Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

blog.scaleway.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 188 posts

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#101

Post by dheera »

devwastaken wrote: post #62
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.

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.

That "3-4 months" is going up at an exponential rate, and it's so bad now that by the time 3 months comes by the expected time to reward is 6 months. Even if you get 1 reward, you won't get a second reward unless you continuously keep buying drives and racks for them. You can't really get continuous passive income on a fixed set of hardware.

50K/year is impossible at this point with a consumer rig.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#102

Post by [deleted] »

mondoveneziano wrote: post #93
arebop wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#103

Post by kevingadd »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #69
scohesc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Manufacturing SSDs and platter drives is definitely not carbon neutral. Let's not even get into the problems with rare earth material extraction...

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#104

Post by AlexandrB »

Nullabillity wrote: post #96
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?

Even so bitcoin takes it to its logical extreme. You put valuable resources in one end and get money out the other side. In between, no useful work is done. It's the essence of capitalism without any of the beneficial side effects we've come to expect.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#105

Post by netflixandkill »

supergirl wrote: post #14

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

This is mostly a problem for low-cost hosting that had some implied assumptions about how heavily used various components would be relative to the rest.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#106

Post by throwaway894345 »

kevingadd wrote: post #103
throwaway894345 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Manufacturing SSDs and platter drives is definitely not carbon neutral. Let's not even get into the problems with rare earth material extraction...

In order to be considered a net benefit, it only needs to emit less carbon than compute-based mining. It doesn't need to be carbon neutral (and indeed, I don't think anyone posited that it was).

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#107

Post by AlexandrB »

jude- wrote: post #84

Proof of Space is just Proof of Work by another means. Honestly, I'd rather just have (electric) PoW -- at least the energy source could be green, and any green energy capacity built out for PoW can be repurposed.

I'm sure eventually we'll see articles about the amount of garbage produced by Chia. I'm imagining pallets of dead SSDs.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#108

Post by vasco »

jefftk wrote: post #50
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.

This is being done right now in the Amazon without blockchain. First you start logging a lot more trees. Then the world is outraged at how many trees you cut, and you begrundgingly go to the negotiation table to figure out the carbon subsidies you're going to get in exchange for not cutting those trees. But wouldn't you know, estimates of how many trees you're able to not cut per year are based on how many trees you just cut so you get way more than you would've in the first place.

Exchanging money for not doing things is fun.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#109

Post by sneak »

Nullabillity wrote: post #96
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?

No. The fable long predates the current anticapitalism trend.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer%27s_Apprentice

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#110

Post by lozaning »

devwastaken wrote: post #62
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.

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.

> Current projections are something like 3-4 months to get a single reward

You cant project time to win without knowing how many plots a farmer has. You've gotta have 100+ TB plotted (prolly closer to 140actually) at this point to have a chance at winning every 3-4 months.

A single plot would put you closer to 7 years.

Post reply on HN