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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

#21

Post by JohnTHaller »

To clarify, it's the supply chain that is destroyed, not the hard drives themselves. Most Chia miners appear to be using enterprise SSDs to "farm" a plot. And consumer SSDs can't really stand up to this process long term, so they get killed relatively quick.

A typical plot is around 100GB and officially takes around 356GB (and a lot of SSD thrashing) to farm. Then that plot is copied off to long term storage (larger, slow hard drives via SATA, USB, etc) where it sits until a given plot of yours "wins". You can run one of these collections of hard drives off a Raspberry Pi.

Fun fact: In other crypto there are pools so that everyone contributing work gets a share of the profit. There are no pools in Chia. You're farming a digital lottery ticket that then sits there using up hard drive space and an always on PC hoping one off your tickets wins.

I researched it a bit so I'd understand the basics and the cost to earnings setup. It's so wasteful of hardware and space that I didn't want to set up a rig, though.

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

#22

Post by skybrian »

dom96 wrote: 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?

I don't know because I don't understand Proof of Stake well enough to know its weak points and vulnerabilities. I hope it works out, but what do we really know about its security and power dynamics?

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

#23

Post by antisthenes »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #21

To clarify, it's the supply chain that is destroyed, not the hard drives themselves. Most Chia miners appear to be using enterprise SSDs to "farm" a plot. And consumer SSDs can't really stand up to this process long term, so they get killed relatively quick. A typical plot is around 100GB and officially takes around 356GB (and a lot of SSD thrashing) to farm. Then that plot is copied off to long term storage (larger,…

So, question from a complete noob:

Can the thrashing of space be done on a RAMdisk, preventing SSD wear? Thereby only the 100GB would be moved onto long term storage, e.g. primary SSDs.

Is that worthwhile? Does RAM speed matter in this case?

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

#24

Post by mschuster91 »

rabidrat wrote: post #16
sneak wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

You don't want any components that have been used in coin mining. Generally, GPUs, desktop CPUs, RAM, consumer disks (both solid stats and spinning rust) and even power supplies are not designed for years of 24x7 100% load.

This is a part of why NVidia cracked down on gpu mining recently - when ASIC mining became more profitable than GPUs, the secondhand market got flooded with cheap high quality cards (thus ruining the primary sale market for new GPUs) and people flooded NVidia support with support queries for slow or unreliable GPUs.

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

#25

Post by xtracto »

antisthenes wrote: post #23
JohnTHaller wrote: post #21

To clarify, it's the supply chain that is destroyed, not the hard drives themselves. Most Chia miners appear to be using enterprise SSDs to "farm" a plot. And consumer SSDs can't really stand up to this process long term, so they get killed relatively quick. A typical plot is around 100GB and officially takes around 356GB (and a lot of SSD thrashing) to farm. Then that plot is copied off to long term storage (larger,…

So, question from a complete noob: Can the thrashing of space be done on a RAMdisk, preventing SSD wear? Thereby only the 100GB would be moved onto long term storage, e.g. primary SSDs. Is that worthwhile? Does RAM speed matter in this case?

Yes, ram speed matters A LOT . That's what is called "temporary storage" in Chia, and people who mine look for the fastest SSDs to mine faster.

The big problem is whether you can setup a 400GB Ramdisk?

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

#26

Post by yorwba »

mschuster91 wrote: post #24
rabidrat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You don't want any components that have been used in coin mining. Generally, GPUs, desktop CPUs, RAM, consumer disks (both solid stats and spinning rust) and even power supplies are not designed for years of 24x7 100% load. This is a part of why NVidia cracked down on gpu mining recently - when ASIC mining became more profitable than GPUs, the secondhand market got flooded with cheap high quality cards (thus ruining…

Chia doesn't require running disks at 24x7 100% load. You fill up your storage and then wait until you win the lottery. Most of the time, you won't win and your disk can remain idle.

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

#27

Post by skybrian »

chrisacky wrote: post #7

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

It's built on large files that act as bingo cards. You have a limited time to respond when you get a bingo. The more cards you have, the more likely you are to win.

They are designed so that precomputing the bingo card is expensive but once you have them, checking to see if you have a bingo is cheap. It's thought that nobody will be able to compute a winning bingo cards on the fly ("grinding"), so it will be cheaper to store and reuse them once you have them.

(I don't know the details of the algorithms though.)

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

#28

Post by xtracto »

chrisacky wrote: post #7

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

The way it was explained to me is that when you "farm" your "plots" the first time, you are just generating and writing a lot of numbers that are written in the 100GB plots.

Then the transaction validation is done by whoever finds value in their storage (instead of doing a lot of computations online, they are pre-generated).

I assume there's a bunch of tree-like structures in the middle to make the search faster.

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

#29

Post by skybrian »

tracedddd wrote: post #17
meesterdude wrote: post #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 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.

That's only part of the process (precomputing the large files you need to win). Once you have the files, they can be stored anywhere and that storage is only lightly used.

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

#30

Post by skybrian »

antisthenes wrote: post #23
JohnTHaller wrote: post #21

To clarify, it's the supply chain that is destroyed, not the hard drives themselves. Most Chia miners appear to be using enterprise SSDs to "farm" a plot. And consumer SSDs can't really stand up to this process long term, so they get killed relatively quick. A typical plot is around 100GB and officially takes around 356GB (and a lot of SSD thrashing) to farm. Then that plot is copied off to long term storage (larger,…

So, question from a complete noob: Can the thrashing of space be done on a RAMdisk, preventing SSD wear? Thereby only the 100GB would be moved onto long term storage, e.g. primary SSDs. Is that worthwhile? Does RAM speed matter in this case?

Speed mattered a lot at the beginning because likelihood of winning was much higher (due to fewer people playing the game).

I don't know if it still matters or it's too late now.

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