Monday, April 19th 2021
Chia - The Cryptocurrency Gunning for Your SSD and HDD Space That Could Bring Another Tech Sector Pricing Up
A new cryptocurrency going by the name of Chia could bring about a boom in demand for HDD and SSD, which have been kept relatively untouched by the latest mining and supply constraints. However, optimistic predictions of falling prices for NAND (optimistic for consumers, that is) could prove to be erroneous. Apparently, the new cryptocurrency, which saw its whitepaper being published in February 9th and has already led to shortages of high-performance SSDs from China's Jiahe Jinwei.
The cryptocurrency was designed to be mined in SSDs and HDDs, looking to cut on electricity cost from proof of Work (PoW) cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and (still) Ethereum. The intention is for the cryptocurrency to have as broad an appeal as possible, by excluding the need for prohibitive investments in either ASICs (for Bitcoin) or GPUs (for Ethereum and other Dagger/Hashimoto-based calculations). It also leverages that which is most widely available and oftentimes left empty of any workload - storage space. Due to this, it's been reported that Chinese miners are already buying HDDs (4 TB through to 18 TB) and SSDs (mainly NVMe solutions) in bulk. This could prevent technologists from ushering in the current trend of falling storage pricing - if demand becomes as crazy as it has become in the GPU space.
Chia was designed by BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen, and uses a specific type of consensus and ledger-assurance system that's described as Proofs of Space and Time. The blockchain is farmed via Proof of Space, which is done inside your HDD or SSD via computing through already-in-storage models, and then contacts Chia's servers for Proof of Time - which essentially ensures that a required amount of time has passed between the block's generation and its actual inclusion in the network, to prevent any ill-intentioned farmer from assuming control of the network.
There are several advantages to farming a cryptocurrency such as Chia over the more general proof of work models. HDDs and SSDs take up much lesser space than a rack of GPUs, whilst consuming much less power, generating much less heat and noise, and thus allowing for much higher scalings in farming scenarios (which is what Chia calls its mining, because it's more ecologically sustainable than the usual mining workloads).
Sources:
Chia Project Home, via Tom's Hardware
The cryptocurrency was designed to be mined in SSDs and HDDs, looking to cut on electricity cost from proof of Work (PoW) cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and (still) Ethereum. The intention is for the cryptocurrency to have as broad an appeal as possible, by excluding the need for prohibitive investments in either ASICs (for Bitcoin) or GPUs (for Ethereum and other Dagger/Hashimoto-based calculations). It also leverages that which is most widely available and oftentimes left empty of any workload - storage space. Due to this, it's been reported that Chinese miners are already buying HDDs (4 TB through to 18 TB) and SSDs (mainly NVMe solutions) in bulk. This could prevent technologists from ushering in the current trend of falling storage pricing - if demand becomes as crazy as it has become in the GPU space.
There are several advantages to farming a cryptocurrency such as Chia over the more general proof of work models. HDDs and SSDs take up much lesser space than a rack of GPUs, whilst consuming much less power, generating much less heat and noise, and thus allowing for much higher scalings in farming scenarios (which is what Chia calls its mining, because it's more ecologically sustainable than the usual mining workloads).
101 Comments on Chia - The Cryptocurrency Gunning for Your SSD and HDD Space That Could Bring Another Tech Sector Pricing Up
You never know when you give greedy people, scalpers, miners or companies good ideas for there own gain to much suffering for you and us normal gamer or people just using a pc.
Guys, we've had SiaCoin for a long time. Even at its peak it didn't cause any shortages, and at this point became a victim of its own success: it can barely compete with cloud storage, regardless of its many technical advantages only because it became more and more expensive.
The only reason we'll get SSD shortages this/next year, is because our usual suspects Samsung, WD, Kioxia, Hynix and Micron will decide to f#$%k you over once again because [ generic placeholder for power outage || contamination || natural/unnatural disaster || COVID ].
www.techradar.com/how-to/how-to-mine-cryptocurrencies-on-your-android-smartphone
But trying to do it on a calculator, why am I not surprised. Just showing People's greed will never end. Mine on anything possible. Game consoles has also been used for mining. PS4 was used under the 2017/2018 crypto boom.
The only thing you could do on a PS4 is mine XMR on CPU or some garbage like Electroneum (you may also know it as "that garbage script-kiddies bunlde with malware to overheat your CPU").
PS4's APU is about as powerful as Carrizo APU inside your run-of-the-mill $150 netbook of that time. Not much compute oomph to mine even one cup of bitter coffee. On PS4 it's not even profitable(electricity costs overrun your puny profit even at optimistic 800H/s XMR). GPU mining was always out of question, because the only thing that kinda works on PS4 is Gallium.
wccftech.com/dedicated-cryptocurrency-mining-ssds-in-production-chia-coin-rise/
Excuse me while I go out and p**e over this BS. Crypto is the worst invention ever. It's time for governments to step in and take control over this. It's uncontrolled and cause suffering and desperation among people who just want a gaming gpu or soon new storage. Also companies can't upgrade there servers because you guessed it, gpu and storage is gulped up by either miners or scalpers. I know there is also a ressource shortage, but that is not alone the culprit for this shortage of hardware.As far I know and have read. It was possible by installing Linux on ps4. Probably a hacked ps4's consoles. I have not read much into it.
I Will not be surprised if ps4 and other consoles will be used two. Specially if crypto keep going strong and gpu is still a problem to get the next coming month.
There is all ways someone trying different ways to earn money.
BTW, just checked how SIA is doing - no change since last year. $13/TB/mo and ridiculous bandwidth fees. Chia isn't even listed anywhere and doesn't have an developed infrastructure to bring any kind of meaningful impact. Really doubt there's gonna be a reason for anyone to become a doomsday-prepper with shelves full of HDDs and SSDs.
A lot of alt-coins are designed to be RAM hard, and HBM2 and GDDR6x are the best RAM for those kinds of problems. Sure, there's a GPU attached, but you're just using the GPU-portion as a RAM interface (cheapest way to get lots of HBM2 or GDDR6x)
What nice future we are going to...