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Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

blog.scaleway.com

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Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#41

Post by dheera »

ksec wrote: post #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.

Chia isn't worth farming anymore.

I have a pile of old spare 512GB SSDs and it looks like I would able to make something like $2/day. Not even enough for a coffee.

Same with Ethereum. Tried to mine with my Titan V. 31 MH/s. Also not even enough for a coffee.

This is meaningless, and cryptocurrencies are effectively centralized around mining farms with ASICs.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#42

Post by tmathmeyer »

floatingatoll wrote: post #24
scohesc wrote: 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.

its "gamer" like "video game player". not an acronym.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#43

Post by arebop »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #26

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.

This defeats the purpose of disincentivizing adversaries who want to steal coins from other participants. The stake/spacetime/electricity isn't wasted; it is used to establish global consensus. You can't redirect those resources into "doing some real good in the world" the best you can do is to allocate resources directly to your good cause rather than trying to magically get the good done for free.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#44

Post by zamalek »

vineyardmike wrote: post #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?

Farming: you hold massive (101GB) bingo cards of mathematical proofs on your hard drive. When you receive a challenge, you first do a pre-filter on your bingo cards to see which of them could contain a proof. Within that filtered list, you find the closest proofs. The peer with the closest proof available wins the challenge and [currently] gets 2XCH.

Plotting: you fill your free space with bingo cards. You need 300-400GB of free temporary space and TBs of writes in that space. This uses a lot of compute and eats SSDs for breakfast.

Once you have filled your space (assuming you don't go out and buy more disks), you can stop plotting. This is where the claimed "greenness" of Chia comes into play: you eventually stop using compute resources. Of course, there are whales who are adding drives to their servers daily.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#45

Post by Mooty »

supergirl wrote: post #14

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

Did some, transfer costs beetween instances that serves as plot generators are f** expensive. You need TB of data transfers, for example 15TB to transfer on the internet is somewhere around 1500$.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#46

Post by dheera »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #26

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.

Set up a coin such that every time it goes up, some amount of reserve is sold, and 100% of profits donated to carbon reduction projects. Give away free electric cars. Plant trees. Whatever.

Then hype up the coin. Make people bid it up endlessly just like they do other coins. Post lots of #moon #hodl crap on Twitter. Get the flock of sheep moving.

Sell hype, use the proceeds for CO2 reduction.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#48

Post by ipsum2 »

dheera wrote: post #41
ksec wrote: post #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.

Chia isn't worth farming anymore. I have a pile of old spare 512GB SSDs and it looks like I would able to make something like $2/day. Not even enough for a coffee. Same with Ethereum. Tried to mine with my Titan V. 31 MH/s. Also not even enough for a coffee. This is meaningless, and cryptocurrencies are effectively centralized around mining farms with ASICs.

I don't believe that an ASIC has been developed for Ethereum, but I'm not too familiar with cryptocurrency.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#49

Post by duskwuff »

vineyardmike wrote: post #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?

In short:

Plotting is an compute- and IO-intensive process which eventually generates a ~100 GB block of data after a large number of read/write operations to that data. This is the part of the process that involves (and destroys) SSDs.

Farming is a slower process which is performed on those blocks of data, which involves occasional read operations on small sections of that data. The data blocks are typically transferred to slower bulk storage (like hard disks) for this.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#50

Post by jefftk »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #26

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.

> proof-of-carbon-emission-reductions

That one is fun! First, I credibly claim to have plans to release ridiculous quantities of CO2, and then you negotiate with me to convince me not to. Then we can split the coins.

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