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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

#31

Post by skybrian »

yorwba wrote: post #26
mschuster91 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, mostly idle. You can't win if you're not online, can you?

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

#32

Post by loloquwowndueo »

chrisacky wrote: post #7

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

This is well explained in chia’s documentation. A server issues “challenges” and the harvesters respond if they have the answer to that challenge. Think of it like bingo but with a gazillion squares.

The trick is that calculating the response to a challenge takes a very long time and the server only waits for a very short time to get any valid responses. So it follows that the harvesters must compute the responses in advance and store them on disk, which serves as proof that you had that disk space allocated to chia harvesting.

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

#34

Post by meesterdude »

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.

it depends on the drives. CAN you destroy drives by plotting? yes. But other drives can take quite a beating - and generate 40K plots worth of data before reaching failure point.

additionally, farming (serving plots) is done with regular drives, and those are very lightly read from and used once the plots are loaded.

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

#36

Post by WantonQuantum »

ggggtez wrote: post #13

> Bitcoin requires so-called miners to do vast amounts of useless calculations finally someone calling it like it is

A better characterization would be that Bitcoin requires miners to perform vast amounts of hashing in the hopes of finding a hash that is arbitrarily difficult to find.

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

#39

Post by ihumanable »

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…

I don't know much about Chia, but I've read some stories about how Chia plotting just destroys SSDs.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/chia-crypto-farming-can-de...

But I'm no expert so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

[I see from other comments that this is bad for SSDs but not so much for HDDs]

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

#40

Post by bassman9000 »

dporter wrote: 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.

To be fair, there's the plotting phase, and the farming phase.

When farming, disk speed is not critical, just size. Thus the idea of recycling millions of HDDs in a low power scenario. A few seeks here or there on your old, unused terabytes, but you need to have enough space to offer, otherwise your chances are zero. Today's farming is dominated by pools, some using non-official, closed source binaries of unknown origin. Official pooling is, supposedly, coming soon.

Plotting, which is preparing the files that are farmed, is, as of today, extremely IO intensive, but still cheaper, energy-wise, than mining. A single 100GB plot (you need ~20TB to have any chances of farming success) can take hours to plot. So people are resorting to extremely fast SSDs, or NVMe in RAID0 in PCIe 8x/16x cards to slash that time. And, in the process, wearing them out. Can't find the link now, but some were saying normal SSDs are ruined after 6 weeks of 24/7. Plotting keeps improving, although I'm not sure if it's got a lower performance bound by design.

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