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What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?

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Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?

#81

Post by jcun4128 »

conradev wrote: post #75
xhrpost wrote: post #58

To be honest I kind of wish someone would build a proof-of-bandwidth crypto. Miners would overtake data centers with cheap transit, driving the build out of more long-haul network. Some would then move to different neighborhoods just to get FTTH access, enabling more incentive for last-mile build out.

Orchid is a decentralized crypto market for bandwidth: https://www.orchid.com/ You can run a node and sell bandwidth to people who want to proxy traffic through your node

Curious about this idea. What happens if illegal stuff happens? Assuming bandwidth = internet.

Side thought is renting out your mobile device for peripheral testing. That's something I was looking for recently video/audio specifically.

Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?

#83

Post by Igelau »

dang wrote: post #48

Recent related threads: Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27008295 - May 2021 (106 comments) SSD makers start warning that mining products like ChiaCoin will void warranty - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27001848 - May 2021 (381 comments) Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26975734 - April 2021 (151 comm…

So in other words, there's a campaign (centralized or not) to pump Chia on HN? :(

Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?

#84

Post by insulanus »

ronyfadel wrote: post #66
chade wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof-of-space is essentially stored Proof-of-work. You are pre-filling your drive with many cryptographic hash's. When a challenge comes in the software will do a quick check to see if any of your plots could possibly have a proof (a hash with sufficient zeros for that challenge). If any of your plots pass this filter then the plot is looked up on the HDD to check if it does indeed contain a proof. The difficulty, t…

For someone uninitiated: what if you had high computing power? Instead of scanning your HDD, can’t you generate these hashes on the spot?

Yes, you can. That's called a grinding attack. There is mitigation in the proof-of-space construction for exactly that. That is also the reason that they will have to move to more expensive proofs as time goes on, and hardware improves.

Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?

#85

Post by arcticbull »

christiansakai wrote: post #53
arcticbull wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Officially, no, but it is an emergent property of their other responsibilities. For instance, a government cannot maintain law and order without power, and a society without law and order is the definition of a failed state ([edit] well, more specifically one in which the government has lost its monopoly on violence). It's not an unreasonable interpretation to therefore say any non-failed state must retain power.

Bank bailouts in 2008 justified? Save the rich, screw the poor and the middle class. At least the society is peaceful.

Mmm not to me no, I believe in a capitalist system that lets losers lose. However the argument was ordinary folks would pay.

Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?

#86

Post by qwtel »

Glench wrote: post #35

Folks here might be interested in Chia's smart contract language: https://chialisp.com/ Basically the designers saw how easily many Ethereum/Solidity contracts were hacked and saw that stateful side effects were the main culprit so they made their language have no side effects! Pretty cool.

I've been wondering if non-turning complete languages might be the way to go for many smart contracts, which often resemble vending machines more than what general purpose languages are used for. Those should be captured by pushdown automaton or even a finate state machine and the corresponding languages (but except from regex, I'm not really aware of any..).

My CS knowledge got really rusty, but I think it should be possible to put tight bounds on the computational cost of these, as well as statically guarantee that certain states cannot be reached, both of which would be very valuable in this case.

Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?

#87

Post by tehlike »

schmichael wrote: post #82
plank_time wrote: post #79

If someone could create a cryptocurrency using proof that require people to pick up garbage, the world would be garbage-free in a month.

People would litter just to create more garbage to “mine.”

Rats of Hanoi - explains the exact thing you are saying :) https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-190...

Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?

#88

Post by ChainOfFools »

Igelau wrote: post #83
dang wrote: post #48

Recent related threads: Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27008295 - May 2021 (106 comments) SSD makers start warning that mining products like ChiaCoin will void warranty - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27001848 - May 2021 (381 comments) Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26975734 - April 2021 (151 comm…

So in other words, there's a campaign (centralized or not) to pump Chia on HN? :(

this incredibly viral "chia will cause a shortage of hard drives" meme (true or not) is a huge gift wrapped win for the coin's promoters.

every impression of this meme that results in someone's decision to avoid chia (which, had they never heard of the coin in the first place, would have been the outcome anyway) will be offset by a half dozen others who will spot a quick 10x return opportunity for themselves, even if they recognize that the long term result is a net negative for everyone else.

it's Streisand Effect rocket fuel.

Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?

#90

Post by tylersmith »

surround wrote: post #12

It took me a while to actually understand how proof-of-work mining works because seemingly every article one the subject gives too abstract of an explanation. Turns out it's not that complex if you understand what a cryptographic hash is. Just take a block (a list of recent transactions) and take a SHA-256 hash if it over and over with slight variations until you get a hash that starts with enough consecutive zeroes.…

One way is using zero knowledge computational integrity proofs. They allow me to prove to you that I know of pre-image of some hash without revealing what it is.

Say the network has seen 1TB of data before with hash H. It can generate a random number as a challenge, and request a miner to prove they have access to the 1TB worth of pre-image at the same time it has access to the random challenge. The only way for a miner to compute such a proof is to have the 1TB of data stored somewhere.

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