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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

#61

Post by VectorLock »

popotamonga wrote: post #51
zamalek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You could do 1 plot at a time.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#62

Post by devwastaken »

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.

That's not how chia rewards you though. It's a lottery, and though chia may be around 1000 or so right now it could massively increase in the future. Current projections are something like 3-4 months to get a single reward. But if you could make potentially an extra 50K a year with some harddrives that's not a bad deal.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#63

Post by mvanaltvorst »

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.

You need a relatively large amount of storage space for plotting, more than most RAM disks. It has proven to be more cost effective to consume SSD's than to use slower HDD's or a RAM disk.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#64

Post by zamalek »

popotamonga wrote: post #51
zamalek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It can be, just set up a RAM disk and use that as your temporary drive. It's exactly what I'm doing to fill my tiny 12TB Raspberry Pi farm. Your plotting rate won't be competitive (plotting in parallel on NVMEs turns out to be much faster).

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#66

Post by lozaning »

popotamonga wrote: post #51
zamalek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah, I plot an a DL580 with 512GB. Other than not having to worry about write durability there's not much gained though. GB per GB my ram drive is faster, but i can plot in parallel on my NVME drive because it's considerably larger.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#67

Post by throwaway894345 »

c1sc0 wrote: post #38
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.

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?

> Then again ... what’s the point of putting that on a blockchain?

Marketing. :p

> That’s actually pretty simple if you can live with centralization ... just certify CO2 offsets for example for each coin purchased.

We have this today, but "just certify" does a lot of work here. It's really hard to certify CO2 offsets in many cases (e.g., it's tough to verify that the trees someone plants weren't going to be planted anyway or that they will live to their expected potential and not get burned down prematurely).

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#68

Post by temp8964 »

mikl wrote: post #4

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.

So every conclusion to hard drive also applies to electricity? How do you establish the equivalency?

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#69

Post by throwaway894345 »

scohesc wrote: post #23
mikl wrote: post #4

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.

I think it's funny how the world as a whole just simply moves the problem (excess resource usage for something a lot of people have deemed 'excessive' like bitcoin mining) from one type of resource to another. Now we're going to see storage costs skyrocket, which will (hopefully not) affect cloud storage providers, datacenters, etc. etc. etc.

That would be a bummer, but if it doesn't exacerbate the energy/co2 problem I consider it a net benefit.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#70

Post by guimoz »

meltedcapacitor wrote: post #56
kevingadd wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A plot is basically a 100GB file (or file) that is associated with your public key. You can move it around how you want. Many people are creating them on machines with nvme disk and then they are copied over a network storage somewhere else.
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