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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

#71

Post by tnzm »

creato wrote: post #42
eindiran wrote: post #35

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…

Doesn't he deserve it? If you were to launch a world-changing project at the cost of disappearing completely, wouldn't you want to reap some benefit from that project if it ever succeeds?

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#72

Post by loloquwowndueo »

jfoutz wrote: post #41
Glench wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How about a RAM disk?

Sure but you need about 300GB RAM for the temporary files needed while creating plots.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#74

Post by freddiecoleman »

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…

Read the business whitepaper to see what they are doing with the pre-farm.

https://www.chia.net/2021/02/10/chia-businesss-whitepaper.ht...

You are free to agree or disagree with the plan, but need to read it before coming to any conclusions.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#75

Post by londons_explore »

zozbot234 wrote: post #65
londons_explore wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My reading of the wiki suggests that the time for your disk to read the data really does matter.

Chia blocks are every ~20 seconds. Within those 20 seconds, you need to read 7 + 64 different areas of the disk. Some read addresses depend on the last, so in reality you need to do 7 sequential reads, all within the block time to get any reward.

So basically, if your storage medium takes over ~1 second to read data, you're going to be throwing away some rewards, and if it takes over ~10 seconds per read, you will barely get any rewards at all.

Tape drives are out then, and so is optical media unless it's already in a drive.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#76

Post by rbanffy »

marcan_42 wrote: post #47
Glench wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 store…

Not all enterprises are FAANGs and the immense majority operates at a tiny fraction of that scale.

While I don’t think too many businesses will buy this idea of using spare storage for “cryptofarming”, unused resources are pretty common.

The price of a cryptocurrency will tend to roughly follow the cost of generating it. In storage, it’s safe to assume the cost will only go down for the same amount of space. And disk space has been growing faster than transistor density for some time now.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#77

Post by rbanffy »

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…

If the data on the drive is encrypted, there’s no need to shred decommissioned drives.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#78

Post by puranjay »

Glench wrote: post #38
gruez wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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/

Do you know what’s a good place to start if I want to build a rig for Chia?

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#79

Post by zozbot234 »

londons_explore wrote: post #75
zozbot234 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My reading of the wiki suggests that the time for your disk to read the data really does matter. Chia blocks are every ~20 seconds. Within those 20 seconds, you need to read 7 + 64 different areas of the disk. Some read addresses depend on the last, so in reality you need to do 7 sequential reads, all within the block time to get any reward. So basically, if your storage medium takes over ~1 second to read data, you'…

Do the 7 initial reads access separate data from the remaining 64, or is the whole "plot" fair game for even those initial reads?

ETA: from looking at the docs, it seems that the 7 initial reads do access separate "tables". It should be possible to optimize by storing these on lower-latency storage, and even optimize further via parallel farming of many "plots", of which only a few at any given time will ever need to retrieve the 64 blocks denoting a successful proof. ISTM that tape media has real potential here.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#80

Post by londons_explore »

In regular file storage, data error rates must be very low.

In Chia, fairly high error rates are still very profitable.

Current hard disks might see one uncorrectable error every 1,000 TB read from them. Chia would be fine with one error every 1 megabyte.

That difference might allow custom drive firmwares to put far more bits far closer together, leading to cheaper less reliable storage for farming.

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