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
RAM are expected to rise up to 20% very soon
Back when DDR4 came out, high-end DDR3 were still superior in alot of tasks especially gaming (which prefers low latency).
DDR4 is not going away anytime soon
Fortunately, the majority of people don't need a 1kW PSU nowadays, even if you have a maxed-out gaming rig.
Heck, I've been getting by with 550W or lower PSU for the past 10 years or so(even on OCed Westmere rig). Got a spare 1kW unit as a payment not too long ago, but I think it'll do better elsewhere.
As for miners, there are much better alternatives than consumer-grade PSUs. Most of my friends with mining rigs got on a bandwagon of refurbished modded Emerson and HP enterprise PSUs. The last one I bought for my customer cost around $200. 2.4kW, already modded with 20-something 6+2pin cables made out of real 18AWG wiring w/ soldered connectors (enough to run his 6xP104-100 cards, hook up a PicoPSU for motherboard and have few spare connectors just in case). Not only is it much safer from electrical standpoint, but also saves those beastly PSUs from landfill.
I'm short on time so I can't reply to any more of your points right now, but they're wrong too.
Cheers.
Alot overestimate their PSU needs
A friend of mine once bought a 1500 watt PSU for a single CPU/GPU system , barely used 450 watts during load
Banks have datacenters that do actually useful things, by processing transactions allowing people to, oh, I don't know, buy food and pay rent and stuff like that. Crypto also consumes power for transactions btw. This is utterly negligible compared to the power cost of mining though, to which there is no equivalent outside of crypto.
A publicly available ledger could be hosted on pretty much any hardware. Or in the case of my joke, on paper, in an actual ledger. The power cost would, again, be negligible, or zero in the case of paper. Again: it's the mining that consumes the power.
As for transport, they could drive cars for pretty significant distances without it coming close to the environmental impact of crypto mining. I don't think you quite grasp the scale of electricity consumption involved.
- First off: yes, technology advanced during both WWI and WWII. That is mainly due to governments using wars as reasoning to spend money on product development. What says they couldn't have achieved the same - or likely even more, given the reduced need for said technologies to be useful for killing - with just spending the same without the war? That warfare has historically been widely accepted as carte blanche on government spending is hardly an argument for it being beneficial, and twisting it to be so is some seriously flawed logic.
- Second: If those hard drives are being produced, it's because they have a use. Companies and people are buying them already. It's not like makers and distributors are stockpiling HDDs for the future, after all. If mining suddenly arrives with a massive demand for HDDs, what happens to those other use cases? They start experiencing shortages. Most HDD makers don't have ~50% free capacity, so it's quite doubtful that they'll be able to avoid shortages.
- As for mining worldwide consuming less power than our current banking and debit machine(?) infrastructure: how about no? Judging by your wording I'm assuming you're basing your numbers on this 2018 blog postor something similar, which among other glaring issues assumes that every ATM in the world has two air conditioners and lighting. Which is downright absurd - most ATMs are embedded into a wall somewhere, and have neither. It also assumes a/c in all bank branches, which again, is just nowhere near accurate. It also doesn't account for electric heating in colder climates, etc. So it's methodology is fundamentally flawed. (There are other articles, like this one, that have slightly different numbers but are still fundamentally flawed.) According to the University of Cambridge, the current Bitcoin network consumes ~122TWH/year(~0.5-0.6% of global electricity consumption). Ethereum is currently estimated at ~39TWH/year. And then there's all the various altcoins out there. This whole comparison of course entirely neglects the fact that global banking serves literal billions of people every day. Crypto comes nowhere close. But more crucially, crypto wastes most of its energy. Should banking become more efficient? Absolutely, yes. Does that make it look bad compared to crypto? Of course not. The vast majority of power consumed by crypto is for mining, i.e. spending computational power to generate a unique signifier of some sort. Is that valuable? Proponents would say yes, seemingly through some sort of philosophical idea of the inherent value of creating something unique and unreproducible. I would say hell no, because the thing that is created is inherently useless. It has zero use beyond being something to gamble on. It provides no tangible use to any human being that couldn't just be served just as well by something that already exists. Does it represent a better chance of ROI for your gamble than, say, a lottery ticket or stocks? Sure. But it also wastes heaps of energy while doing so. Energy that a) wouldn't need to be generated at all if not for mining, or b) that could be spent doing something with actual tangible benefits, like producing useful goods or providing useful services. The inherent - and intended! - difficulty of generating unique tokens is what makes crypto inherently and unchangeably wasteful. No comparison to any other industry or service will change that.