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Bitcoin rival Chia 'destroyed' hard disc supply chains, says its boss

newscientist.com

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Re: Bitcoin rival Chia 'destroyed' hard disc supply chains, says its boss

#11
post #2

I find it hard to get on board with Chia being a better alternative to Bitcoin because it uses less energy when the tradeoff it makes is the manufacturing and waste of millions of terabytes of hard drives. Does not seem very environmentally friendly to me.

Aren't they going to be using that space eventually for another distributed file system?

You are probably confusing Chia with Sia

Re: Bitcoin rival Chia 'destroyed' hard disc supply chains, says its boss

#12
post #2

I find it hard to get on board with Chia being a better alternative to Bitcoin because it uses less energy when the tradeoff it makes is the manufacturing and waste of millions of terabytes of hard drives. Does not seem very environmentally friendly to me.

Aren't they going to be using that space eventually for another distributed file system?

No, Bram Cohen has said that will never happen.

Re: Bitcoin rival Chia 'destroyed' hard disc supply chains, says its boss

#14
post #6

I don't get Chia. With Proof of Stake on the horizon, is there any real advantage that Proof of Space-Time has over it?

If people invest time/money mining coins, they're going to promote those coins in order to justify their mining operation.

From this initial organic buzz, speculative markets take over and the whole thing becomes a positive feedback loop.

Crypto is fundamentally a huge waste of advanced manufactured goods, electricity, and time, and enables tax avoidance and money laundering. The correct response from Governments is to simply ban the formal exchange of all of them in the same way that the USA bans online gambling and pyramid schemes.

Re: Bitcoin rival Chia 'destroyed' hard disc supply chains, says its boss

#15
The thing with hard drives: if chia bombs, you can still turn around and sell them on Ebay. And when they're 14tb+ drives, they'll retain their value for a decent time.

you can't do that with miners, and GPU's are still fairly specific components. But plenty of companies and people have all sorts of needs for extra space.

I mean - if we're going to be scaling anything... hard drives are the thing. And if there are any storage optimizations people come up with, those will only benefit the storage industry overall; unlike ASIC miners, for example.

Re: Bitcoin rival Chia 'destroyed' hard disc supply chains, says its boss

#16
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought that if bitcoin crashed, the mining centers could be refactored someway into other use for computing power alone. Now with this new currency, you could maybe even run cloud storage. Maybe we are accidentally building the futur alternatives to Amazon cloud services.

> the mining centers could be refactored someway into other use for computing power alone The chips that are mining bitcoin are not general purpose computers.

But the hard disks are general purpose storage devices, right? Any chance they will become custom ASIC storage that can't be repurposed too?

Re: Bitcoin rival Chia 'destroyed' hard disc supply chains, says its boss

#17

The thing with hard drives: if chia bombs, you can still turn around and sell them on Ebay. And when they're 14tb+ drives, they'll retain their value for a decent time. you can't do that with miners, and GPU's are still fairly specific components. But plenty of companies and people have all sorts of needs for extra space. I mean - if we're going to be scaling anything... hard drives are the thing. And if there are an…

The drives are reportedly destroyed from the process relatively rapidly. So no, I’d probably not plan to be able to resell drives on eBay later.

Re: Bitcoin rival Chia 'destroyed' hard disc supply chains, says its boss

#19

The thing with hard drives: if chia bombs, you can still turn around and sell them on Ebay. And when they're 14tb+ drives, they'll retain their value for a decent time. you can't do that with miners, and GPU's are still fairly specific components. But plenty of companies and people have all sorts of needs for extra space. I mean - if we're going to be scaling anything... hard drives are the thing. And if there are an…

The drives are reportedly destroyed from the process relatively rapidly. So no, I’d probably not plan to be able to resell drives on eBay later.

SSDs are destroyed but HDDs are not.

Re: Bitcoin rival Chia 'destroyed' hard disc supply chains, says its boss

#20

How does "Proof of Space" actually work. How do they prove the disks exist?

I haven't read any papers about this, so this is just a first speculative guess that I will update if/when I learn more:

I suspect nodes ask one another to perform computations on random subsets of very large amounts of data. Since the subsets requested would be random, nodes can't predict the requests and thus have to store all the data. The data would then be augmented with the consensus results of these computations, so that future computations would be able to reference them.

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