, so they would need to figure out a way around that if they’re going to reuse them offsite.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#17What is going on with Chia? Over the last week I've been getting news stories about Chia miners buying up hard drives and driving up prices. But I haven't really seen prices going up. And I looked into Chia and it seems like it is just running a testnet right now. And my coworker has not been getting the same news stories about hard drive prices.
As you can see in the graph, the mainnet network space for the Chia blockchain is growing exponentially fast. Lots of people starting to mine ("farm") Chia using low-electricity proofs of space. The full node count over the trailing 5 days is north of 120,000 which is more than Bitcoin I believe.
Part of the reason for this is because Chia is really easy to farm — anyone with extra space on their hard drives can do it. There are people farming a petabyte with a Raspberry Pi. This was by design to keep the network decentralized and hard to attack — close to the original intention of "one cpu one vote" from bitcoin.
Right now there's no price for Chia since it's not on exchanges and transactions won't start until May 3. But in the short term it's advantageous to buy enterprise-level SSDs because they're the fastest to "plot" with so it seems that in a few markets, especially in China where interest in farming Chia is surging, a few SSD sellers have seen a spike in demand.
For long-term effects on the storage industry it's hard to say what will happen — there's tons of existing storage out in the world already, the storage industry already sells 1+ zettabytes of storage a year, and unlike single-use bitcoin mining hardware hard drives are useful outside of Chia. The Chia company speculates on the impact on the storage industry on page 23 of their business whitepaper: https://www.chia.net/assets/Chia-Business-Whitepaper-2021-02...
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#18What is going on with Chia? Over the last week I've been getting news stories about Chia miners buying up hard drives and driving up prices. But I haven't really seen prices going up. And I looked into Chia and it seems like it is just running a testnet right now. And my coworker has not been getting the same news stories about hard drive prices.
As you can see in the graph, the mainnet network space for the Chia blockchain is growing exponentially fast. Lots of people starting to mine ("farm") Chia using low-electricity proofs of space. The full node count over the trailing 5 days is north of 120,000 which is more than Bitcoin I believe. Part of the reason for this is because Chia is really easy to farm — anyone with extra space on their hard drives can do i…
How do you connect a petabyte of storage to a Rasberry Pi?
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#19chia claims that its proof of work alternative is "eco-friendly"[1]. This is also reflected in their advertising material, eg. instead of having a whitepaper they have a "greenpaper", and rather than mining they have "farming. While it's true that proof space is less energy intensive to "farm", wouldn't economics dictate that the resource consumption is equal to proof of work's resource consumption? All you're doing…
The key difference is that there is a lot of overprovisioned storage out there currently sitting idle which could be used to farm Chia with only a marginal increase in energy usage. The theory is that as this overprovisioned storage comes online it will make stockpiling storage explicitly for farming unprofitable.
>The key difference is that there is a lot of overprovisioned storage out there currently sitting idle
From where? Individuals or enterprises? With the direction we're headed (SSDs and cloud storage), it's hard to imagine many people with a few terabytes of hard drive space. On the other hand you can get around cheap hard drives at around $15/TB if you buy external, then shuck them so you can put it in a backpane or something. At that price, it's hard to beat the price of a new drive, especially if you factor in the time it takes for the individual to set it up. Enterprises might have better economies of scale, but I'm skeptical that executives would sign off on running arbitrary code on production servers just to earn some cryptocoins.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#20chia claims that its proof of work alternative is "eco-friendly"[1]. This is also reflected in their advertising material, eg. instead of having a whitepaper they have a "greenpaper", and rather than mining they have "farming. While it's true that proof space is less energy intensive to "farm", wouldn't economics dictate that the resource consumption is equal to proof of work's resource consumption? All you're doing…
I think another difference that I've heard the Chia folks talk about is the fact that even with a shift to manufacturing (which is real and a potential ecological problem, but one that already exists to some extent in the 1+ zettabyte storage industry), it's a one-time deal — hard drives can keep farming forever after they're manufactured with minimal electricity consumption. And they can be used for other purposes besides just farming Chia. With bitcoin the cost is terrible because ASIC hardware only works for mining bitcoin and by definition has to waste huge amounts of electricity forever to keep mining.