Proof-of-space cryptocurrency Chia triggers HDD sales boom in Europe The launch of the cryptocurrency Chia has caused demand for hard disk drives in the European market to blow up, according to research firm Context. Figures for April released by the analyst show just under 200,000 enterprise-grade nearline storage drives of 10TB capacity and above were sold to end users across the region, …
Unless it all goes to mining specific hardware (like custom Bitcoin ASIC / FPGA), it means that in ~5 years the market is going to be flooded with second hand GPUs and Hard Drives which is probably good.
The problem is that these hard drives can probably get away with being ridiculously slow if all they are for is "proof of space". This is less good and will simply fill up landfills once the crypto-fanatics are through with them.
Plotting for Chia (the up-front and once-off process of preparing the data which is "farmed") generates a significant amount of disk writes. That's documented on the Chia website, and they warn against using consumer grade SSDs (because the wear tolerance for writes tends to be relatively low).
For farming Chia (the on-going, long-running process of looking for answers to keep the blockchain secured) only reads from the drive. Whether that be a traditional spindle or a modern SSD, it shouldn't affect the lifespan notably at all.
Cha-Cha-Cha Chia pet! (Americans will get this reference)
I have a friend that is buying consumer grade 1TB SSD's in bulk. He figures that he will get one patch plotted per drive and at the relative price of an SSD to a plot of Chia, it is a factor of expense, not an obstacle. All SSD's are impacted.
Everyone and his yapping dog is trying to jump on the Vapour Value bandwagon, forgetting that traditional money has been conjured out of thin air for decades and regardless of it's format, value is only arbitary and ultimately decided by governments, banks and rich speculators who manipulate the currencies to their best advantage.
I would not trust my pension to the alleged space in a server somewhere.
It will end in a lot of tears for many and profit for a few.
Chris G,
"It will end in a lot of tears for many and profit for a few."
That is the point of all scams and crypto-currencies are just yet another one !!!
If only I could jump on the NFT bandwagon with some 'spare' crypto-currency, I would be rich beyond measure ....... or more likely poor at an even more accelerated rate !!! :)
Plan A for low disk space: move one of the backup disks to the front line and put a big cheap host managed SMR in its place. Reality: cannot find HM-SMR anywhere and drive managed SMR is not cheap. (I assume it is just a firmware change but they can charge more if people think they are getting CMR.)
Plan B: I probably will not run out of space for a year. Wait for the prices to drop back to sanity. Reality: chia.
Plan C: ?
But proof of work actually benefits somebody, because it's hard to produce fake transactions fast enough to slot them in. Very costly, yes, but at least there's some purpose to it. Proof of space is not very helpful for anything. If they wanted to do a lottery system, they don't need to make empty drive space the method of deciding how likely you are to win. They could just do a straightforward lottery and forget the drives except for chain storage. It wouldn't be any weaker from a security perspective, although it's already weak enough that I wouldn't put money into it.
Pfft. All criticisms of Chia are wrong, because it was created by Bram Cohen, the best network protocol engineer alive.
Modest, too.
> Cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin, have been criticised for relying on proof of computational work, which sucks up a phenomenal amount of energy and skews the market for GPUs
No one but a complete idiot uses a GPU to mine Bitcoin ( ~0.1 to ~3 Mhash/Joule) any more that ship has long sailed away. In terms of energy and time everyone uses ASIC's (~100 to ~3000Mhash/Joule). A bit like a race between a Snail and a Bugatti Veyron, you pretty much know who will win the prize before the race takes place unless the distance to the finish line is very very very very very very very very short.
See, that's the issue. Most of the folk jumping late on the BTC bandwagon are in fact idiots who believe they will get rich in a week if they grab an off the shelf mid-pack NVidia GPU and set it to mine 24/7. That's what driven their prices up.
Icon because I can't find a decently priced GPU for my son's new PC.
If you buy ASICS and have cheap 3rd world power and hosting/labour costs it's worthwhile.
If not it's cheaper to buy some, use your media platform to hype it, then sell shorts and use you media platform to sink it.
Like the rest of industry - it's not worth actually making or mining anything when you can gamble on it.
Or mining Monero, or Doge, or whatever the flavor of the month is. That's the real key: guess which bandwagon other people will be jumping on tomorrow, and get on first. Then off before the crowd bails out.
So pretty much the same as other investments.
Personally I find the whole thing too tiresome to bother participating in.
By the tulip^H^H^H^H^H cryptocurrency boom? So far we have enough energy to operate a mid sized country wasted, we have chip capacity used to make leading edge ASICs wasted, we have high end GPUs/GPGPUs wasted, now we have large capacity hard drives / SSDs wasted.
What's next, a cryptocurrency that relies on huge amounts of RAM to blow up the DRAM market? Maybe one that relies on driving long distances so we can run out of gasoline and tires?
Chris G,
"I have an idea for hardwiring feacebook users into their machines, the idea is to use spare process space their brains, if we can find the spare processing the good news is there is an almost infinite supply of them."
You do realise that the money will be made by whoever gets the contract to do all the 'Hardwiring' !!! :)
I would like to tender for the job IF I can use my patented 'Hardwiring' method that only requires a simply hammer to complete the job :)
"What's next, a cryptocurrency that relies on huge amounts of RAM to blow up the DRAM market? Maybe one that relies on driving long distances so we can run out of gasoline and tires?"
The only people guaranteed to get rich in a mining boom are the people selling the shovel.
To expand on that, if you happen to have a big shovel manufacturing operation, it might seem like a good idea to "create" mining opportunities.
I wonder who might be instigating all these new "coin mining" schemes?
<Takes tinfoil hat off and slinks away>
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