Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I live in Belgium and I never heard of that. Do you have any source? I’m interested.
What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?
161–170 of 263 posts
Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Because it doesn't work. I wish it worked! It does feel like something out of a cyberpunk novel. I loved "Crypronomicon." There's nothing punk about Bitcoin anymore, though. IBM, the least punk organization in the history of mankind, wants to sell you a blockchain. The promise of Bitcoin is the idea that individuals, not large financial concerns, have the power. Coinbase just IPO'd for an eye watering amount of money…
>Because it doesn't work.
Bitcoin works well in plenty of ways. Bitcoin just doesn't work very well as a currency, but that ship has sailed and it's ok.
Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?
#163I 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…
Here's an alternative mental model... Let's talk about Filecoin (related to Chia) for file storage. Assume for the moment that all 2 billion tokens are in circulation. At any given time, there is a market of people looking to store files and people willing to store those files for a fee. You're transacting (roughly) in Gb-years at today's level of technology -- i.e. willingness to store 1Gb of data for 1 year. Regula…
So I'm trying to check out FileCoin as I like the idea it tries to solve but: the website has some nifty visuals but after reading a few pages, I have no idea:
1- how to really get started and participate if I don't have a dedicated server (I mean I would expect something easy to onboard, but I don't want to setup a whole dedicated machine for that, despite the $100 rebate on Digital Ocean's bill).
2- How are the coins allocated and what the heck you can do with them?
3- what if I'm just a user who wants to store some files? No idea how to do that, through who I should go, what tools I should use. How do I pay for the storage to start with?
4- no idea how this economic model works: spend on hardware to become a miner? but I don't see how you get back this heavy investment. I understand miners get paid, but see 3).
5- who is this for exactly? It doesn't seem to target individual users, small businesses or even large companies. Is it just an experimental project, is anyone actually really using it and building stable 'stuff' on it?
6- how does this compare to the other storage solutions in terms of availability, andwidth and cost?
7- What's the adoption so far? Is there any storage available in my region?
I mean, it's a great idea but even as a 'tech guy', I'm lost as to how to use that infrastructure.
I'm sure that I could invest a few hours into it to find out[1], but should I really have to put that much effort into something that should be clear in a couple of paragraphs without the confusion of big word marketing[2] (I mean that page has all the buzzwords but doesn't explain much by the time you reach the bottom it).
I think the time spent on that nifty animated intro[3] of the front page could have been put to better use. I see no onboarding effort although the docs look good.
Maybe this is too much of a rant and I'm being unfair, I'm sure I must have missed some important things, but I don't see how this can get wide adoption if the basics are not clear and the onboarding is not better.
Or maybe it's just me; I still don't know what it can do for me. Maybe I'm not the target?
[1] https://docs.filecoin.io/about-filecoin/what-is-filecoin/#for-storage-providers
[2] https://filecoin.io/store/
[3] https://filecoin.io/Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?
#164Earlier 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…
On Bitcoin you can do micro transactions using the lightning network. On Ethereum you have a plethora of layer 2 scaling projects that are gaining traction as we speak. Other networks like Avalanche achieve high throughput and low finality out of the box. It seems to me that there are plenty of things to be excited about in the space but you have to keep an open mind instead of being a stickler about the verbiage used in the original Bitcoin white paper.
Random fun fact: the EU Investment Bank just did a 100 mln bond issuance on Ethereum.
The financial rails of the world will be moving to crypto asset networks, slowly at first, and there is nothing that can stop this shift.
Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 re…
> At least among ones that I encountered cyberpunk is strongly dystopian. Back in the day when we were sitting in dark basements with big Unix beards drinking Jolt cola, we all dreamed of living in a crypto-anarchy, becoming cyborgs with chip implants and fully submerge in the Metaverse. I guess times have changed.
Cyberpunk is corporate oligarchy, and we are getting there.
Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?
#166First 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".
Proof of X unfortunately has to be capable of being verifiable by a computer without human intervention.
Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?
#167Folks 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.
Tezos has a similar pitch (having a better language that is less bug prone) and is a ghost chain now.
Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am fascinated by the POS coins you chose to list. Why list neo and cutcoin over Cardano? I've never heard of either!
And Cardano's Proof of Stake is groundbreaking. I don't know why the commenter chose to list those coins.
why is it groundbreaking? how does it work vs ETH try at PoW?
Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?
#169I 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…
Every time there are talks about cryptocurrencies it seems like HN is stuck pretending that only Bitcoin exists and tech hasn’t moved since Bitcoin.
Most cryptocurrencies are clones of Bitcoin with the same problems. Ethereum is more interesting, though it still has some of Bitcoin's problems.
Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am... Suspicious of all the chia articles popping up on HN. I have not seen the same kind of buzz happening in other crypto spaces about it. And I am also suspicious about the claims that chia is the one that is such a threat to data storage supply, considering there are other crypto currencies with a similar approach. Overall, I am inclined to say that this is a submarine and HN is falling for it. Regardless, more…
I learned about Chia last week by googling "hard drive shortage" to figure out why suddenly hard drives prices are spiking where I live. Definitely not a submarine.
Could you or the parent commenter define "submarine" in this context? I searched and didn't find anything relevant.