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Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

chiaexplorer.com

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Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#21

Post by gruez »

skybrian wrote: post #16
gruez wrote: post #9

chia 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 tha…

>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?

AFAIK people already buy up used datacenter drives to use elsewhere, so you're just shifting demand around.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#22

Post by rektide »

I hate this crypto thing too. more spiking people's belief to milk frivolous unfounded overconsumption. hard drive prices have doubled & that's if you can find stock. all for some new unproven technoreligion that promises riches. that is frankly equally as inscrutable & impersonal as all the other concensensus driven scarcizitation ponzi schemes. computing is far too good to be wasted on concensensus, on the limited. and such harping upon fomo, such impervious immovable centralized concensus at the heart of each of these, depraved & mad preying upon people, praying to get rich by helping stupid clocks to keep ticking; this poor sad era.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#25

Post by duskwuff »

Glench wrote: post #20
gruez wrote: post #9

chia 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 b…

> hard drives can keep farming forever

SSDs have limited program/erase lifespan, and the proof-of-space algorithms used by Chia eat into that lifespan pretty fast.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#26

Post by Glench »

gruez wrote: post #19
magila wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Both enterprises and consumer drives have over-provisioned storage, yes. Enterprises obviously have a lot more and it will take a while for them to trust that Chia is a good way of using their unused storage until a more valuable use of their storage space comes along (like an Amazon customer requesting S3 space or something).

It also seems likely that flash storage will become cheaper than HDDs in the next ten years, which will start increasing SSD space on drives due to increased competition. Analysis here: https://wikibon.com/qlc-flash-hamrs-hdd/

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#27

Post by phire »

pabs3 wrote: post #18
Glench wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Bunch of USB hubs?

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#28

Post by gruez »

Glench wrote: post #20
gruez wrote: post #9

chia 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 b…

>it's a one-time deal — hard drives can keep farming forever after they're manufactured with minimal electricity consumption

Let's say your mining operation brings in $1000/day in revenue. If it's mining bitcoin you might be paying $500/day in electricity bills, leaving you with $500 as profit to reinvest in the business (ie. buy more hardware). If it's mining chia you might be paying $50/day in electricity. That's $450 in less resources wasted, sounds good right? Well no, because any savvy businesman is going to reinvest that $450 into buying more mining hardware, so you can make even more money. In the end any resource you save from lower electricity consumption just gets poured into manufacturing more hardware.

>And they can be used for other purposes besides just farming Chia

This is a mixed bag, because while it's true that the mining hardware can be repurposed, it also means that during boom times, regular consumers have to pay more for their hardware. See for instance, the GPU shortage.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#29

Post by Glench »

duskwuff wrote: post #25
Glench wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

> hard drives can keep farming forever SSDs have limited program/erase lifespan, and the proof-of-space algorithms used by Chia eat into that lifespan pretty fast.

To be precise, the process of "plotting" (using disk space for Chia) causes a lot of writes to disks, but those writes are a one-time process. Once a plot is written it can be moved anywhere and farmed forever. The actual proof of space algorithm for farming only takes an initial 5 seeks and then 64 seeks for the full proof so farming is not a big stress on disks long-term.
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