New cryptocurrency could potentially cause an SSD or hard drive shortage | Hacker News Reader

New cryptocurrency could potentially cause an SSD or hard drive shortage

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26 pointsjimmyneptune30 comments

I would assume current SSD shortages are more related to global chip shortages and increased demand than a speculative cryptocurrency that hasn't even fully launched yet.

Browsing the Chia FAQ, it looks like the Chia organization is busy pre-farming Chia coins for themselves with plans to loan them to companies to use:

> Why are we pre-farming?

> Chia has a novel business model to both, lower volatility of the coin and increase adoption. By loaning Chia and managing the interest rates of those loans as well as other tools like buying our stock with chia coins, we hope to lower the quarter to quarter volatility of the coin. To drive adoption, we intend to loan Chia to Global 5000 companies who will use it to pay their international vendors quickly, less expensively, and more securely.

This idea that companies will need to borrow a volatile currency to get payments done faster feels like a joke. Why must every fast payment scheme use arbitrary tokens with floating exchange rate instead of simply tapping into existing banking systems and representing existing currency holdings? No serious business wants to put a volatile cryptocurrency on their books just to transact a tiny bit faster.

Yeah, wow, whitepaper expects their reserve matched by other farmers only after 21 years of Chia mining/plotting.

I see Bram Cohen got the original authors of "proof of space" or whatever this is to author papers with him, and also got inflationary pressure in there, but if that's the extent of research, well, that's still not how the economy works. At least ransomware gangs won't switch from encrypting to deleting stuff altogether for space.

There's little performance advantage to SSDs over hard-disks since the proof of space only requires a few blocks to be read every (on avg) 5 minutes. This leaves them unable to compete against the much cheaper hard-disks.

Furthermore, the ROI on hard-disks bought just to mine this may be decades as there is already a glut of unused hard disk space. So there's no hard disk shortage to be expected.

As downsides to chia I see

1) the huge premine.

2) the large complexity of the proof of time + proof of space system.

3) the fact that the mining chain cannot commit to the tx history (instead the miner's private key signs for a block of txs as belonging to the mined header)

The one who devises a method to keep crypto people busy without them having negative effects on the real world might get the Nobel Peace Prize - or rather the Economics one? Maybe both - to express our deepest gratitude?

Proof of stake is already in production.

Kind of curious how you can actually ensure they actually have that unused space available. The article said it had to be empty.. couldn't someone just write their own disk driver that lies about the size of the drive?

it probably writes and MD5's a giant sparse file with some salt lightly scattered throughout it in order to force allocation of the space or fail hash test.

I’ve wondered that too. If you wrote your own client you could lie about the hashes, so there must be something else to it. I have a farmer going and maybe every 10 minutes the hard disk spins up for what sounds like very little I/O so it’s definitely not checking the entire 100GB plot file.

Chia doesn't rely on empty space; it fills the space with useless data.

Getting really fucking tired of these ponzi schemes creating massive collateral damages. Can the "industry" just move on to proof of stake and contain their damages to themselves?

Proof of stake is an oligarchy. The only proof-of-X that works is if X guarantees one person has the same voting power as another person. Finding X is currently an unsolved problem in mathematics and computer science. No cryptocurrency does this.

It's only oligarchy if stakers have governance rights over the protocol. That's true of some PoS chains but not all.

Otherwise, it's just people with more money getting the same percentage returns as anyone else, which is actually a better situation than legacy banking (where bigger accounts get better rates) or proof of work (where there are physical economies of scale).

There's an argument that a 51% attack (or threat thereof) is a form of governance so all miners/stakers ultimately have governance rights.

Ethereum just had a brief encounter with that threat. It's switching to a system that burns most transaction fees instead of giving them to miners. The miners took exception to that, and made a lot of noise about a "demonstration of force" in which at least 51% of them would move to the same mining pool, showing they could attack if they wanted to.

The rest of the community called their bluff. The miners backed down and the change is scheduled for July.

Miners don't have that much power because if users, apps, exchanges, data feeds, and tokenized real-world assets are all referencing the new hard-forked chain, then miners have a choice between running that fork or going out of business. A chain with just miners has little economic value and can't support all those GPUs.

Under proof-of-stake, a 51% attack is even less of a threat. A double-spend attempt results in destruction of all your stake. A long-term censorship attack could be maintained, but if it's egregious then users could remove your stake with a hard fork, and if there's support for that from all the above entities, it'll work.

Miners and stakers are not governors. They're service providers.

Exactly what I was going to say. Governance is social weight, which is exactly what you have if you buy your way to 51%. Proof of person also suffers from this because decentralized collectives can conspire and/or collectively make decisions (as we saw with $GME), but it always guarantees that any person ultimately has exactly the same fundamental weight as any other person.

It is an extremely hard problem and I think it is impossible to achieve true decentralization because many other things are centralized, like human relationships. Mom, dad, sister, brother, girlfriend, boyfriend, best friend, business partner, etc. will always share increased affinity with you when making certain decisions. Unfortunately, I believe the human flaw is that we are more likely to agree with people based on relationship rather than on merit. Humans are corruptible and can be convinced to sway in a certain way, and therefore create gravity wells of centralization.

It sounds crazy, but a classic example is "cliques" in high school. There's the jocks, the goths, the nerds, etc. They are like little planets of centralized thinking, dancing together in the uncertain space of adolescence.

Everything is equivalent to proof-of-stake plus overhead. If you have the stake, you can show it in proof-of-stake, or you can buy mining hardware and burn electricity in POW, or you can buy storage and prove it via "plotting" (in Chia) in proof-of-capacity. Two of these require you to exchange stake for something else that you then dedicate to the system. Unless there's something in the protocol unique to non-proof-of-stake then it's comparatively wasteful.

But any variant of proof-of-you-can-afford-to-buy-tons-of-expensive-hardware is just oligarchy with additional, economy and environment damaging, steps. PoS at least takes out the middlemen and lets you run your "crypto" "currency" without collateral damage while you figure out something better.

this is actually impossible because all cryptocurrencies necessarily start out maximally centralized, and "decentralize" gradually through the distribution model.

the problem is that this creates at best a concentric circular pattern of ownership (and thus leverage over liquidity), even if everyone involved is completely honest and ownership is 100% transparent. in reality it's far worse than that because pseudo anonymous address ownership means claims of "fair distribution" cannot be trusted let alone proven.

decentralization is a mirage.

How about Proof-Of-Poverty?

Amount of damage by cryptocurrencies is mind boggling and yet they are going strong...

This isn't the first proof-of-storage-capacity cryptographic currency. I think the first was Burst, which came out in 2014.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_space

Thinking any brand new shitcoin could cause a storage industry shortage is rather ridiculous.

Yea the guy only invented Bitorrent and changed the entire internet, what does he know!

I'm sure you're right.

I wonder if this kind of thing, while momentarily painful, can't benefit society in the end.

I think WWII was horrible, but it might have kickstarted civilian aviation.

California's PG&E electricity prices are a travesty, but there is a real market for solar panels in california, which means solar R&D is being funded.

Chip shortages are causing real investment to be made in fabs now, which means better designs and cheaper products 10 years from now..

Electric cars need batteries, so battery tech has gotten a real boost and we get better batteries for all kinds of other things.

The pandemic ... mRNA for cancer?

I believe this will further impact the environment.

An increase in the demand for SSDs will result in an increase in the production of hard drives. The construction of these hard drives requires energy, and this energy comes from the burning of fossil fuels.

Just another nail in Bitcoin's coffin.

I thought you believed bitcoin didn't run on coal. Why the sudden return to reality?

There is no advantage to farm on SSDs so if anything old HDD might find a new use.

As if Graphics card aren't already hard to get this is just another problem added to that list. Won't be surprised if they started getting really expensive just as they started getting cheaper :(

Chia uses hard disk space, not computational power so it shouldn’t affect graphic card prices.

=\ thats too bad

but I do have 16TB of NVMe SSDs so..... hmmmm, I guess that's fine since I already own them

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