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Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

blog.scaleway.com

71–80 of 188 posts

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#71
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…

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 transactio…

> Where is the write thrashing coming in?

This happens during plotting (not farming). The plots are sorted, which is where the write thrashing happens. Once you've completely plotted a farm, it is never written to.

Everything else you said is basically spot-on.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#72
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. But someone else could add 8 SSD's for the same money and plot multiple times as fast as you, until the SSDs break.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#73
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.

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.

BitCoin mining is also a lottery. I could stumble on a good hash using my own CPU. But the odds are in favour of the farms with ASICs.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#74
post #43

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.

> The stake/spacetime/electricity isn't wasted; it is used to establish global consensus.

In the case of PoS or PoW it is spent to establish global consensus.

It’s certainly waste if there is no other productive work is done by the network that wouldn’t have been done without it.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#75
post #2

> 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.

Who buys up all the farmed coins on these new cryptocurrencies. It is really just speculation fever?

Yes. And miners tend to hold their coins so the supply remains moderately low. A bit like the OPEC.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#76
post #2

> 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.

Who buys up all the farmed coins on these new cryptocurrencies. It is really just speculation fever?

I came across a subreddit, I forget its name though, thats sole purpose was pumping up new cryptocurrencies, hoping it would catch the attention of casual crypto investors. They'd pick a day to sell off whatever cryptocurrency they had pumped up, then repeat it was some other no-name cryptocurrency.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#77
post #50

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.

It’s like proof of stake - you have to prove you have a track record of producing the emissions.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#78
post #46

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.

According to Bitcoiners Bitcoin is green, so you you could use the proceeds to buy Bitcoin.

https://bitcoinisgreen.org/

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#79
post #77
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It’s like proof of stake - you have to prove you have a track record of producing the emissions.

Burn tires for a year then reap the reductions the next.
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