1EB = 500 people with 2-3 disk drives each
Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
111–120 of 175 posts
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s only the storage required for ongoing use (“farming”). You’re not taking into account “plotting” which requires NVMe SSDs, decently fast CPU, and a few GB RAM per plot (~101GB storage). Assume it takes 7 hours to create a plot on high end consumer hardware.
As far as I can see, only the phase 1 of plotting is cryptographic in any meaningful way. The rest is just rearranging data requiring no CPU power, and can be done effectively instantly if you have 400GB of RAM. A big 'plotting house' would have dedicated crypto units to do phase 1, then stream the results over the network to a machine with 400 gigs of ram to do the rearrangement and write out a plot file. It should…
I agree on a longer time scale. It seems like moderate success of the Chia network would be a prerequisite for someone to invest in building that.
My comment was responding to my interpretation of your claim to mean a single entity is likely responsible for the majority of the 1EB, and that could be accomplished for $20M. Based on my own observations over the past few months, I believe the network has been bootstrapped by a wide variety of hobbyists and a few larger scale operations, with far more than $20M invested overall.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s plutocracy with emojis. Other than that - absolutely nothing
I'm not trying to be obtuse, but why is authority tied to amount of coin owned any more plutocratic than authority tied to amount of computing resources used? Both cost money, and both scale power with amount of money sunk into it.
I don't think it is any more plutocratic. It's about the same.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#114chia 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…
There's no expected level of resource consumption.
Bitcoin is a shitty public ledger, the resource consumption is due to the significant collective interest in it, not what it accomplishes.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is wrong with proof of stake?
It’s plutocracy with emojis. Other than that - absolutely nothing
The upside is that the wealthy have an incentive to keep the currency functional, otherwise their wealth is lost.
The downside is that "functional" isn't exactly a high bar. For example reducing block rewards to encourage deflation would disproportionately help the wealthy so they may push it even if it isn't ideal for the average person.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#116In 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.
I think that would be unfortunate. That kind of special-purpose hardware would go against the "anyone can farm" spirit of Chia and likely worsen the environmental impact since those drives wouldn't be useful for other applications.
"Anyone can farm" is clearly only going to be a thing while the project stays small.
It will always be more cost efficient to assemble tens of thousands of the most optimal hard drives/CPU's/ASICS in a big room, bulk ordering them all cheaply, than it will be to DIY it yourself at home.
Any kind of mining will always end up costing exactly the same as the revenue. And that means you and I will make a loss at home.
You could claim "but I'm using unused hard drive space, so it's free", but really you should be thinking "I bought a hard drive bigger than I needed, but I can partially recover the cost with Chia". And besides, in a few months, the 200GB free on your hard drive won't even be worth the effort of installing the software.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#117And now storage devices have shot up in cost. Once again proving that crypto currencies seem to ruin everything they touch.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#118I'm admittedly rather disappointed with Chia after reading up on it, as I thought it was closer to Sia [0] or Storj [1] where you got rewarded in coin to provide storage space, but instead it's more akin to Burstcoin [2] and indeed, proof-of-capacity cryptocurrencies are nothing new and the only supposedly added value would be on Chialisp for (safer?) smart contracts. It IS factually correct to say proof-of-capacity is far less resource intensive than proof-of-work crypto as even the least efficient hard drive will consume orders of magnitude less energy than a mining rig, but it's still based on tying up a resource, this time it's just a majority of hardware and a minority of electricity instead of the other way around.
One issue that most people advocating for proof-of-stake gleefully ignore is to work through the initial distribution of the coin- can't stake what you don't have. So you either have a sizable premine, you bootstrap your coin using someone else's ledger or you start out with proof-of-work (or like Chia, proof-of-capacity) and then move on to proof-of-stake once there's a stable ecosystem for it. It does seem like Chia comes with a sizable premine, which is also disappointing but not entirely surprising as practically every new cryptocurrency that has come out as of late has had it to "financially bootstrap" its development and what not. I'd also have some choice words about Bram Cohen, but they'd be rather out of scope here.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#119Here I am thinking there's finally a working file storage coin for truly decentralized and anonymous file hosting and no... it's another proof-of-waste thing.
What's even the point of "decentralized and anonymous file hosting"? There's a bajilion serious hosting providers that have proven their mettle. And when chips come down to it, crypto never is anonymous.
What's even the point of a moon landing?
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s plutocracy with emojis. Other than that - absolutely nothing
The upside is that the wealthy have an incentive to keep the currency functional, otherwise their wealth is lost. The downside is that "functional" isn't exactly a high bar. For example reducing block rewards to encourage deflation would disproportionately help the wealthy so they may push it even if it isn't ideal for the average person.
The same argument has been made about monarchies; no rational king would ruin the kingdom for his son. A quick perusal of the history books makes a mockery of that theory.
Turns out humans aren’t perfectly rational, and handing a huge amount of control to a tiny number of rich people is a fantastic way to discover that while any given rich person might be smart and what not, there’s a non trivial chance that their heir is an idiot and will ruin whatever they’re given. This is entertaining for personal fortunes, but not so funny when they control a currency.