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Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

blog.scaleway.com

31–40 of 188 posts

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#31
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand, newer consumer level SSDs are designed to have a lower TBW (TeraBytes Written) - mostly because any reasonable consumer doesn't write terabytes of data to their SSDs in any decent length of time. Enterprise/Higher end "GaMeR" SSDs have higher TBW ratings - I believe 1TB FireCuda Model NVMe SSDs have something insane like a 1800 TBW rating when I was looking a couple weeks back. These above men…

What is the expansion of the acronym “GaMeR”? I’ve not seen it before and I want to be sure I understand.

[deleted]

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#32
Can anyone explain a simple explanation of how chia works? I tried reading the White Paper ("green paper"), but its a little dense and math-y.

What is plotting? How does farming a plot work?

Edit: Why do people plot with SSDs? Is there a speed element to it?

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#33
Some people think Chia is so much better because of it uses SSD / Storage rather than GPU. I think this could be far worse.

Not everyone needs a GPGPU, but everyone need NAND and SSD. And it already causes price hike for SSD we will soon see something similar to chip shortage. The DRAM Fab which could be quickly retooled to NAND will be part of this equation as well.

This is not good.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#34
post #22

> Chia plotting is extremely I/O intensive and destroys most SSDs in under a few weeks Woah, really?

Here's the official Chia answer to this: https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/1393988621921701889

> For some odd reason the 'Chia burns out hard drives!' is getting repeated as the fashionable fud.

No one is claiming that Chia is burning hard drives. He is intentionally being misleading. Chia absolutely destroys consumer SSDs.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#36

> Chia plotting is extremely I/O intensive and destroys most SSDs in under a few weeks Woah, really?

Yes and no. As I understand it, there are two parts: you create plots which take up a certain amount of disk space, and then farm those plots indefinitely, and only the first plot creation part is extremely I/O intensive. So what a lot of people seem to be doing is creating the plots on SSDs and then moving them to cheaper spinning rust hard drives once created, and it's this that can apparently destroy consumer SSDs relatively rapidly (so long as you have much more storage used for Chia than the capacity of the SSD). I don't think just creating a plot or two in the spare space of your consumer SSD and leaving it there farming away would be a huge problem.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#38

Somebody needs to invent a coin that works on proof-of-carbon-emission-reductions, or proof-of-global-poverty-reduction and do some real good for the world.

That’s actually pretty simple if you can live with centralization ... just certify CO2 offsets for example for each coin purchased. Then again ... what’s the point of putting that on a blockchain?

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#39

I read the headline as China rather than Chia and was wondering what China was plotting to farm now. Frankly it was much more interesting than Chia bad, no Chia for you.

I initially thought it was some agricultural issue similar to palm oil farming but for chia seeds.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#40
post #19

is it not feasible to plot on AWS? would be interesting if they are also forced to ban this.

From what I understand, the network/algorithm is designed to prevent this from happening - either due to massively huge egress costs (I think you need to 'upload' the whole plot to the network after you have a verified proof), or for sheer data storage cases (some farmers/miners have tens of petabytes of plots already - i wonder how much that would cost to store monthly?)

You don't have to upload the plot after you have a verified proof. You do have to pay to store it, though, and that can be pretty expensive on AWS. If you just plot on AWS and store the plots elsewhere to save storage costs, you have to pay outbound charges on the plot files.
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