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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

#31

Post by davidgh »

One interesting thing about chia is that before you can “farm” you have to “plot”. Plotting (generating the files that fill up the hard drive to provide the proof of stake) takes fast SSDs and lots of CPU, if you want to build your farm in any reasonable timeframe.

The challenge is that it requires you to buy different sets of hardware to earn chia, and the high performance plotting hardware is only needed temporarily (while you’re filling up hard drives). It seems a cottage industry of plotting services is already developing so that those that want to farm don’t have to invest in the hardware to plot.

Farming requires very little CPU and slow disks are not a problem.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#32

Post by novok »

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.

do you need to use ssds with chia?

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#33

Post by reasons »

greyface- wrote: post #13

Chia 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 prem…

> ... it feels like a get rich quick scheme for its founders

Well, Bitcoin itself is a get rich quick scheme for its founders. So are most of its spinoffs.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#34

Post by Glench »

novok wrote: post #32
duskwuff wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

do you need to use ssds with chia?

No, it's just useful to use SSDs for plotting since they're faster. For farming any storage (HDDs, for example) are fine.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#35

Post by eindiran »

reasons wrote: post #33
greyface- wrote: post #13

Chia 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 prem…

> ... it feels like a get rich quick scheme for its founders Well, Bitcoin itself is a get rich quick scheme for its founders. So are most of its spinoffs.

> Bitcoin itself is a get rich quick scheme for its founders

Regardless of what you think about Bitcoin, this claim is completely ahistorical.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#36

Post by [deleted] »

reasons wrote: post #33
greyface- wrote: post #13

Chia 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 prem…

> ... it feels like a get rich quick scheme for its founders Well, Bitcoin itself is a get rich quick scheme for its founders. So are most of its spinoffs.

[deleted]

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#37

Post by Glench »

Eduard wrote: post #5

Google, Facebook, and all the other datahoarders are going to be pissed that there is now a new and distributed player eating away their share from the global HDD and SSD market.

Or if Chia becomes popular then they're the most likely to hop onboard and use their overprovisioned space to farm Chia until they need it for something else.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#38

Post by Glench »

gruez wrote: post #28
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…

>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 $…

It all depends on the economics. It's pretty likely that at some point reinvesting in Chia by buying more drives just doesn't make sense.

You can also read more about the power consumption of Chia here: https://chiapower.org/

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#39

Post by theptip »

davidgh wrote: post #31

One interesting thing about chia is that before you can “farm” you have to “plot”. Plotting (generating the files that fill up the hard drive to provide the proof of stake) takes fast SSDs and lots of CPU, if you want to build your farm in any reasonable timeframe. The challenge is that it requires you to buy different sets of hardware to earn chia, and the high performance plotting hardware is only needed temporaril…

If you enjoy building PCs, it's an interesting challenge; plotting and farming have very different performance profiles, and there are multiple strategies for viable builds depending on your expertise (big JBOD vs. raspberry pi with USB drives, etc). Feels a lot like the early BTC/ETH mining days where we were building crates full of GPUs zip-tied together, before ASICs institutionalized the mining process.

> the high performance plotting hardware is only needed temporarily

I'm not sure if you're ever done plotting; if the network space keeps increasing, then you need to increase the number of plots you maintain to keep up -- else you'll gradually farm fewer over time.

I think you probably need more plotting hardware in the initial buildout phase though.

Some are already talking about "plotting as a service", selling disks full of plots once they have finished their own plotting. In the spirit of "selling jeans to gold miners", that might be a viable business model.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#40

Post by MrFoof »

gruez wrote: post #3
linsomniac wrote: post #2

What 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.

> 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…

>Because 1EB is a minuscule amount of the hard drive capacity

Very much agree here. I purchased about 144TB of raw storage a few weeks ago for future video and data projects, and it's possible to purchase 1PB of raw capacity (with no redundancy, nor anything to connect to) for as cheap as around $13000 USD at retail pricing.

1EB could be acquired for somewhere between $12-$15M. Not chump change, but considering the number of players pre-mining, absolutely nothing in the scheme of things.

-----

What will be interesting is how this increase in mainnet capacity grows over time, and relative to manufactured capacity. 1.1EB of footprint today is nothing ... but we might start to care if it were to grow at a rate of 1.1EB/day or faster, as manufacturers like Seagate, WD, Toshiba, etc. can't instantly respond to such a sustained demand spike. Channel supply could be exhausted relatively quickly.

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