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Comment by Glench | Hacker News Reader

I think another difference that I've heard the Chia folks talk about is the fact that even with a shift to manufacturing (which is real and a potential ecological problem, but one that already exists to some extent in the 1+ zettabyte storage industry), it's a one-time deal — hard drives can keep farming forever after they're manufactured with minimal electricity consumption. And they can be used for other purposes besides just farming Chia. With bitcoin the cost is terrible because ASIC hardware only works for mining bitcoin and by definition has to waste huge amounts of electricity forever to keep mining.

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>it's a one-time deal — hard drives can keep farming forever after they're manufactured with minimal electricity consumption

Let's say your mining operation brings in $1000/day in revenue. If it's mining bitcoin you might be paying $500/day in electricity bills, leaving you with $500 as profit to reinvest in the business (ie. buy more hardware). If it's mining chia you might be paying $50/day in electricity. That's $450 in less resources wasted, sounds good right? Well no, because any savvy businesman is going to reinvest that $450 into buying more mining hardware, so you can make even more money. In the end any resource you save from lower electricity consumption just gets poured into manufacturing more hardware.

>And they can be used for other purposes besides just farming Chia

This is a mixed bag, because while it's true that the mining hardware can be repurposed, it also means that during boom times, regular consumers have to pay more for their hardware. See for instance, the GPU shortage.

It all depends on the economics. It's pretty likely that at some point reinvesting in Chia by buying more drives just doesn't make sense.

You can also read more about the power consumption of Chia here: https://chiapower.org/

Do you know what’s a good place to start if I want to build a rig for Chia?

You might check out https://chiaforum.com/ or there are some Youtube tutorials if you search.

You can also use any old extra disk space you have on your current computers.

“We initially recommend that you try plotting with what you have around.”

https://www.chia.net/2021/02/22/plotting-basics.html

What do you mean? Chia miners will be forced to continually expand capacity, otherwise they will be left behind by difficulty adjustment as other miners expand capacity instead.

Chia does only one thing: replace $1000 spent on electricity with $1000 spent on SSD manufacturing. It’s unclear which one is worse for the environment, but I think it’s likely that SSD manufacturing is worse, given the (real) mining and toxic chemicals involved.

> hard drives can keep farming forever

SSDs have limited program/erase lifespan, and the proof-of-space algorithms used by Chia eat into that lifespan pretty fast.

To be precise, the process of "plotting" (using disk space for Chia) causes a lot of writes to disks, but those writes are a one-time process. Once a plot is written it can be moved anywhere and farmed forever. The actual proof of space algorithm for farming only takes an initial 5 seeks and then 64 seeks for the full proof so farming is not a big stress on disks long-term.

What numbers are we talking about here? Assuming 1tb ssd with say 1000 cycles of warranty, would it die instantly or would it not even feel it?

do you need to use ssds with chia?

No, it's just useful to use SSDs for plotting since they're faster. For farming any storage (HDDs, for example) are fine.

How about a RAM disk?

Sure but you need about 300GB RAM for the temporary files needed while creating plots.

Thinking about it, for someone who is looking to be seriously into chia, that might make sense. The cost of the RAM is only about $1,500. Might be a smart idea.

Has anyone tried this? Would be interesting to see the benefits.

Wouldn't the ram be idling most of the time while farming? Only storage space matters for farming, speed doesn't.

Honestly, this part I don't understand.

Somewhere over that couple days I read that you can farm on an HD, but plotting is faster on an SSD, so I'm making a huge presumption that plotting on a ramdisk would be even faster, without the wear on an SSD.

I'm still not clear on Chia. Sometimes I think I understand it, and other times I'm not so sure...

Plotting is the initial process of building the files that you farm with. Plotting is very CPU/Memory/Disk IO intensive and the total writes to a disk to build a ~100gb plot is over 1tb with ~260gb of temporary space used at any one time during the process. This means that the process of building plots (plotting) is best done with an ssd. The fact that the process writes over 1tb to the disk to generate a ~100gb plot means that you will be really consuming the life of a consumer grade SSD with a low TBW rating. It is possible to use RAMDisk and yes it is potentially faster for a single plot. But you would need ~260gb of ram to plot 1 plot at a time. Nvme SSD's are only marginally slower than ramdisk but they are much cheaper per GB and you can connect multiples of them meaning you can build many plots at once. ie. 1-2 plots per CPU core concurrently provided you have sufficient ram ~3400mb per plot and sufficient fast temporary storage SSD. Once plotted the plot file can be moved to a spinning disk HDD and farmed from there as very little reads are ever made in the farming process. Can you use Ramdisk? yes. Is it better? No. It's far cheaper and faster to use SSDs and use your ram for building multiple concurrent plots.

Thank you very much. That’s the first explanation that makes complete sense.

Actually plotting in parallel across multiple SSDs is likely to have the highest TiB/day of plots created. And then you’d be better off using the ram to enable more parallelism.

It’s a matrix of processor cores, threads per core, temp drive bandwidth, memory, and temp drive speed. Oh and cost per TiB of plots per day.

Also plotting happens in several stages, and each has a different set of requirements. So timing the running of plots in parallel and staggering starts also comes into it.

> With bitcoin the cost is terrible because ASIC hardware only works for mining bitcoin and by definition has to waste huge amounts of electricity forever to keep mining.

Multipurpose mining hardware would compromise security of the network. An alternative use for the hardware would effectively be a subsidy on mining Bitcoin.

This would imply that the costs of securing Bitcoin are not being paid by Bitcoin hodlers, and are not fully internalised by Bitcoin.

This is similar to the reason that Proof of Work must not have economic uses external to the network.

If such a subsidy were more valuable than rewards intrinsic to the network, any variance in that subsidy would cause variance in the security of the network, with the likely case being reduced security, the network now being dependent on that external use case.

E.g. if the alternative use is valuable, it might incentivise me to acquire enough miners such that I control majority hashrate of the network subsidised by the alternative more profitable use of the hardware. Any attack on the network is then subsidised by the external use case for the hardware.

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