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

Post by valesco » Sun, May 02, 2021, 8:03 AM UTC

PeterStuer wrote: post #129

schmichael wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Post by cwyers » Sun, May 02, 2021, 8:09 AM UTC

hwbehrens wrote: post #131

cwyers wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not asking for a pitch deck or a prospectus. I'm asking for a little bit of humility and learning from history. Like, credit where credit is due, the original Bitcoin paper posed a real problem (real in the sense that solving it could actually be net beneficial for society as a whole) and proposed a novel, clever solution to it. That's great! And from the perspective of when the paper was written, it was hard to…

> what Bitcoin has done to GPUs I understand your argument, but Bitcoin hasn't been mined on GPUs since 2011/2012. Broaden your argument from Bitcoin to "proof of work schemes" more generally, and from GPUs to "profligate (mis)use of resources", and it will land more effectively. If you are against cryptocurrencies more broadly, inclusive of proof of stake and other more recent approaches that aim to address the reso…

Post by hobo_mark » Sun, May 02, 2021, 8:18 AM UTC

mavhc wrote: post #128

ThatPlayer wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Post by vladvasiliu » Sun, May 02, 2021, 8:21 AM UTC

chade wrote: post #25

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.…

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…

Post by faeyanpiraat » Sun, May 02, 2021, 8:27 AM UTC

hwbehrens wrote: post #131

cwyers wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not asking for a pitch deck or a prospectus. I'm asking for a little bit of humility and learning from history. Like, credit where credit is due, the original Bitcoin paper posed a real problem (real in the sense that solving it could actually be net beneficial for society as a whole) and proposed a novel, clever solution to it. That's great! And from the perspective of when the paper was written, it was hard to…

> what Bitcoin has done to GPUs I understand your argument, but Bitcoin hasn't been mined on GPUs since 2011/2012. Broaden your argument from Bitcoin to "proof of work schemes" more generally, and from GPUs to "profligate (mis)use of resources", and it will land more effectively. If you are against cryptocurrencies more broadly, inclusive of proof of stake and other more recent approaches that aim to address the reso…