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Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
61–70 of 175 posts
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#62I've had trouble finding an answer to one question: I don't understand why one would need multiple drives. Seems like you could earn the coin, sell it for USD, erase the drive, and earn another coin with the same disk. What prevents this?
The more space you have, the more likely you are to win coins. Therefore you want to plot as much space as possible.
If multiple people have good enough plots there can be multiple winners for the same challenge!
You can also win with the same plot file multiple times.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#63One 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…
How slow can these disks be? Could they be tape-drive slow? Or "1 million blurays in a stack" slow?
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#64Disks are about $20/TB right now.
So 1 exabyte is $20M. Well within the scope of VC funding for someone who wants to make Chia appear to be a success.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#65One 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…
How slow can these disks be? Could they be tape-drive slow? Or "1 million blurays in a stack" slow?
From looking at the Chia wiki, the farming process seems to be very slow. Slow enough that a tape- or optical-media robot library would easily keep up with it.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why one would need multiple drives then. Seems like you could earn the coin, sell it for USD, erase the drive, and earn another coin with the same disk. What prevents this?
You earn the coin continuously for proving that you still have the disk full of random data. It isn't a once-off thing.
Why doesn't that mean that coins can only be transferred through the sneakernet? If you get coins from someone else do you have to trust them to have the plot still around?
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Doesn't matter, you can reduce it down to the wallet. (At least) someone has (or at least has at one point had) access to it.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#68chia 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…
> 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.
Multipurpose mining hardware would compromise security of the network. An alternative use for the hardware would effectively be a subsidy on mining Bitcoin.
This would imply that the costs of securing Bitcoin are not being paid by Bitcoin hodlers, and are not fully internalised by Bitcoin.
This is similar to the reason that Proof of Work must not have economic uses external to the network.
If such a subsidy were more valuable than rewards intrinsic to the network, any variance in that subsidy would cause variance in the security of the network, with the likely case being reduced security, the network now being dependent on that external use case.
E.g. if the alternative use is valuable, it might incentivise me to acquire enough miners such that I control majority hashrate of the network subsidised by the alternative more profitable use of the hardware. Any attack on the network is then subsidised by the external use case for the hardware.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#69Earlier 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.
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 d…
The thing with ideologies (and other kinds of socioeconomical hypotheses) is that they're hyperstitional in nature - you can't prove they're realizable without at the same time deliberately trying to realize them, using people as fodder. (See, communism.) And at least one of the ideologies promulgated in meme-space must have some basis in potential reality (otherwise people wouldn't be at all prone to believing in world-changing ideas). Might be this one, might be not.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#70Chia 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.
So are VC unicorns.