Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

> As you can see, (the scale is in Petabytes), the space used is growing uncontrollably, and has already reached 7 Exabytes.

Judging by the graph in the article, it was 1 exabyte in late April, under a month ago. Wow.

I’m sure all the crypto fans are lining up around the block to tell us that their pet technology doesn’t waste valuable resources, it just uses storage that would otherwise have gone unused, as they do with Bitcoin and electricity.

You can see what remains of their cheap STORE servers: https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/pricing/?family=STORE

TIL people are competing for who's got the biggest hard drive...

Yes, presumably as a measure to make it harder to scale the plotting process (to make it more "fair"), it apparently does a ton of reads and writes across the whole region being plotted, so it will quickly exhaust the total number of write cycles available on the drive. A cheaper drive will be effectively destroyed (high quality drives can survive more write cycles, so they're comparatively okay.) I would have assumed it just linearly computed the whole plot to be farmed, but presumably that would make it vulnerable to some sort of attack where you create a "winning" plot on demand.

You could theoretically plot on a RAMdisk to avoid this problem, but the necessary amount of RAM would be incredibly expensive, so it's unlikely that many people will do it.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twwyBdsRYL4