Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

blog.scaleway.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–188 of 188 posts

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#181

Post by inshadows »

ksec wrote: post #33

Some people think Chia is so much better because of it uses SSD / Storage rather than GPU. I think this could be far worse. Not everyone needs a GPGPU, but everyone need NAND and SSD. And it already causes price hike for SSD we will soon see something similar to chip shortage. The DRAM Fab which could be quickly retooled to NAND will be part of this equation as well. This is not good.

Right. Your cloud rents will rise by few cents.

Seriously, anyone compared the capacity of Chia and beloved cloud providers?

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#182

Post by RobLach »

jefftk wrote: post #50
qbasic_forever wrote: post #26

Somebody needs to invent a coin that works on proof-of-carbon-emission-reductions, or proof-of-global-poverty-reduction and do some real good for the world.

> proof-of-carbon-emission-reductions That one is fun! First, I credibly claim to have plans to release ridiculous quantities of CO2, and then you negotiate with me to convince me not to. Then we can split the coins.

That’s how the current carbon offset credit system works.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#183

Post by meltedcapacitor »

duskwuff wrote: post #158
blibble wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you can build an SSD that's hundreds of GB you can certainly build a ROM...

Flash memory is uniform. Every flash memory die is (hopefully) identical to the next one. Once you know how to produce a flash memory die of a given size, you can produce a million of them, and that's worth a million times more. Chia plots are unique. Producing two copies of one isn't just pointless, but undesirable; it means that someone else might get a copy and reap the rewards instead of the person who plotted it…

The idea is you plot into a one time programmable thing either at the factory or on first use (so single die, multiple values).

That said it needs to be cheaper than HD, as the SSD is apparently only used to build the plot, so maybe impractical indeed.

Curious that the plotting hasn't already moved to DRAM, apparently 256GB is needed to build a plot which is not too wild on server-class computers.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#184

Post by 1-more »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #26

Somebody needs to invent a coin that works on proof-of-carbon-emission-reductions, or proof-of-global-poverty-reduction and do some real good for the world.

Folding@home and SETI@home and The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search already existed and could have had big nerds turn them into robot money somehow but naahhhhh. Of course not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_...

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#185

Post by throwaway894345 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #112
throwaway894345 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order to be considered a net benefit, it only needs to emit less carbon than compute-based mining. It doesn't need to be carbon neutral (and indeed, I don't think anyone posited that it was).

That's a pretty low bar. To be a net benefit it should emit less carbon than traditional payment processing. If you set my house on fire you don't get to call saving my cat a "net benefit".

I don’t think you understand what “net benefit” means. It does not mean “the most optimal state”, it only means “better than the status quo”. In this case, the status quo for crypto is compute-based, so storage-based crypto is a net benefit if it beats compute-based crypto. Saying something is a net benefit doesn’t imply that it is optimal, so I’m specifically not suggesting that storage based crypto is optimal (indeed, I’m not even sure it is a net benefit; I only said “if it emits less carbon, then it very likely is a net benefit”).

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#186

Post by zepto »

dheera wrote: post #165
zepto wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Bitcoiners Bitcoin is green, so you you could use the proceeds to buy Bitcoin. https://bitcoinisgreen.org/

I mean, personally, I do own some cryptocurrency right now, if it moons enough in the near future I would be very likely to use the proceeds to switch to an electric vehicle. If it moons even higher I could move to a more energy-efficient apartment with double-paned glass and all.

A coal company executive installing double pane windows doesn’t make coal green.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#187

Post by rsynnott »

kelp wrote: 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.

> This reminds me of how Steve Jobs would talk about the need for liberal arts influence in technology.

I mean, in this case, you really just need engineering (in the traditional sense) influence. Engineering as a discipline covers considering this sort of thing.

Re: Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming

#188

Post by duskwuff »

meltedcapacitor wrote: post #183
duskwuff wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash memory is uniform. Every flash memory die is (hopefully) identical to the next one. Once you know how to produce a flash memory die of a given size, you can produce a million of them, and that's worth a million times more. Chia plots are unique. Producing two copies of one isn't just pointless, but undesirable; it means that someone else might get a copy and reap the rewards instead of the person who plotted it…

The idea is you plot into a one time programmable thing either at the factory or on first use (so single die, multiple values). That said it needs to be cheaper than HD, as the SSD is apparently only used to build the plot, so maybe impractical indeed. Curious that the plotting hasn't already moved to DRAM, apparently 256GB is needed to build a plot which is not too wild on server-class computers.

> The idea is you plot into a one time programmable thing

... like flash memory?

Flash storage has been heavily optimized. You're not going to do any better than that with custom silicon.

> Curious that the plotting hasn't already moved to DRAM, apparently 256GB is needed to build a plot which is not too wild on server-class computers.

My understanding is that people have done the math, and using an SSD ends up being cheaper, even considering the fact that it'll wear out prematurely. (And, in the case of hosting services like Scaleway, the miner isn't concerned -- their hosting provider is the one burdened by this usage.)

Post reply on HN