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What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?

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Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?

#221
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gridcoin is designed for this. It is based on scientific research and instead of sha256 hashes of random data, coins are earned by proof of your computer doing scientific research. From their homepage: > Examples include protein structure prediction (Rosetta@home), mapping the Milky Way galaxy (Milkyway@home), and tackling problems in public health and clean energy (World Community Grid).

How do you prevent malicious research projects in a decentralized system?

On-chain voting is used to decide what projects are whitelisted.

Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?

#222
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who developed Chia hold a massive pre-mined collection, and plan to go public (as in stock, not ICO) later, so definitely seems like they could profit.

That then makes this a very transparent pump-and-dump case - going public would mean the SEC would be right on them.

just like they are on the innumerable illegal activity hedge runs commit every day, right?

Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?

#223
post #94

I just... do not understand how smart, even _brilliant_ people, the sort of people who know enough to make something like this, can look at Bitcoin... the waste, the way it has utterly failed to achieve what it set out to do[1], everything, and thinks, I know, I want to do that, but instead of blowing up the market for GPUs it'll be SSDs. Why? To get rich? It even seems doubtful to me that the people who developed Ch…

I think many of us underestimate the power of FOMO and the desire to get rich quick. The latter isn’t necessarily greed, lots of people just don’t have the good fortune to make a comfortable amount of money (as those of us in tech do) so are more susceptible to bubbles.

> lots of people just don’t have the good fortune to make a comfortable amount of money

The people who can imagine and implement a novel new type of cryptocurrency certainly do

Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?

#224
post #94

I just... do not understand how smart, even _brilliant_ people, the sort of people who know enough to make something like this, can look at Bitcoin... the waste, the way it has utterly failed to achieve what it set out to do[1], everything, and thinks, I know, I want to do that, but instead of blowing up the market for GPUs it'll be SSDs. Why? To get rich? It even seems doubtful to me that the people who developed Ch…

The main thing about money, Bud, is that it makes you do things you don't want to do.

That means you actually wanted to do those things, even if you hadn't thought of them before. Money is inanimate, it can't force you to do things you don't want.

Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?

#225
post #7

Just bought a new Synology NAS this week and started putting together disks and they're scarce and the prices are through the roof. Couldn't find what I was planning on buying. What I found was through the roof. I bit the bullet and bought 4 new ones. Not enough to fully populate the NAS, but at least it'll give me some space for now to do what I need. We've seen scarcity and what it does for prices after the floodin…

I just did some NAS upgrades a month ago and feel as if I dodged a bullet.

I'm curious what you ended up paying. I bought drives on sale, and got nine 16TB external drives to shuck (one is a spare) for ~$2250 USD taxed and shipped.

I will warn you though that burn-in testing is going to take a while. I did a very exhaustive test[1]... and two drives at a time over USB3 it took about twelve calendar days to test them all before I put them into service.

-- ----- ----- ----- -----

[1] Write out block pattern, read back. 2 hour break. Head thrash random writes/reads for 2 hours. 2 hour break. Head thrash random writes/reads for 2 hours.

Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?

#226
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time there are talks about cryptocurrencies it seems like HN is stuck pretending that only Bitcoin exists and tech hasn’t moved since Bitcoin.

Most cryptocurrencies are clones of Bitcoin with the same problems. Ethereum is more interesting, though it still has some of Bitcoin's problems.

Can you list the problems here? For each problem I'll give you an alternative of Bitcoin that aims to solve it. I'm not joking.

Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most cryptocurrencies are clones of Bitcoin with the same problems. Ethereum is more interesting, though it still has some of Bitcoin's problems.

Ethereum is also part of the shitcoins given the ridiculous amount of premined, but their marketing is considerably better.

why do you care about premining?

Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?

#228

Why would Chia be the threat here? Filecoin(IPFS) is already a threat, it already has a capacity of 4.81 EiB of data, 4810 PetiBytes! (Is that how you spell it? In contrast to Petabytes) And to store 1 GiB of data per year it only costs the user $0.00082 USD. That shows harddrives are already being gobbled up by miners at an incredible rate. Has this made a noticeable rise in storage prices? Anyone know of any data t…

>Filecoin(IPFS) is already a threat, it already has a capacity of 4.81 EiB of data, 4810 PetiBytes! (Is that how you spell it? In contrast to Petabytes)

4.81EiB is ~5.54EB. Filecoin has been around for ~81.5 months. That's an average growth rate of only ~68PB/month, but we can of course assume that the current growth rate is higher. For example, last year there was a period where it grew 250PB in a month.

Chiacoin has supposedly added ~200PB to its mainnet in the past 24 hours. That growth rate is also still climbing.

Seagate has been quoted as having an current HDD manufacturing capacity of ~350EB per year. The general assumption is that between Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba there's likely a total manufacturing capacity of close to 1000EB a year.

Of that 1000EB, a large percentage goes to OEMs and SIs, another large percentage goes to direct customers (Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc.), and the remainder goes into the sales channel (retail, VARs, etc.). OEMs, SIs and direct customers have contracted supply and pricing, whereas the sales channels do not. Channel is likely 30-40% of current production volume. So that's 300-400EB a year of capacity across all manufacturers going into the sales channel where end users can buy from.

-- ----- ----- -----

At 0.2EB/day of growth, that is 18-24% of all channel volume being consumed just by new Chia farm plots. At that rate, that'll cause channel supply issues very, very soon for certain. Once channel supply becomes exhausted, prices will rise since the demand is there.

The issue is... what ends up happening to the sustained growth rate? If it were to reach something like 1.0EB/day in growth, that is basically all of the normal channel capacity being spoken for just by Chia farm plots. That's an actual disaster for end users.

Manufacturers can't respond to those demand spikes instantly. They can respond some, for certain, but if some component hits maximum manufacturing capacity, you need to expand or build new factories (whether the manufacturers, or contract manufacturers within the supply chain for certain components). Building new factories is not quick. Not just construction, but ensuring that the demand will be sustained so you don't end up with these huge capital expenditure factories going idle when demand wanes.

Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?

#229
post #163
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an alternative mental model... Let's talk about Filecoin (related to Chia) for file storage. Assume for the moment that all 2 billion tokens are in circulation. At any given time, there is a market of people looking to store files and people willing to store those files for a fee. You're transacting (roughly) in Gb-years at today's level of technology -- i.e. willingness to store 1Gb of data for 1 year. Regula…

So I'm trying to check out FileCoin as I like the idea it tries to solve but: the website has some nifty visuals but after reading a few pages, I have no idea: 1- how to really get started and participate if I don't have a dedicated server (I mean I would expect something easy to onboard, but I don't want to setup a whole dedicated machine for that, despite the $100 rebate on Digital Ocean's bill). 2- How are the coi…

Filecoin is meant for stable long-term storage; thus, mining the unused space on your personal harddirve is not the intended use case.

Today, there is a lack of Dropbox-like systems to make the decentralized system broadly useful. It's a shortcoming that people are working on solving. It's akin to being given a big ole harddrive: Until you have a filesystem & file browser, it would only be relevant to a small population -- but that utility would explode once tooling is complete.

Some resources to address you question on utilization:

https://file.app/

https://filscan.io/#/home

Also: spending less than an hour trying to grok something new, and then ripping into it seems pretty disconnected. Thinking back to my learning curve on emacs, linux, IRC, BBSs, early www, etc. Hell, I remember spending days(!) wire wrapping that first computer and flashing the ROMs. It took substantial effort to be involved in the "obscure hobby", but look where computing and the web are now! Don't mistake ease of use today for potential impact tomorrow.

Re: What is Chia cryptocurrency and why is it bad news for hard drives?

#230
Then don't use it, simple as. I doubt miners don't know the risks.

These sort of 'non-argument' articles really joggle my neurons when it comes to "let's talk about something popular because that will drive our traffic and something something industry because that also generates traffic and interest".

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