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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?

#121

Post by M4v3R »

Tepix wrote: post #117

First we had proof of work, now we have proof of space. Both are rather wasteful. The challenge appears to be to create a proof of something beneficial for society, like "proof of clean energy generated", "proof of not flying", "proof of vegan lifestyle" or "proof of CO2 sequestered".

There already exists a cryptocurrency that is both environmentally friendly, fast and fee-less - Nano [0]. It uses something called directed acyclic graph (DAG) and while it does require proof of work it’s only for sending transactions to prevent spam, not for mining. It was created a few years ago but only recently it starts to get more traction. I used it a couple of times and it worked great.

[0] https://nano.org/

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

#122

Post by Tepix »

john_minsk wrote: post #97
theshadowknows wrote: post #4

I asked this recently but the topic died before I got many answers. Basically, I’m not a cryptocurrency denier. I just don’t understand it. Do people want cryptocurrency because they want to spend it on stuff? Or do they want cryptocurrency because they want to sell it for other currencies? In other words, at what point will a cryptocurrency stand on its own as something that’s worth a pair of shoes? Instead of being…

The way I understand bitcoin is the following: 1. Main advantage of it is that it can't be stopped. 2. Since it can't be stopped - it allows to evade any regulation from the government or the bank. If it replaces banking system - you can move around the globe with your capital and spend it the way you like. This is not the case at the moment 3. Bitcoin could become a currency if it was fast enough and fees were low e…

If more countries outlaw exchanging bitcoin with fiat commercially (for example because of its detrimental effect on the environment), bitcoin's value will decrease.

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

#123

Post by Kiro »

cwyers wrote: post #94

I just... do not understand how smart, even _brilliant_ people, the sort of people who know enough to make something like this, can look at Bitcoin... the waste, the way it has utterly failed to achieve what it set out to do[1], everything, and thinks, I know, I want to do that, but instead of blowing up the market for GPUs it'll be SSDs. Why? To get rich? It even seems doubtful to me that the people who developed Ch…

I don't understand how a forum called Hacker News is so dismissive of an invention that should be right up a hacker's alley. Innovative, technical, cryptographic and decentralized. Cryptocurrencies feel like something straight out of a cyberpunk novel.

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

#124

Post by superdisk »

cwyers wrote: post #108
nine_k wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin did solve the problem it alleged to be solving: money which is not controlled by state, and a system which us pretty hard to seize. It does allow you to have an "account" outside any jurisdiction, and allows you, given good opsec, to transfer huge amounts in transactions not controlled by any state. Like, millions of USD. Bitcoin is obviously useless to pay for daily goods, like a coffee. But gold would be al…

Read the Bitcoin paper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf It does not, at any point in there, say that the benefit is to avoid state control. It talks about how the cost of requiring a third party in transactions discourages microtransactions, for instance (there are other touted benefits as well). But it's not an anarchist manifesto. And all of the benefits of Bitcoin listed in the original paper require it to be a us…

The original point of Bitcoin was most certainly to avoid state control. Read some of satoshi's forum posts or this: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block

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

#125

Post by pmlnr »

deckplecksetter wrote: post #44

If only someone could invent a cryptocurrency that incentivises something good instead of something harmful.

There's FoldingCoin:

https://www.newsbtc.com/news/foldingcoin-where-people-mine-p...

Things that would make sense:

- SETI@homeCoin, ala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home

- ArchiveCoin, ala https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior

These would actually be useful.

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

#126

Post by Tepix »

rovr138 wrote: post #7

Just bought a new Synology NAS this week and started putting together disks and they're scarce and the prices are through the roof. Couldn't find what I was planning on buying. What I found was through the roof. I bit the bullet and bought 4 new ones. Not enough to fully populate the NAS, but at least it'll give me some space for now to do what I need. We've seen scarcity and what it does for prices after the floodin…

Did you look at large external USB hard drives' prices?

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

#127

Post by saurik »

mike_d wrote: post #100
jcun4128 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It looks like you can't become a "miner" (sell bandwidth) without becoming a partner. All of which are existing VPN companies - who probably have their abuse handling well ironed out at this point.

(I am the lead developer of Orchid.) Can you tell me where you read that bit about "without becoming a partner"? It is sort of correct--like, I can see how that argument could be made--but not really true in any fundamental sense... it certainly isn't true enough that I would have personally said it to someone, as if you want to provide bandwidth you absolutely can, it is just highly unlikely anyone will buy it, as they would have to explicitly leave the only-loosely-fenced-off garden we provide by default (but I also don't work on the current UI or the documentation, so for all I know this is extremely hard to know). Really I am just curious what specifically you saw, as you seem to have come to that conclusion pretty quickly for something I only consider half true ;P.

Definitely, though: you join a market like this because you know what you are doing and what you are getting yourself into; I personally could not in good faith recommend that an end user sell access to their home Internet connection.

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

#128

Post by mavhc »

ThatPlayer wrote: post #102
mNovak wrote: post #98

Can anyone clarify for me why/how this incentivizes SSDs over HDDs? Seems if it's really just about having "proof of space", whatever HDD is cheapest would make sense? How much data gets read back how fast during validation?

It's the initial generation of the 'plots' that make up the proof of space that's disc IO limited. So faster SSDs for that and then moved onto HDDs for long-term. According to Chia, it uses 332 GB to generate a 101.3 GB proof of space: https://www.chia.net/2021/02/22/plotting-basics.html

So just need a computer with 350GBs of ram?

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

#129

Post by PeterStuer »

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.”

We had (have) this here in Belgium with a very real case. Separate collection of plastics and the creation of plastics collection and recycling (organizations)companies were introduced for environmental improvement.

Unfortunately, these have turned into the biggest plastic packaging lobby and have caused an explosion in the use of plastic packaging in retail. More plastic use is unfortunately a net benefit to those whose economic/financial incentives depend on it.

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

#130

Post by matkoniecz »

Kiro wrote: post #123
cwyers wrote: post #94

I just... do not understand how smart, even _brilliant_ people, the sort of people who know enough to make something like this, can look at Bitcoin... the waste, the way it has utterly failed to achieve what it set out to do[1], everything, and thinks, I know, I want to do that, but instead of blowing up the market for GPUs it'll be SSDs. Why? To get rich? It even seems doubtful to me that the people who developed Ch…

I don't understand how a forum called Hacker News is so dismissive of an invention that should be right up a hacker's alley. Innovative, technical, cryptographic and decentralized. Cryptocurrencies feel like something straight out of a cyberpunk novel.

> Cryptocurrencies feel like something straight out of a cyberpunk novel.

And that is exactly why I dislike it. At least among ones that I encountered cyberpunk is strongly dystopian.

> I don't understand how a forum called Hacker News is so dismissive of an invention that should be right up a hacker's alley

I hope that Chia dies and falls on its face before SSD and HDD will repeat story of GPU.

I like to use this resources for actually useful things, not gambling.

> decentralized

So far BTC-like stuff is centralized, just in a novel toxic way.

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