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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?

#231

Post by curryst »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #138
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…

> with Proof-of-space you are printing your tickets once and then storing them for years. So then where's the issue with SSD wear, and wouldn't it be more interesting for people to have spinning drives (for the better ratio of GB / $)? > There is extra layers, Chia is actually proof-of-space-and-time, so that you can't win by faking proof-of-space with proof-of-work. Is it because of this? So you'd have to print your…

> wouldn't it be more interesting for people to have spinning drives (for the better ratio of GB / $)?

You do trade off for a slower read rate. If the rate of requests coming in is fast enough, your spinning drive/s may not be fast enough to go through the indexes for each one.

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

#232

Post by curryst »

faeyanpiraat wrote: post #144
saurik wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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 t…

Why would anyone sell their bandwidth then?

Potentially for more favorable routing? There are some other potential niche things like maybe load testing, or doing load testing from weird IPs. It's not entirely clear to me either without having some kind of storage (in which case it would make sense as a CDN).

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

#233

Post by mavhc »

hobo_mark wrote: post #136
mavhc wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So just need a computer with 350GBs of ram?

That works of course, but RAM also costs per gigabyte an order of magnitude or so more than SSDs.

Doesn't wear out though. Question is will they require more ram in the future once 350GBs becomes cheap?

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

#234

Post by mr_woozy »

throwaway4good wrote: post #139
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…

The main thing about money, Bud, is that it makes you do things you don't want to do.

> The main thing about money, Bud, is that it makes you do things you don't want to do.

I'm not your Bud, Pal.

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

#235

Post by smsm42 »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #169
baby wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not true at all. Most cryptos aren't clones of BTC at all - they have wildly different consensus systems, interaction models, goals and capabilities. They all have their own issues and capacities, but saying they are all clones of BTC is like saying all existing programming languages are clones of FORTRAN and have the same problems as FORTRAN does. There's a huge variety, and we're still in the very beginning of it, nobody knows what emerges out of it and what would be successful and what would fail. It's probably decades in the future, maybe more.

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

#236

Post by aristophenes »

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…

My understanding is that the way they intend to operate it, the coin will start out rather highly valued, won't have too much capacity to grow in value, and the number of coins that can be "farmed" is already known, and will reduce in the future. At the rate it's growing, it'll probably be at the point where it isn't worth it to buy new SSDs for this sometime this week or next. And it will likely rapidly get to a point where it isn't worth it to buy HDD soon thereafter.

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

#237

Post by atat7024 »

Hjfrf wrote: post #8
i_have_an_idea wrote: post #2

I hold no Chia or crypto at all, however, from what I am seeing around me, Chia is going to be really, really big.

We can always hope that trading Chia is made illegal, along with proof of work algorithm based currencies in general. Governments so-far failing to regulate existential threats to themselves is honestly odd.

> Governments so-far failing to regulate existential threats to themselves is honestly odd.

Factions within governments all around the world are using it to their own ends.

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

#238

Post by whoisterencelee »

unnamedhorse wrote: post #184
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 run a Bitcoin lightning node on a small Raspberry Pi, and I use Bitcoin for p2p payments. So from my perspective, Bitcoin is both a great store of value and a good currency. But since this thread is about an altcoin: Almost no other altcoin enables me to run my own fully-validating node on cheap hardware. And that is 100% a requirement I have since the whole point of crypto to reduce trust to a minimum. I don't kno…

Check gridcoin.us , can run on most hardware even raspberry pi [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gridcoin/comments/7mdnud/get_into_g...

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

#239

Post by chade »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #207
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…

I'm probably missing something here. CPU/GPU cycles are irreversible, you can't get them back after you have used them. Storage space is reversible, you can get it back at any time by deleting what has been stored. I'm sure they have a way of detecting and preventing this, but wouldn't that imply that constant network connectivity is required to check that the storage is still allocated?

Think of proof of work, where you create loads of hashes for each challenge that comes in, once people came along with ASICs they could create so many more hashes in the same amount of time! The chances of finding a proof with an ASIC is directly correlated with how much more hashes you can create than a CPU in a given time. With proof-of-space you are storing the hashes on disk. The more hashes you have stored the more chance you have of finding a proof. You can delete those hashes at any time if you would like (to use the space for some other purpose) and the only effect is that you will just be lowering your chances of finding a proof for any future challenges. You don't have to be connected to the network all the time, however you will only have a chance of winning Chia while you are connected to the network. The positives of this approach: 1) Once you have plotted you drive and the plots are farming you use very little electricity (many people farm with Rasberry Pi's) 2) You can utilize unused storage on drives you already own and then as you need that space for some other purpose you can delete the plots. 3) Your chances of wining are directly correlated with your share of the network space ie. someone who plots twice as much has you has on average twice the chance of wining a block, no more, no less. 4) Building a special ASIC for proof of work serves no useful benefit beyond what it was intended to do. Whereas if someone was to build a cheaper more efficient form of storage, well that would be a benefit to everyone!

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

#240

Post by chade »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #138
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…

> with Proof-of-space you are printing your tickets once and then storing them for years. So then where's the issue with SSD wear, and wouldn't it be more interesting for people to have spinning drives (for the better ratio of GB / $)? > There is extra layers, Chia is actually proof-of-space-and-time, so that you can't win by faking proof-of-space with proof-of-work. Is it because of this? So you'd have to print your…

Yes you absolutely want to be farming with spinning drives for the better price to capacity ratio as you mention! (Hopefully in a few years this will change and SSDs will overtake spinning disks in this metric)

The most efficient way to start your farm is to build your plot with a temporary drive (an SSD) and then move it to a destination drive (Spinning HDD) where the actual farming takes place.

The building of the plot is what does heaps of writes and reads and puts the wear on an SSD.

You absolutely can plot directly to Spinning Disk however it is slow and you will really be trashing the heads if you try and plot multiples to the same disk.

The solution is an enterprise SSD with proper endurance. If a consumer SSD doesn't state it's TBW then you can be pretty sure its not very much.

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