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Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

blog.scaleway.com

171–180 of 188 posts

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#171
post #145

This reminds me of how Steve Jobs would talk about the need for liberal arts influence in technology. I feel like so much of this blockchain and cryptocurrency stuff is made purely looking at the tech, with either no thought to the actual incentives involved, or a total misunderstanding of them.

There’s no misunderstanding, people are naturally greedy and will try to get away with as much as possible

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#172
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the official Chia answer to this: https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/1393988621921701889

> For some odd reason the 'Chia burns out hard drives!' is getting repeated as the fashionable fud. No one is claiming that Chia is burning hard drives. He is intentionally being misleading. Chia absolutely destroys consumer SSDs.

He’s a sellout who premined a massive amount, of course he’s going to lie through his teeth

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#173
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cheaper way to deal with you is to embargo/tariff your exports, until you come back to the negotiating table, hat in hand.

Not sure that always works. Hang on, Fidel Castro is on the other line.

That was a life-or-death political issue for the communist party of Cuba (USSR subsidies also mitigated some of the damage the embargo caused). This is just a question of money - which is far more tractable.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#174
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This defeats the purpose of disincentivizing adversaries who want to steal coins from other participants. The stake/spacetime/electricity isn't wasted; it is used to establish global consensus. You can't redirect those resources into "doing some real good in the world" the best you can do is to allocate resources directly to your good cause rather than trying to magically get the good done for free.

> The stake/spacetime/electricity isn't wasted; it is used to establish global consensus. I still would like everyone to understand how proof-of-work really works, I don't think many people do. The current Bitcoin hash rate means that all those miners are currently calculating on the order of 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 hashes per second. Of those, in Bitcoin only around 6 per hour have any actual effect. Six. Those…

I’m not sure I see what you’re saying. The “arbitrary target” is so high because of all the mining. If there were less miners, the difficult would decrease, and then it would be easier for a malicious party to find one of those 6 lottery tickets.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The stake/spacetime/electricity isn't wasted; it is used to establish global consensus. I still would like everyone to understand how proof-of-work really works, I don't think many people do. The current Bitcoin hash rate means that all those miners are currently calculating on the order of 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 hashes per second. Of those, in Bitcoin only around 6 per hour have any actual effect. Six. Those…

I’m not sure I see what you’re saying. The “arbitrary target” is so high because of all the mining. If there were less miners, the difficult would decrease, and then it would be easier for a malicious party to find one of those 6 lottery tickets.

I am simply explaining how proof-of-work works.

It is correct that the difficulty is adjusted based on the hash rate. If mining power was halved, it would become twice as easy to hit the target. If a new ASIC would make calculating hashes twice as efficient, the network would make hitting the target twice as difficult, effectively counteracting the efficiency. The goal is to always have 6 successful calculations per hour on average.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#176
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This defeats the purpose of disincentivizing adversaries who want to steal coins from other participants. The stake/spacetime/electricity isn't wasted; it is used to establish global consensus. You can't redirect those resources into "doing some real good in the world" the best you can do is to allocate resources directly to your good cause rather than trying to magically get the good done for free.

> The stake/spacetime/electricity isn't wasted; it is used to establish global consensus. I still would like everyone to understand how proof-of-work really works, I don't think many people do. The current Bitcoin hash rate means that all those miners are currently calculating on the order of 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 hashes per second. Of those, in Bitcoin only around 6 per hour have any actual effect. Six. Those…

I really like the characterization as a lottery, it is just luck. Your odds of winning each “next” are weighted by your ops/sec, but nothing better.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#177
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reference implementation is Python, so there's lots of room to optimize. I wonder if you can eventually build an ASIC that replaces the disk based lookup with in memory calculations of the same data.

Can you send a link? I'd like to help.

Most of the work happens in C++[1]

[1] https://github.com/Chia-Network/chiapos

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#178
Most of all I'm angry that everyone calls chia coin a green coin, although this is far from the case and there are more eco-friendly altenratives. For example, crypton https://utopia-ecosystem.org/. For its mining, only the Internet and a PC are needed, and the energy consumption is minimal.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#179
>Chia plotting is extremely I/O intensive and destroys most SSDs in under a few weeks

Is this true? Back in 2015, techreport tested a bunch of SSDs to failure and it took 18 months to kill them all. This was a while ago, but I'd been lead to believe write endurance had only improved since then.

https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experi...

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#180
Oh no! Regular people are using products for something legal that's not approved by "Hacker" "News"? Petabytes of storage capacity for decentralized storage network? That's obscene. Clearly that storage capacity is meant only to expand exabyte storage data centers of big tech. Only socially responsible way to store data is to rent capacity on AWS.
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