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Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

chiaexplorer.com

41–50 of 175 posts

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#42
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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.

Satoshi (or one of his friends) owns 5% of all bitcoins that will ever exist.

I wouldn't call it a get rich quick scheme for its founder(s) because I doubt they could have known it would take off the way it did.

But, at this point, I don't know that intent matters. Imagine if Bitcoin really did become a dominant currency... one guy would own 5% of it, a deflationary currency! The "fiat billionaires" don't come anywhere close to that kind of concentration of wealth.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#43
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin itself is a get rich quick scheme for its founders Regardless of what you think about Bitcoin, this claim is completely ahistorical.

Satoshi (or one of his friends) owns 5% of all bitcoins that will ever exist. I wouldn't call it a get rich quick scheme for its founder(s) because I doubt they could have known it would take off the way it did. But, at this point, I don't know that intent matters. Imagine if Bitcoin really did become a dominant currency... one guy would own 5% of it, a deflationary currency! The "fiat billionaires" don't come anywhe…

'Satoshi' as far as we know is a fiction, it could very well be a psuedonym for an entire team of unknown size

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#44

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…

Literally every issued asset in history has a "premine", but somehow last decade's crypto aficionados find this controversial. It's so strange to even care and the market obviously does not care because there is like half a millenium of it never caring.

It's nice to see the crypto market maturing and ignoring these people so segregated from every other financial market because they never traded anything else. Low float, "pre-mined" assets are in vogue and represent a more compatible funding model for continued development and personal riches than whatever was happening just a few years ago, let alone through the last decade in crypto.

You should ignore the "egalitarian ideology", or completely take advantage of it by launching a Chia-clone without a premine while you simply provide all the storage space first and get the exact same "insta-mine" result while advertising it to people like you that actually care about no premines. A dozen ways to get the same result, its all marketing.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#45
post #33

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.

My hunch is that Bitcoin is actually a project to promulgate Austro-libertarian economics and "Satoshi" is actually a bunch of people hired by stratospherically wealthy libertarians (like the guy that founded Renaissance who is tight with the Mercers). Call me crazy, but after hearing the correlation between people becoming interested in Bitcoin and Austro-libertarianism simultaneously I can't help but think it's a deliberate project.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#46
post #39
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 hig…

Is there a crash course on chia’s various requirements and models for a new participant? I moderately hate bitcoin for it’s effects on everything, but this one (yet) feels like an adequate thing to support, if their landing page is honest.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#47
post #26
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

The idea that enterprises have tons of "over-provisioned" storage is hilariously cute. Do the Chia guys really think engineers at FAANGs haven't found ways of using that storage for something useful? :-)

Storage workloads aren't uniform. Some need to have localized, reliable, consistently performing persistent storage with room to absorb sudden demand spikes (like customer data on cloud clusters). Others can be stored anywhere and moved with ease, with few requirements on latency, redundancy on a global scale, and read-mostly workloads, which means immediate loss of a single local copy is harmless (like YouTube videos). FAANGs have long since figured this out and how to optimize their storage utilization.

There is zero chance one of them is going to up and decide that Chia is a better use of their "spare" (not really) storage capacity if they have anything resembling competent engineering teams. I know Google does.

Source: Xoogler.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#48
post #29

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.

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.

What numbers are we talking about here? Assuming 1tb ssd with say 1000 cycles of warranty, would it die instantly or would it not even feel it?

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#49

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…

Literally every issued asset in history has a "premine", but somehow last decade's crypto aficionados find this controversial. It's so strange to even care and the market obviously does not care because there is like half a millenium of it never caring. It's nice to see the crypto market maturing and ignoring these people so segregated from every other financial market because they never traded anything else. Low flo…

> simply provide all the storage space first and get the exact same "insta-mine" result while advertising it to people like you that actually care about no premines. A dozen ways to get the same result, its all marketing.

You only get the same result if you completely monopolize mining for the first twenty-one years. If you control 50% of mining, it would take 119 years to achieve the equivalent. My issue is not that there is a premine. It's the scale of it.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#50
post #46
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hig…

Is there a crash course on chia’s various requirements and models for a new participant? I moderately hate bitcoin for it’s effects on everything, but this one (yet) feels like an adequate thing to support, if their landing page is honest.

A good place to start is the official blog/wiki: https://chia.net/2021/02/22/plotting-basics.html

Reddit also has some good plotting/farming recommendations among the usual chaff.

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