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
Fortunately, the said idiots were cheap enough to use slow silicon. Your coffee maker will have to settle with being a lowly node in some Russian botnet... </s>
Whoops, now those 140mm fans you were going to buy cost over $200 each and are out of stock!!
Hashi Hashimoto is now head of civilisation control department. Crypto has been used on several planets at a similar stage of development, with great success every time.
A couple of year back in 2017 cypto craze, hdd minimg with burstcoin was thing that thankfully died out. Looking at the world now with covid and shortage of tech in general. Its not looking positive.
The 18 TB Ironwolf Pro i ordered a few hours ago will be my 9th Ironwolf drive
Would never buy another Ultrastar its too slow and loud and the WD Black has that annoying lubrication thing where the drive heads move every few second
Cant say anything about the WD Gold since i never bought one of those but i had a ton of problems with the non Pro WD Red and one of those is the only dead drive i have had in the last 5 years
Cant say if either of us has good or bad luck with either but i know i would not buy WD or HGST again but maybe and thats a big maybe i would try theWD Gold
Anyway off topic
www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/eth?HashingPower=5200&HashingUnit=MH%2Fs&PowerConsumption=6000&CostPerkWh=0.46&MiningPoolFee=1
www.frozencpu.com/products/8147/fan-500/Delta_Mega_Fast_120mm_x_38mm_Fan_-_252_CFM_-_Bare_Lead_PFB1212UHE-F00_No_RPM.html?tl=g36c781s562&id=fHIM5kZc
I don't miss it.
But in this titcoin joke one thing is impressive: its logo is amazing, simple yet very obvious what it portrays.
Everyday, something always would happen to1-3 machines, and about every 2 days I would need to install the OS again.
You need to start from a position of relative privilege to get off the ground mining crypto at all. You need knowledge and access to relevant equipment, most of which is expensive, so you need access to either cash or loans. That already excludes the vast majority of the global poor - but crucially also the vast majority of the poor in rich countries like the US - but also opens the door wide for the wealthy, for whom the cost of entry is essentially irrelevant. If you're used to trading stocks or commodities in the tens of thousands of dollars or more, setting up a couple of crypto rigs in a warehouse somewhere is a cheap gamble. Paying someone to set it up for you is also a negligable cost for the wealthy.
But ultimately, what you're arguing for here is just the virtuousness of selfishness in a predatory capitalist society. Which ... I mean, I get it, but it's counterproductive and only serves to maintain the status quo. Rather than take meaningful political action to make the society you're in work better (by, say, taxing the rich and through that ensuring living wages, universal healthcare, good working conditions, paid sick leave, vacation pay, livable pensions, etc. etc., i.e. resisting and fighting to change the current state of the system of government that has been shaped to dramatically benefit the wealthy over the past half century) you're arguing for a "everyone for themselves" ideology. Again: understandable given the circumstances, but also highly cynical and ultimately only serving to maintain a bad situation. There will always be more losers or people unable to take part in something like this than winners. The illusion that "anyone can win" is what keeps predatory capitalism going, as it lulls poor people into thinking they can be the one to get rich, when the odds of that in reality are near zero. Class and social mobility in the US has near stagnated over the past decades while the wealth of the richest has exploded, and neoliberal economic policies (which, to be clear, are also propagated by so-called "conservatives") serve to ensure that the wealth of the rich is never threatened, but rather consolidated and made safer. For any real change to take place, that needs to change, and saying "screw everyone else, I can get rich on crypto" is just a) a huge gamble, given the risk of a crash, and b) presenting selfishness as a virtue in lieu of fighting for meaningful change.
As for those of us critical of this being "well off right now and financially in a good place": sorry, but that's pretty myopic. Many of us are likely either living in societies where people are treated better than in the US, or know of the very real possibility of such a society. You're treating the current absolute shitshow that is working conditions in the US as a natural and unchangeable default ("live off minimum wage or go to work 40hrs a week with an hour or more drive and back" etc.), and you're falsely presenting the gamble of getting moderately rich off crypto as "true freedom". But within a system where money is the only determinant of success and the only real measure of power, no such thing as true freedom can ever exist. Everyone is a slave to money, whether it's the poor who don't have it or the rich who become obsessed by hoarding it through fear of losing it (as losing it would entail a total loss of security). Thankfully, all of this can relatively easily be moderated through political action. I don't know of any form of society where "true freedom" is possible (that leads us into some really heavy philosophical questions), but more freedom for more people is very easily achievable through better taxation and redistribution of wealth, even within capitalist systems. Just look to the nordics - our wages aren't quite as high as in the US, but our standards of living are higher, we're healthier, safer, trust each other and our governments more (largely due to the societies being more just and thus ultimately more free), we live longer, have more free time, are happier, etc., etc. You're presenting giving in to a hostile system as a way out of that system. That's just self-delusion.