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, …

[karlkarl]

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.

[katrinab]

No, apparently a consumer grade SSD which would normally be good for about 10 years will wear out in 6 weeks if you use it for Chia mining.

[FlamingDeath]

Saying something doesn’t make it true

[wallyhall]

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.

[MiguelC]

PNY directly blamed Chia farming for their decision to cut their SSD endurance warranties

[gjmartin]

I thought the warranty reduction was due to the chip shortages, switching from TLC to QLC?

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

>I thought the warranty reduction was due to the chip shortages, switching from TLC to QLC?

No it's because of these evil bankers miners - nothing to do with us cutting costs, we are the innocent victims here, poor us etc

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

[FlamingDeath]

Idiocracy

“I like money”

- Frito

I feel like this movie got so much about humanity down to a fucking tee, Mike Judge is a living prophet

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Idiocracy

Save yourself some time. Watch to the opening credits, there's not a lot to see after that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Idiocracy

Frito: Yeah, I know this place pretty good. I went to law school here.

Joe: You went to law school at Costco?

Frito: I know! I couldn't believe it either but luckily my dad was an alumnus so he pulled some strings.

[Anonymous Coward]

So.

Conjuring even more funny money out of thin air, and not even secured by a nation state?

[Chris G]

Re: So.

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.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: So.

> value is only arbitary and ultimately decided by governments,

The difference is that governments can demand that you pay taxes in their made up magic beans, and they can send men with guns if you don't

[James_H]

Re: So.

> The difference is that governments can demand that you pay taxes in their made up magic beans, and they can send men with guns if you don't

Amazon being excluded naturally.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So.

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 !!! :)

[Peter2]

Re: So.

The security is based on something far more reliable than a nationstate.

It's based on criminals extorting and laundering the proceeds of "cyber"crime.

[pip25]

Just great

"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."

But thanks to our savior Chia, now the HDD market is skewed too. Yaay.

[Flocke Kroes]

Re: Just great

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: ?

[yetanotheraoc]

Re: Just great

"most users have unused storage space on their devices"

Not any more.

[Glenn Amspaugh]

Re: Just great

Will Chia-pet drive space become more valuable than porn drive space?

[doublelayer]

Re: Just great

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.

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Just great

Pfft. All criticisms of Chia are wrong, because it was created by Bram Cohen, the best network protocol engineer alive.

Modest, too.

[krakead]

Can't crypto currencies just cut to the endgame already with a Proof of Stupidity model? There's an endless supply of that around it seems,

[Flocke Kroes]

Re: Proof of stupidity

Nigerian 419'ers had some success monetising stupidity but now that politicians have learned how to harness it the supply has became constrained no matter how much more they make.

[katrinab]

That would be the OneCoin, or, allegedly, Tether.

[Dante Alighieri]

Helliconia

Winter or Spring

[Anonymous Coward]

GPUs

> 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.

[slimshady76]

Re: GPUs

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.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: GPUs

>idiots who believe they will get rich in a week if they grab an off the shelf mid-pack NVidia GPU

If it wasn't for idiot consumers we wouldn't have nice shiny toys - it's just a shame that short term it means I have to buy Quadra cards for no good reason.

[Glenn Amspaugh]

Re: GPUs

I got a reservation at EVGA for an RTX3070 for daughter's machine. Took about 3 months for it to become available but that was back in Nov 2020.

You get an email saying "8 hours to claim reservation or it goes to next-in-line".

[katrinab]

Re: GPUs

Sadly there are a lot of complete idiots out there.

Even if you did buy the right kit, how long would it last before it is obsolete, and how many bitcoins would it produce in that time net of electricity costs?

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: GPUs

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.

[Piro]

Re: GPUs

You know full well everyone is mining Ethereum, and often getting paid in Bitcoin (using something like Nicehash). The home gamer is not mining Bitcoin directly.

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: GPUs

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.

[cornetman]

I wonder if you could use a RAM disk, assuming you has sufficient ram at your disposal.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see why not, but a 4 TB disk drive costs about the same as 16 GB of RAM, i.e. RAM is very roughly two orders of magnitude more expensive than disk space per bit.

[Graham Cobb]

It needs to store information "permanently".

Hmm... I've got some old PDP11 core around somewhere I think...

[Version 1.0]

LOL - drive space

Back in the early days of USB drives I was in China and bought a 100Mb USB stick at a street market in Beijing ... that was cool until I tried to load my MP3 files onto it. Turns out it only had 50Mb of storage but reported 100Mb.

[IGotOut]

Re: LOL - drive space

Still a very common problem. That's why you should always buy from trusted sources such a EBay or Aliexpress.

[DS999]

So what else can be wasted

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?

[Adrian 4]

Re: So what else can be wasted

Proof of labour.

There is a reasonably sized pool of waveslaves. Large enough to be viable, small enough to create a shortage.

And so we go round and round.

[DS999]

Re: So what else can be wasted

Make them solve CAPTCHAs? No, that's too cruel!

[Chris G]

Re: So what else can be wasted

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So what else can be wasted

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 :)

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: So what else can be 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?"

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>

[Piro]

If they were taken by surprise, they were stupid. I was warning people I knew before Chia started trading - buy up any hard drives you might need in future, now.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no hard drives left, none.

[Anonymous Coward]

Buh?

Bitcoin I kinda understand - I do some math so therefore money.

But I don't see how "I can prove my hard drive isn't full" equals money. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯