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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

#51

Post by popotamonga »

zamalek wrote: post #44
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 300-4…

I have 512GB Ram, cant it be used for plotting without ssd?

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#53

Post by vineyardmike »

zamalek wrote: post #44
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 300-4…

Can you explain the "bingo card" analogy in a bit more depth?

is this like pre-computing the values to a hash function against different inputs? Where is the write thrashing coming in? If you only need X hundred gigs, why do you write terabytes? Because you can't store intermediary values in RAM (since ram is expensive and small in comparison)?

I get how bitcoin style block-chains use hashing to secure the transaction chain, and the POW factors into hashing... how do responding to the challenges factor into a currency?

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#54

Post by fbcpck »

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?

If you'd like it in video format, [this one][1] explains it in layman terms quite well and covers possible ways to mitigate the ssd endurance problem, as well as expected profit rates with the right "commodity" hardwares.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twwyBdsRYL4

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#55

Post by jl2718 »

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

I need to look into this more, but I think this is an implementation issue. It should buffer in RAM to require only one write pass.

Edit: I was wrong. They set a minimum k that wouldn’t easily fit in ram.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#56

Post by meltedcapacitor »

kevingadd wrote: post #11
tpetry wrote: post #5

Hetzner has forbidden Chia yesterday too because the disk are used a lot when chia farming.

Technically plotting is the really bad part, farming mostly just occupies storage and uses a bit of CPU. Not that I personally am a fan of either, but plotting is the destructive part and then you 'farm' the completed plot forever and that can be done on inexpensive spinning rust drives by a cheap PC.

Can you "plot" at the chip factory (producing some sort of pre-plotted ROM) or does it have to be updated in some way?

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#57

Post by VectorLock »

jl2718 wrote: post #55

> Chia plotting is extremely I/O intensive and destroys most SSDs in under a few weeks I need to look into this more, but I think this is an implementation issue. It should buffer in RAM to require only one write pass. Edit: I was wrong. They set a minimum k that wouldn’t easily fit in ram.

Now you just need terabytes of RAM.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#58

Post by newsclues »

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.

A smart bike that prints coins based on the energy put into the bike.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#59

Post by Vespasian »

zamalek wrote: post #44
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 300-4…

Is there an expected limit of storage where your average drive would die of old age before it yields enough income?

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#60

Post by jl2718 »

ipsum2 wrote: post #48
dheera wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Long ago. See the hash rate chart and guess when that might have happened. Hint: long before they were offered for sale.
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