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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

#91

Post by imhoguy »

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.

Not good indeed. Small hosting businesses and consumer storage will suffer, because big cloud companies usualy have HW production customized and contracted ahead.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#92

Post by dragontamer »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #67
c1sc0 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Whenever you plant a tree, do the following.

1. Take a picture of the tree

2. Burn the tree down.

3. Create NFT of the picture of the tree burning down.

4. Use the NFT of the picture of the tree to certify the CO2 offset.

Inspiration from: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56335948

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#93

Post by mondoveneziano »

arebop wrote: post #43
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.

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

I still would like everyone to understand how proof-of-work really works, I don't think many people do.

The current Bitcoin hash rate means that all those miners are currently calculating on the order of 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 hashes per second.

Of those, in Bitcoin only around 6 per hour have any actual effect. Six. Those are the ones that met the arbitrary target. The other 10^20 did not do any actual work, meaning that none of them did bring any miner, not even the same miner, the same chip, closer to the "answer". In that sense, they are wasted.

Instead, it is literally a lottery. The difficulty is adjusted such that if you try 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 random numbers per second, 6 per hour will randomly hit the target. It's more "raffling" that "mining".

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#94

Post by r1ch »

crazypython wrote: post #65

Is it possible to optimize plotting to use I/O less and RAM more? Or is it an inherent boundary of the protocol like energy use is in PoW?

The reference implementation is Python, so there's lots of room to optimize. I wonder if you can eventually build an ASIC that replaces the disk based lookup with in memory calculations of the same data.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#95

Post by deepserket »

dstick wrote: post #82
mvanaltvorst wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And what happens if the SSDs break? You lose your plot? Has to be right - since it's proof of space? But what then is the use of burning through SSDs so fast?

the SSDs are used just to create the plots, once the plots are created they can be moved into HDDs where they get farmed (checked to see if they can solve blocks for the blockchain)

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#96

Post by Nullabillity »

cbdumas wrote: post #86

Perhaps the "paperclip maximizer" doomsday scenario was right in was right in its broad strokes but just wrong about the agents involved? They were worried about a super-competent AI that burns resources producing low-utility widgets. In fact we have created an system (a combination of societal incentive structures and technological tools) that burns resources producing low-utility pseudo-random numbers.

Hasn't the paperclip optimizer always been a euphemism for capitalism?

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#97

Post by wmf »

crazypython wrote: post #88
wmf wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have ~300 GB of RAM you should be able to plot directly in RAM.

Imagine a cloud provider has 300GB RAM. What if they plotted and let other people later download the plot?

I think bandwidth charges kill that idea.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#98

Post by duskwuff »

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?

The plots are each unique, and are too large (hundreds of GB) to represent as a ROM.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#99

Post by duskwuff »

wiredfool wrote: post #52
tpetry wrote: post #5

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

Wonder if that’s why their backup storage box performance has been so bad for the last few weeks.

Likely. They specifically mentioned their storage boxes in the announcement; I suspect they had customers using them to store farmed blocks for Chia.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#100

Post by imhoguy »

To me the only explanation of this fad (or scam) is pure greed. That information smog producing period of time will be recalled in history books like the coal race with smog cities of early XX century.

Useful Proof of Storage cryptos like Siacoin or Filecoin should be more incentivised. They store meaningful data.

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