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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

#41

Post by megameter »

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?

Proof of stake, as implemented in most of its current examples, faces a philosophical problem in that the initial distribution of the token is now a "trust me" premise - a founding organization announces a policy - versus a baked-in labor theory of property concept (I put "work" into this therefore I own it). Coins that transition from one mode to the other, as Etherium is doing, must reckon with friction from miners. Distribution, both in terms of early emission rates and then years later, represents a major quandary.

So, alternative proofs of work still have an interesting basis for speculative valuation and acceptance. In the last crypto bear market, of the top 100 at peak, proof of work coins were the ones that had the smallest drawdowns.

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

#42

Post by gwern »

WantonQuantum wrote: post #37
qalmakka wrote: post #33

> 12 million terabytes So 12 Exabytes? ¹ ¹ or 11 Exbibytes

This! As the numbers become larger, the distinction becomes more important.

I dislike how articles like this not only don't provide the relevant numbers like percentages, the numbers they do provide are not even the same bases:

"Around 12 million terabytes of hard disc space is currently being used to mine Chia, having risen on an exponential curve since its launch in March. ... Hoffman says that if all hard discs sold in a year – which could hold data totalling roughly 1 zettabyte, or 1 billion terabytes – were used exclusively for mining Chia, it would still use less than 1 per cent of the energy currently used by bitcoin."

Quick, divide 12 million into 1 billion in your head! "Uhhh..." (It's 1.2%.)

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

#43

Post by missingrib »

WantonQuantum wrote: post #36
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.

That's needlessly technical. The original sentence summed it up better.

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

#44

Post by aussieguy1234 »

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.

This wouldn't stop an unscrupulous seller from almost wearing out an SSD, then selling it on eBay to an unsuspecting buyer as a "working SSD" and buying a new one

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

#45

Post by chade »

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…

Drives used for Chia farming both SSD and HDD would have very little use over time. All the discussion around Chia destroying SSD's is when they are used in the initial plotting process which does a huge amount of reads and writes in the process of generating a plot. Once you move those plots to a large capacity spinning disk for farming, there is very little reads on the disk thereafter.

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

#46

Post by JohnTHaller »

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?

If you have 356GB of RAM per plot, sure.

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

#48

Post by rainsil »

gwern wrote: post #42
WantonQuantum wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! As the numbers become larger, the distinction becomes more important.

I dislike how articles like this not only don't provide the relevant numbers like percentages, the numbers they do provide are not even the same bases: "Around 12 million terabytes of hard disc space is currently being used to mine Chia, having risen on an exponential curve since its launch in March. ... Hoffman says that if all hard discs sold in a year – which could hold data totalling roughly 1 zettabyte, or 1 bil…

Is the 1.2% intended as a contrast to the "<1%" claim?

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

#49

Post by rambojazz »

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?

Please don't give new ideas to miners, RAM is already expensive as it is now :)

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

#50

Post by rambojazz »

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,…

What are some examples of "enterprise SSD"? I actually would like to buy one because I suppose they are way more durable than consumer SSDs, and less likely to die on me. But the closest to "enterprise" that I can find are the samsung pro.
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