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Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

chiaexplorer.com

101–110 of 175 posts

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#101

Chia pre-mined 6 years worth of block rewards. Proof-of-space may be the closest thing we have to a viable proof-of-work replacement but this instantiation of it feels like a get rich quick scheme for its founders. Edit: My calculation was based on the initial reward schedule of 64 units per block, but when you take into account the fact that it ramps down to 4 units per block shortly thereafter, it's actually a prem…

What is wrong with proof of stake?

It’s plutocracy with emojis.

Other than that - absolutely nothing

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#102

Disks are about $20/TB right now. So 1 exabyte is $20M. Well within the scope of VC funding for someone who wants to make Chia appear to be a success.

That’s only the storage required for ongoing use (“farming”). You’re not taking into account “plotting” which requires NVMe SSDs, decently fast CPU, and a few GB RAM per plot (~101GB storage). Assume it takes 7 hours to create a plot on high end consumer hardware.

As far as I can see, only the phase 1 of plotting is cryptographic in any meaningful way. The rest is just rearranging data requiring no CPU power, and can be done effectively instantly if you have 400GB of RAM.

A big 'plotting house' would have dedicated crypto units to do phase 1, then stream the results over the network to a machine with 400 gigs of ram to do the rearrangement and write out a plot file. It should be possible to do that in seconds per 100GB file.

The plotting I don't see is any kind of bottleneck for a big operation. It's the storage of the resulting files.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#103

In regular file storage, data error rates must be very low. In Chia, fairly high error rates are still very profitable. Current hard disks might see one uncorrectable error every 1,000 TB read from them. Chia would be fine with one error every 1 megabyte. That difference might allow custom drive firmwares to put far more bits far closer together, leading to cheaper less reliable storage for farming.

I think that would be unfortunate. That kind of special-purpose hardware would go against the "anyone can farm" spirit of Chia and likely worsen the environmental impact since those drives wouldn't be useful for other applications.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#104
post #73

Here I am thinking there's finally a working file storage coin for truly decentralized and anonymous file hosting and no... it's another proof-of-waste thing.

What's even the point of "decentralized and anonymous file hosting"?

There's a bajilion serious hosting providers that have proven their mettle.

And when chips come down to it, crypto never is anonymous.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#105

Chia pre-mined 6 years worth of block rewards. Proof-of-space may be the closest thing we have to a viable proof-of-work replacement but this instantiation of it feels like a get rich quick scheme for its founders. Edit: My calculation was based on the initial reward schedule of 64 units per block, but when you take into account the fact that it ramps down to 4 units per block shortly thereafter, it's actually a prem…

What is wrong with proof of stake?

Proof of pyramid scheme, you mean?

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#106
post #40
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I haven't really seen prices going up. [...] And my coworker has not been getting the same news stories about hard drive prices. because 1EB is a minuscule amount of the hard drive capacity, compared to the total amount produced per year. According to seagate's blogpost[1], they ship at least 500 EB per year. If you add in capacity from WD/toshiba, it's probably closer to 1000EB if not more. That would make chi…

>Because 1EB is a minuscule amount of the hard drive capacity Very much agree here. I purchased about 144TB of raw storage a few weeks ago for future video and data projects, and it's possible to purchase 1PB of raw capacity (with no redundancy, nor anything to connect to) for as cheap as around $13000 USD at retail pricing. 1EB could be acquired for somewhere between $12-$15M. Not chump change, but considering the n…

The difference in consumer storage prices today compared to a few weeks ago is pretty substantial, and that’s when you can find it in stock at all.

HDDs have been hit much harder than SSDs, but I’m guessing you didn’t buy 144 TB of SSDs.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is wrong with proof of stake?

It’s plutocracy with emojis. Other than that - absolutely nothing

I'm not trying to be obtuse, but why is authority tied to amount of coin owned any more plutocratic than authority tied to amount of computing resources used? Both cost money, and both scale power with amount of money sunk into it.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#108
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Because 1EB is a minuscule amount of the hard drive capacity Very much agree here. I purchased about 144TB of raw storage a few weeks ago for future video and data projects, and it's possible to purchase 1PB of raw capacity (with no redundancy, nor anything to connect to) for as cheap as around $13000 USD at retail pricing. 1EB could be acquired for somewhere between $12-$15M. Not chump change, but considering the n…

The difference in consumer storage prices today compared to a few weeks ago is pretty substantial, and that’s when you can find it in stock at all. HDDs have been hit much harder than SSDs, but I’m guessing you didn’t buy 144 TB of SSDs.

It's just a spike, the price will come back down quickly as total stored space increases and makes further "farming" even less competitive. Just consider how quickly the projected rewards are dropping, e.g. at https://chiacalculator.com/ or the XCH/TiB chart at https://www.chiaexplorer.com/charts/xchTib (same site as OP).

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#109
post #73

Here I am thinking there's finally a working file storage coin for truly decentralized and anonymous file hosting and no... it's another proof-of-waste thing.

What's even the point of "decentralized and anonymous file hosting"? There's a bajilion serious hosting providers that have proven their mettle. And when chips come down to it, crypto never is anonymous.

The ultimate dream was being able to hook up a few spare hard drives and then earning enough tokens to host your backups for free. The problem is defending against malicious actors makes everything too complex.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decentralised ledger with smart contract is just tech. It's not that impressive and it's not a ponzi scheme. Any currency which is not backed by real resources is a scam. Including fiat in the last decade - albeit fiat is a scam backed by state actors with armies, making it a bit more trustworthy

State actors with armies haven’t exactly helped a lot of fiat survive. Ask a Venezuelan if he would rather have BTC vs his native fiat.

The Bolivar was introduced in 1879. To its credit, it lasted until Black Friday in 1983 as the most stable and internationally accepted currency in all of South America. It's been mostly downhill since then, but 104 years is a decent run. None of us will be alive in 2112 to see what becomes of Bitcoin, if it even still exists then.
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