SSD makers start warning that mining products like ChiaCoin will void warranty
guru3d.com
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While I'm no proponent of storage mining, I do feel a little empathy. First they sell products that don't stand up as well to wear, then they wash their hands of it when you actually want to use the thing. Feels a bit like when stainless steel appliances gave way to plastic ones.
That's why I stopped buying entry-level, and prefer enterprise SSD's or at least good brands that publish endurance figures and have held up to third-party testing proving them out.
Here are some fun experiments writing to SSD's for days/months/years on end to see how long they'd last:
[1] https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experi...
[2] https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/thread/9rl1lp19?p=9#r179
[3] http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SS...
I have no problem with a manufacturer publishing a lifetime write rating and denying the warranty once you've exceeded it. But unless they were up-front about it, amending the terms afterward by saying "well, we never intended you to use it like that" seems a cop-out.
It all comes to the use case scenarios. It's not really a dirty secret but cost issue where you can pay up more for robustness and buy the industrial use one if the consumer grade stuff doesn't fit your needs. On 99.99% of its users it's fine, almost everyone is happy with a consumer SSD.
A consumer laptop screen might do just well in the dashboard of a car but it might also turn yellow. You can't complain because it wasn't meant to be used like that (like operating in 80+C temperatures). Your vacuum cleaner would certainly not last long if you started vacuuming water and construction debris, the kind of stuff an industrial vacuum is built for.
A consumer SSD is not designed to be used for this kind of mining. Regular consumers are more price sensitive and ignore other aspects because they're not tech educated. Many don't even understand what this "mining" entails, just that they could make some money. There's a minority of consumers who went for the cheap stuff and now want to make money off of it by pushing it beyond the stated limits. I honestly don't think they have a leg to stand on.
It's a good thing that not all products are made to meet all expectations because they would cost all the money, all the time.
Wasn't the GP's whole point that those limits aren't stated? Or that they are deliberately misleading, e.g. consumer internet sold as "up to 10 Gbps", but would more accurately be labeled "10 Gbps once in a blue moon".
Also, the prices given for consumers assume that they are not going to max out the bandwidth all the time, so the ISP having 1000Gbps line to the rest of the internet can sell it to 1000 customers, giving them each a 10Mbps. It will work fine up until a lot of them are watching Netflix at the same time or torrenting.
The moment you have guarantees on the speed, your prices and speeds are adjusted to make it feasible(the same hypothetical ISP can have 2 customers at 100Mbps, 30 at 10Mbps and 500 at 1Mbps with guaranteed speeds and vastly different prices). In many places you can definitely pay a lot of money and have a connection that is not pooled with your neighbour.
It's the same difference as with the shared hosting and a dedicated machine hosting.
Consumers should be free to violate any and all assumptions with no negative consequences. Especially unstated ones that only people familiar with their business model would know about.
If an ISP advertises 1 gigabit/second internet, consumers should be able to fill that pipe with 1 gigabit of data every second. In practice only a minority is going to do that but it should be possible with no punitive throttling of bandwidth whatsoever.
I don't think this is universally true. I have a gigabit line via a residential ISP ($60/mo) in Europe and it will max out 24/7 without throttling.
What I don't have is access to the same support and service guarantees that would be included in a business plan.
But you can't really expect to max out 100/100 24/7 all year long on a consumer pipe. It is overprovisioned and assumes that most won't be utilizing theoretical maximum all the time. Just as the coffee maker.
My employer with 400 onsite employees (in noncovid situation) has provably worse transfer speed & latency than my household with our consumer 1 Gbps connection. I expect them to pay at least 100x more for it. But its a bank, they can't do differently - they never had connection issue in last 10 years I work there. If they ever had, the team of experts would have fixing it as their top priority.
We had a consumer-grade coffee machine at the office once, along with free coffee capsules for the employees.
Whereas in somebody's home that machine would have made 4-5 cups of coffee a day, that machine was making in the order of hundreds a day.
Of course it broke quite often.
But having worked at a restaurant as a waiter in my youth, I can tell: industrial (even entry-level) professional dish-, washer are on another league, completely different. If anything, for having the dishes done in 40 seconds (!)
While my next home dishwasher will be an industrial / commercial-grade dishwasher after one too many services calls for a supposedly premium residential make (Bosch, and I've heard rumblings Miele fares no better), I also have to acknowledge there are trade-offs.
1. I need to supply higher voltage and amperage than most homes plumb for dishwashers. Fortunately not three-phase for the smaller units I'm looking at.
2. I cannot put my more delicate dishware into them, and hand wash them.
3. While there is more energy and water use, I'm okay with that. That marginal inefficiency is more than made up for by keeping a residential dishwasher from entering the landfill in just a few years. Under residential use, I can reasonably expect to run it until parts run out, which for the better brands like Hobart, does not appear to happen for decades.
4. While I have to use detergents that are not available at the grocery store, I'm okay with that.
I sometimes wish there were open source reference blueprints for the big ticket household appliances built around a design dimension that will not change for the foreseeable future: human planiform scale. And manufacturers plug into that frame so the basic core like the tub of a laundry machine or dishwasher doesn't change common mounting points and dimensions while everything around it changes and swaps Ship of Theseus-style over the decades, radically reducing the footprint of these machines entering the waste stream. What I'm really wishing for is more cradle-to-cradle design however, and I should leave the actual implementation to the domain experts.
1: Demand that it's attached to the hot water (machine need less power to heat it up, less chalk...AND Cheaper(your boiler is better at producing hot water))
2: Clean it once a month, especially the pump intake (has often sand like stuff on the ground)
3: DONT use tabs but powder.
However, Industrial grade stuff is more expensive (from the power standpoint), but better for the water (not stupid aromas)
Most machines actually specify that the water entering the unit has to be at least 49C. To meet this you usually have to run the hot water on the kitchen sink—which then wastes water. (And may be where people get the mistaken idea for pre-washing: they're running the sink anyway.)
AFAICT, the only brand that can officially be connected to the cold water (10C) supply is Miele, which have an internal heater. And the official specs show that they actually use less overall power with cold water. This is probably because (a) some of the cycle can use cold water, and (b) a smaller quantity overall needs to be heated up compared to running the tap. It does take longer, time-wise (~30m), though; see page 45:
* https://www.miele.com/pmedia/ZGA/TX2070/10544640-000-03_1054...
The tests that you link to suggest that SSDs meet and exceed their manufacturer's durability claims as measures in petabytes written.
The problem appears to be that manufacturers want to translate that number into something consumers understand, and farmers now want to take them up on that for their industrial use of the devices.
Manufacturers use "lasts for 10 years" as the label for consumers. Which seems entirely reasonable - the disks really will last for 10 years in typical usage, and this phrasing seems useful for consumers.
Now we could fix by either requiring that any warranty standard must hold under any imaginable usage scenario, or manufacturers could resort to a somewhat squishy "reasonable use".
I think the "any use case" requirement is not practical, and we have a long history of "reasonable use" being used, eg for cars.
If the limitation was also expressed in objective, preferably quantitative terms, it would be clear. Internet conections usually have that: 1Tb transfer at 100Mb/s speed, then 64kb/s. 50% of the time, the speed may be limited by congestion, etc.
But even if that's not strictly quantified, I think the manufacturer position is justifiable, in particular when advertising to consumers.
> Lasts for 10 years!*
> * Based on a total lifetime of X PB and typical usage of Y GB/month.
But if they claim "Lasts for 10 years.", then their implied warrantee is "Lasts for 10 years.".
(lets say that there is package of snack that everyone eats at once - package label claims that it is expected to be not eaten at once, what allows them to make less horrifying nutrition label)
Besides Sandforce SSDs I've never have had any SSD fail, including cheap SSDs with 300+ drive writes, which is an insane workload for anything consumer (in my case, being used as a scratch disk) -- you are literally writing dozens of terabytes to an SSD that only holds twohundred GB or so.
None of my normal-use SSDs approach any amount of wear like this, and despite some being used daily for almost ten years, they generally have less than 50 drive writes.
So I really don't see why any FUD is warranted here.
It was in a machine running Ubuntu and manifested in such a way, that during kernel update (linux-headers, i.e. writing lot of small files, to be more specific) it just gave up and became unresponsive until power cycle. It still did work during normal, user usage when the demand on it was light.
They stand up to the wear of a certain duty cycle. If you have a heavier duty cycle buy a product designed for it (which will probably cost more).
There's a reason why Toyota's Corolla sedan (or even their Supra) costs less than their race car that won the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Warranties cover defects, not wear and tear far beyond the advertised workload.
I'm not aware of anything in magnusson moss prohibiting you from indicating a devices designed workload-- whether it's pages shredded per minute, pages printed a month, or TBW / DWPD. It is well known that flash has a limited lifespan and no court is going to rule that burning through those cell writes with a commercial workload somehow entitles you to coverage under an implied warranty.
The hope is that capacity increases outrun the loss in endurance by changing the way the SSD is used. If you have a large capacity SSD the assumption is that you often just write a large file onto it once and it stays there for a long time, resulting in a net gain in endurance.
If you had the opposite, like an SSD cache integrated into an HDD where the cache is being overwritten all the time you run into a problem and your best choice would be to use a smaller capacity SLC SSD with more endurance.
I do have a problem with someone selling me a product and then telling me what I can and can't do with it.
If that is the case, it's more a question of whether the advertised lifetimes are dishonest marketing or not. I guess most people shopping the warranty would understand "years or write limit" well enough.
I would say they aren't telling you what you can do with it, they are just telling you what uses they will cover under warranty. In this case, it's likely that a legal requirement to cover the drives under warranty for this use would cause the price to go up or the product to be pulled.
This is a consumer SSD, by Samsung's own classification: https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/c.... The 970 Pro goes into prosumer territory. The DCT range are their enterprise drives: https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/d...
> Also, are NVMe drives susceptible to faster degradation due to higher throughput
Only if you use the time saved to write more data than you would have with a slower drive. e.g. for 1TB both the 970 evo (nvme) and 870 evo (sata) are covered by warranty for 600 TBW.
The 883 DCT on the other hand offers 0.8 DWPD for 5 years or drive writes per day. So 5 * 365 * 0.8 = 1460TBW, or about 2.45x the consumer drive
Well, NVMe SSDs do get quite hot due to much higher data transfer speeds, and higher temperatures lead to faster flash memory degradation, although I have no idea how important it is in practice (probably on the order of an SSD dying in 10 years instead of 20)
Consumer models will often have about 300-600 TBW of life. Data Center hardware designed for continuous use will have 1000-3000 and up.
Watch out for the FASTEST drives like Evo and WD Black, faster drives (PCIe 4.0, 7GB/sec read) can have much lower endurance.
Nvme drives degrade at the same rate as measured in data written. It's a protocol difference, not a difference in the flash quality or construction.
The whole mining waste pales in comparison with what financialization of real estate and other markets has done to our economy.
(writes when very full / etc will cause write amplification, but that still shows up on the endurance counter. if you want to do a bunch of writes with 10x amplification cause your drive is full then that's on you, it still counts 10x towards the endurance... but the endurance counter is what they specify in the warranty.)
if the drive fails when it's past its advertised endurance... they can tell you to pound sand and that's fine.
First crypto took marginal GPU and energy capacity. Now it is taking SSDs.
It has so far produced nothing except higher values measured in fiat. And the higher the values go the more resources needed for the computer networks.
Of course crypto is not an AI so it can only get fed more resources if it converts believers to feed it more. More GPUs, more SSDs, more coal, to run calculations.
So this should be self limiting at some point. Or maybe I’m wrong and some practical use will come of it but it’s been 12 years without any so far.
Aliens: "Um, so... yeah, we were more interested in trading novel technologies and refueling our ships. But seeing as you all look like you're starving to death and have destroyed your system's resources, how about we just donate a few universal constructors and a bunch of feed stock for them. We've got enough fuel to make it to Proxima Centauri, so we're good for now. Oh-- we're hard coding the universal constructors to "food" only though because your life choices have been... well never mind that, our philosophy is not to judge."
For those who haven't read it yet, it's available for free on the author's website: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
An intergalactic network of wormholes enables rapid travel and communication between worlds, but the collective energy output of the universe's stars is devoted entirely to bitcoin mining, ultimately accelerating the heat death of the universe.
That's the way it keeps getting described to me.
However, where does the hard currency come from? Who is providing the USD for ChiaCoin, and why?
This applies to any other of the cryptocurrencies that pop every day. Mining alone is about as useless as owning a printing press for your own currency $FOO. Unless someone is willing to give you hard currency for $FOO, it's just worthless strips of paper.
Who's trading hard USD for every new fad coin?
unfortunate souls who are speculating on it since they don't know better.
Also a huge % is probably held by a small amount of early adopters who whale that coin up so it seems more valuable and has more perceived trading traffic
Yes, but its seems that every day, it's some other coin. At some point, the money has to run out.
> Also a huge % is probably held by a small amount of early adopters who whale that coin up so it seems more valuable and has more perceived trading traffic
This sounds far more likely.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-07/peter-thi...
China's digital yuan and accumulation of bitcoin hashing power could lead to their dominance in the online dark/gray markets
Why wouldn't they want to dethrone USD as the reserve currency?
You can destabilize the finance system by creating free money, in fact, according to exogenous money theories, it was always possible to create money out of thin air. But until cca 1980s, the creation of new money was confined to financial institutions (not just government) and heavily regulated.
The regulation was gradually lost (that's why we are having these asset bubbles and financial crises), and Bitcoin democratized the money creation even more.
But regardless whether you believe or not that Bitcoin can destabilize financial system, ultimately, if things go south, China can actually react and pull the plug on the financial industry, limit its power in the economy at large, because it owns big chunk of it (or can make sure it owns it). In the West, however, this is a political issue, and governments can only watch the financial system fail and cause another big recession (or at least, huge misallocation of resources, for example in real estate).
So why would China care? Geopolitically, they have the upper hand. We should care, though!
The Chinese government is not usually in the business of recommending specific investments. (However, they might discourage people from investing into known scams.)
The source of this claim seem to be remarks on cryptocurrency that the People's Bank of China's vice president, Li Bo, made at the Boao Forum for Asia: http://www.cs.com.cn/yh/04/202104/t20210419_6158938.html
Specifically, he said that stablecoins would have to subject themselves to the same strict regulations as banks if they want to become widely used payment channels, and that cryptocurrencies aren't per se currencies, but a different kind of investment, and that, like other countries, they're currently investigating how to regulate them to manage the associated risks.
How that turned into an "endorsement" I don't know for sure, but I suspect hype factories trying to sell bitcoin using whatever story works.
(Try telling a Bitcoin maximalist that software has bugs...)
Many clicker games are perpetually-changing resource-balancing and short-vs-long-term-tradeoff games under the hood. Do you spend your [_] on something linear and replace it soon, or exponential but you'll be waiting longer for the next thing? Do you spend [#] to support more passive styles, or do you go full [%] and spend 30m micro-optimizing by hand to save hours later?
That same kind of thing exists in the core of lots of games. E.g. look at StarCraft - Zergling rush, or get more resource gatherers? Early and mid game is super heavily focused on this, and the players and community spend incredible amounts of effort micro-optimize their setup to get even one more unit in a time window. Through this lens, the combat is primarily evidence of your superior resource management, and whether you investigated your opponent's plans well enough.
---
They're of course not all homogeneous, but if I had to pick one thing they overwhelmingly share in common, it's this resource-balancing aspect. And they go a heck of a lot further in it than most other kinds of games do.
Censorship resistance. Digital money that does not require constant "authorizations" from incompetent, flaky, slow, or even sometimes corrupt payment processors or other financial entities. Money that works even where traditional systems fail. No denied transactions. No limits. No "account" to open. Works for the underbanked. Send it truly anytime anywhere. No other system does this.
In other words, money created by people for the people.
Just playing devils advocate, but isn’t it’s usage reliant on traditional systems like electricity, ISPs, hardware makers, software makers, mining operations, etc?
Say you were in California during rolling blackouts, or Florida post hurricane that knocks the power out for weeks, or an authoritative country that has historically turned the internet off on its citizens during protests/uprisings. How would it all work?
Banking systems has more choke points. If money is on your bank account and it gets blocked, that's it, nothing can be done about it.
With Bitcoin, even if internet in the entire country is blocked, you still have options: you can transmit data by phone. There are many ways to smuggle 250 bytes out of a country.
You can also just memorize the mnemonic phrase (so-called brainwallet) and move yourself out. They won't find your bitcoins even if they strip-search you. (But if they know you have them, wrench attack might work, no defense against that if your privacy is compromised.)
All the other things are not necessary for using cryptocurrency, they just need to happen somewhere. So the system can route around the damage. Mining is not possible in your country? That's OK, it will work as long as there's at least one country where mining is possible.
So Bitcoin resilience is not about working when power is out, obviously. It is about giving people options to route around the damage. If your bank blocks you, you can't go to another bank to get money on your account, since that money resides within a particular bank. But Bitcoin is global - you can access your funds from any computer in any country, as long as you have a private key.
Those banking systems are the primary method of turning fiat into bitcoin & vice versa, so those banking choke points are defacto choke points for bitcoin as well.
Kind of like saying "what good is Bitcoin during a hurricane Katrina scenario" but by that point its survival, not money you're worried about.
There are also devices for offline transactions.
Relying on HAM radios and satellite links are both legacy systems and we can’t pretend any significant percentage of the global populace could conduct Bitcoin transactions without centralized 3rd party services subject to the same regulations as the banks, much less use HAM radios, especially the poor and unbanked who always seem to be the goto demographic the proponents of cryptocurrency point to as the people benefiting greatly from cryptocurrency.
It’s on par with saying when supply chains fail we have farming, hunting and gathering. Very few people are capable of getting fresh water much less living off the fat of the land.
I like the technology and do see it as still in the early stages of adoption, but I liked the freedom of the early internet, unfortunately that didn’t stop SV and VC money from putting a strangle hold on it, making it the shit-hole sandboxes it is today, exploiting people and farming their attention and data for advertising dollars.
> sent via HAM radio
You probably want to transmit your private key in a secure manner. HAM radio is not a good way to do this: http://www.arrl.org/news/fcc-dismisses-encryption-petition
It is not censorship resistant, the entire system could be censored. Heck, FinCEN is already moving forward with regulations that require regulatory reporting on crypto transactions touching US institutions in a similar way to CTR reports. Bitcoin exists only because it is not a threat to governmental monetary control, and could be squashed the moment that changes.
The government can deliver serious blows to BTC but I’m not sure it can be totally destroyed.
Banning bitcoins as I described would mean the vast majority of all banks in the world would not be able to act as on/off ramps to crypto so it could never hit mainstream as a medium of exchange. It would also be worthless as a store of value because you wouldn't be able to get that value anywhere useful. It might live on as some part of the existing shadow banking networks, but it would never deliver on the promise of currency available to the masses & disconnected from arbitrary nation-state monetary policy.
I'd like to be clear in my viewpoint though: I am not anti-crypto. I think there are many improvements it can bring to the existing global financial infrastructure. I just don't have any faith that it can deliver on promises of freedom from government regulations & control. If it exists, it will always exist because of government forbearance in killing it, not despite government antipathy.
I think the real joker is the black market. Modern drug organisations are Apple sized businesses that also have their own enforcement of violence and justice systems, and so on, making them effective non-geographic states.
I live in Denmark, we’re a rather small country, we frankly have less authority behind the Danish Krone than some drug organisations would have behind whatever crypto currency they fancy.
In all seriousness, the entire concept of money has always been created by people.
IMO, cryptocurrency seems like a religion. I’m seeing a lot of belief of what said religion will do for you.
That implies a sincerity in their beliefs.
While it's difficult to figure out what people's true motivations are, the promotion of new cryptocurrencies, the "get in early" rhetoric, leads me to believe most cryptocurrencies are little more than pyramid schemes. The ability to mint/mine/farm currency without paying in directly doesn't really negate that since it is intended to become more difficult as time progresses. The actual value comes from speculative investments from a growing number of people.
Besides, it would be naive to take pog trading advice from boosters who are holding a hundred million Alf pogs.
You're the one who sounds like they are subscribing to a religion and haven't actually even attempted to understand what financial freedoms are suddenly afforded to you when you use cryptocurrency.
Financial freedom is an interesting topic, and one that I don’t have much expertise in.
What is cryptocurrency freeing you from? You listed several opportunities that cryptocurrency could provide you, but I don’t exactly see the correlation with financial freedom.
Giving people loans with "no questions asked" has lead to significant amount of problems in the past.
Many here are fairly libertarian, at least regarding drugs. Do you agree with every classification of every drug in US law and that all punishment for them is perfectly appropriate?
In the past you’d be denied banking for the color of your skin or treated differently based on genitalia.
Illegal is only defined by imperfect governments. So yes, it allows for illegal things, that’s a great thing.
It also means you won’t have an account closed for thoughtcrime, or cheering the wrong political party. It means an authoritarian government can’t keep you locked there. And it means you can avoid myriad kafka-esque dystopic mishaps of “the system”, nightmarish AI flagging slip ups that close your account or prevent you from sending money to a relative in need in another county because it’s Sunday or you forgot to renew you drivers license.
Not to mention you can now use code to manipulate your money, give early users real equity in your company and design fully digital co-ops, avoid some of the burden of blatant classist laws like accredited investors, and design incentive mechanisms for your startup that are guaranteed in code.
No, I don't support all laws in pretty much any regime. But I do believe that the ability to enforce laws is important. The only thing that consistently works more poorly than having rules is not having any rules at all.
You are of course welcome to move to a lawless state if this is really what you want, but I suspect you would not find it to be the utopia you dream of.
Thanks, but no thanks.
It has one of the most beautiful endings in my opinion
Not true. All kinds of blockchain development is happening in hundreds of fields.
The most important development so far is deflationary capped currencies independent of any single government. Currencies that almost anyone in the world can use, which helps the poor in the countries like Venezuela, Argentina, Sudan, Lebanon, Iran.
Is it a lack of awareness due to disinterest, or objective reasoning, we’ll never know!
the market has been saying “hey this is useful in some circumstances” for over a decade
That isn’t strictly true. Before the advent of Bitcoin, there was no global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms. That simple academic experiment was quickly infiltrated by profiteers, however. Most people never cared to cultivate an understanding of Bitcoin beyond the barest of surface level understandings, and these same people are now able to finger point at blatantly self-serving get-rich-quick ICO projects — like Ethereum and Chia — which have clearly achieved nothing in spite of endlessly promising investors “innovation”.
The only thing innovative that has ever come out of the Bitcoin space is Bitcoin itself: a speculative store of value. Every national currency is similarly speculative, and people who “missed” Bitcoin are loathe to admit the same thing that happened to gold’s market capitalization prior to its ubiquitous use as money, is now happening to Bitcoin.
That is not good in itself.
> That simple academic experiment
Original description by its author intended it as a replacement for a payment system and currencies, not as an academic experiment or as a store of value useless for normal transactions
But the deflationary global economic system Bitcoin facilitates disincentivizes mass consumerism — mass consumerism which is destroying the world’s natural ecosystems. This is only possible via a global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms. Bitcoin’s creator invented this. It is an innovation, in every sense.
Deflationary economics discourages capital investment, because it rewards saving — i.e. “hoarding” — not spending or investing. Assuming a Bitcoin-based economic system, as the pace of technological advancement continues to quicken, and more products and services hit the market, absolute BTC-denominated prices will have to decrease. More products and services on the market, with a fixed supply of money, equals lower absolute prices.
In addition, global adoption of a free-market money like Bitcoin would eliminate the ability of governments to fund weapons of war and public works projects by printing their own money. That would no longer be possible.
Bitcoin throttles humanity, and with it humanity’s ecological destructiveness could be kept at bay. No other aspect of cryptocurrency is of societal value in any way.
A paperclip maximizer is incentives gone wrong. People wants profits so they can do something with them. But the AI wants paperclips because it is programmed to want paperclips, and it does so to the detriments of any other goals. It would devour the child of the AI designer to turn her into an input for paperclip production.
I don't get how people keep bringing this up.
So it's all pure speculation is what you're saying?
So what are some of the reasons people want crypto?
1. As a store of value. Fiat currencies lose purchasing power over time by design. Especially now that interest rates are funny. If people/businesses (Tesla) want to preserve the buying power of their income/capital, they can not just keep their USD or EUR on RMB in their bank account. Traditionally gold fulfilled this function, but gold has limitations being bulky and all. Furthermore the COMEX where the gold price is decided is completely dysfunctional due to institutionalized deeply rooted corruption. Example: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/jpmorgan-to-pay-%24920-mln-f... (note that this manipulation is ongoing and the fine was a fraction of what JP Morgan made on these spoofing trades).
People are turning to something that cannot centrally be corrupted as easily by a few governments and bankers. People and society as we know it NEED a store of value. So they're turning to one of the few options left: crypto.
2. As a safe haven from a corrupted US/international financial system. See point 1. Metals price manipulations are just a small fraction of the corruption that goes on. There's a reason why Elon Musk Tweeted something along the lines of "Bitcoin, in retrospect it will be inevitable." Tesla stock got naked shorted into oblivion by hedge funds while the SEC did nothing. Coincidence? US companies get deliberately shorted into bankruptcy by hedge funds (case in point: GameStop where this strategy failed). And then there's the share rehypothecation scam with perpetual failures to deliver on institutional trading positions and so on. Example: https://web.archive.org/web/20060421085925if_/http://www.rgm...
Does it still seem like a silly nerdy gamble now that Tesla converts some of it's cash into BTC? Not to me anyway.
3. As a free bank account with upgraded features like almost instant tranfers and total privacy (in case of ZEC and MNR). Ever tried to transfer money to a foreign bank account, thereby losing a significant percentage to currency conversion fees and other fees? Or over the weekend with a national holiday on Friday? You'd be lucky if the money gets into the other account within 4 days. It's infuriating IMO. And now it's also unnecessary, because: crypto.
4. Democratization of the cloud computing market. Example: decentralized yet commercial file transfers: https://skynet-send.hns.siasky.net/ There are other applications like coins that allow you to render Blender projects in exchange for a tiny fee.
So... Can anybody explain to me how all of the above is "nothing" and how the alternatives are somehow clearly more energy efficient and less damaging to the environment (lol: gold mining)? The down voting is not really doing it.
Inflation of fiat currency = loss of purchasing power of fiat currency. So these two sentences contradict each other.
And I get the point that the idea is that this inflation should be constant and there's nothing wrong with it in theory. Sure. Fine.
But that doesn't change the fact that keeping x USD on a bank account for x years decreases the purchasing power of that amount of money. And that that decrease in purchasing power is not desirable. So people try to maintain that purchasing power by converting those USD into something else. We used to have saving accounts, but yeah... those ceased to function due to negative interest rates.
And that's all without going into the scenario where the central banks are failing at their mission to maintain price stability. Which arguably is happening right now and is arguably the reason why people are dumping fiat currency in exchange for anything else that can better preserve buying power.
Am I wrong here so far?
Am I arguing that crypto is inherently and permanently a better currency than fiat? No. Not at all. Am I arguing that fiat currencies are currently not a great store of value: absolutely. And in that situation to preserve your buying power, you buy things you think will retain purchasing power better. I personally (and obviously many others) believe crypto could serve as protection as well as other assets that "can't be printed by governments and central banks". Is it speculation? yes, of course. But so is keeping fiat cash as fiat cash.
Useful concepts and events: speculation, economic bubble, tulip mania.
Crypto only needs resources as much as it needs security and throughput. More efficient cryptos will win as they are cheaper.
I can't get excited about people too poor to have access to banking putting their money into something as severely volatile as crypto currency.
There is room for new financial companies supporting mobile banking and banking in the developing world, but I don't see why crypto needs to be involved.
But others can and that’s the important point here.
There are people who benefit from having strong stores of values with deflationary pressure, and it ain't the poorest among us.
Listen to yourself here.
The debasement argument is irrelevant when the purchasing power can vary by 10% on a daily basis.
There might be countries where there are advantages to crypto (say Turkey who was in the news) where it’s a better short term alternative, but crypto in my book is as speculative as ever, and I have seen nothing that changes my mind.
I’ve heard (don’t know how true it is) there also there are also some big players who have big hoards of a coin and can dump or pump a value at their wim.
With Chia, anyone can farm with minimal electricity cost (after plotting).
Having a low barrier to entry probably increases negative externalities overall. Not sure what your point is.
With BTC at least in theory it could be mostly powered by fully renewable resources, here it is resource heavy.
I suspect that overall it is not better than BTC, and will just cause btc-mania to inflict more misery in a new field.
It’s much more efficient to just have one large data enter with a reputation and trust. They have to store all of the data to keep their reputation.
You can really use some spare capacity for StorJ (I have a Jail with 2TB of disk space on my FreeNAS) but not at all for Filecoin.
StorJ: https://docs.storj.io/node/before-you-begin/prerequisites#ha...
Filecoin: https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/hardware-requirements/#general...
By the way, I am selling fully penciled sheets of paper for $USD one million each. They are unique because I am only human and can't fill the page perfectly evenl every time. They can be eaily minted as nft's for $USD two million. dm for details.
If manufacturers are guaranteeing a certain number of TBW on SSDs but can't actually sustain that at pathological write sizes, they need to start qualifying those guarantees with e.g. an average write size statistic. Then they can claim Chia breaks that assumption and reject warranty claims in those cases.
This isn't unique to Chia. For example, a database workload will cause higher stress per byte written on an SSD than a raw video recording workload.
It's also possible they're talking about time-based warranties with daily usage numbers. Many SSDs will be "guaranteed for 5 years" at some DWPD (drive writes per day). In that case they're probably just saying Chia plotting greatly exceeds the DWPD stat and thus your number of years warranty no longer applies. That ignores the above problem and is just about how the drive endurance is specified.
(Also, just to clarify: apparently SSDs are used in Chia as a staging ground to build data to put on HDDs, which is then read only; I don't think there is any endurance cost to disks for actually "farming" Chia, only for "plotting" the contents of those disks initially; I think Chia is silly but just want to get the tech right)
A zoned SSD has an explicit mechanism for the drive retiring zones from service and making them read-only or completely inaccessible. But it's not currently practical to use a zoned storage device as the primary or sole storage in a system; at a minimum you need a regular block device or namespace to boot an OS from.
I don't have hard data however on like the "curve" of flash cell failures as an SSD ages and therefor exactly how much longer you might get based on the minimum to median cell failure.
I think most OEMs opt not to let you choose this sort of thing and rather bury it into the drive firmware.
>“If users use our SSDs for mining/farming and other abnormal operations, the data writing volume is much higher than the standard for daily use, and the SSD will slow down or get damaged due to excessive data writing volume. Due to the tests carried out, the damages are qualitative according to the test results, and that is why according to the quality assurance standards of our SSDs, we have the right to refuse to provide warranty services. The right of final interpretation belongs to the company."
They're specifically calling out "standard for daily use"...
One alternative explanation is that maybe farmers were just wearing them out quickly and playing naive to claim the warranty?
>One alternative explanation is that maybe farmers were just wearing them out quickly and playing naive to claim the warranty?
That's exactly what they were doing. If you use a low cost "consumer" SSD you can wear it out very quickly then claim it was "defective."
It doesn't require all that many writes. Problems come from a conscious decision to use a small number of SSDs as scratch space for a very large array.
The expectation that an SSD or even SD-card is infinitely rewriteable (practically speaking) is implicit in the marketing.
The idea that a drive can't be rewritten too many times should be explicit (like SMR HDDs)
That said, people burning up SSDs by writing stuff to them seems, kind of par for the course. I wonder if these same SSD vendors exclude video surveillance from their warranties? After all storing HD video 24/7/365 is a lot of writing and typically way more than the "normal" use.
That said, when NetApp was trying to sell SATA based filers into this market (which, not surprisingly is VERY cost sensitive) two things became apparent. First, up front system cost had to be minimized, and the vendors of these systems saw disk failure as a revenue opportunity to "roll a truck" to the customer and replace a failed drive.
Its the 'plotting' that chews up SSDs.
Assuming you only had 512GB of RAM, you'd only be able to do 1 plot at a time (since you need 400GB per plot). Plotting to RAM would need to be 4x faster, but it isn't since you'll be CPU bound. So it would be both slower and more expensive.
Adding plots costs 100GB a time, so an 8GB drive can get you about 80. If you want to double that, you must buy another drive. Double it again, two, four, eight drives etc, and they're like $200 each.
The number of participating plots you are competing with though, is going up exponentially. That will double by itself in a couple of weeks.
So people in at the ground floor, who premined, will do great, the whale-sized farming operations with a significant fraction of the lottery tickets will do great, for everybody else every hour dilutes their chance of "winning" anything.
That's where the SSD problem comes from, during creation the 240GB is thrashed, it is reused for every plot made. So an 8TB storage for finished plots implies 80 finished 100GB plots, which implies 80 x 240GB of thrashing on the SSD to produce them.
Why? Why China? Why now?
Even stuff like this post could be PR. "Hey, SSD makers, would doing this void my warranty? It would, can you clearly state that in writing somewhere? Thanks!" Then you call your friend at guru3d with an interesting article tip and a link to their updated warranty, and suddenly everyone's wondering why they can't mine chia coin. Who are you to tell me I can't mine chia coin! I must mine it!
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4418567-bitcoin-china-launc...
Also, the writer seemed to miss the whole point of decentralized currency.
It's never about da tech or mah decentralisacion, just some maaaad gainz that may and may not happen.
The ability to trade coins (but not necessarily their listing on exchanges) will begin in a matter of days.
https://news.bitcoin.com/bittorrent-creator-bram-cohens-cryp...
Regarding China... crypto speculation is popular there? Big mining pools want to own something that could potentially become big? Unclear.
Cryptocurrency really ruins the market for regular consumer.
The entire Chia network as it stands only amounts to a few hours of storage sales compared to the volume put out over the year.
Just like if there is food shortage, it's probably the fault of humans for consuming too much food, not the fault of the producers for making too little.
Right?
That analogy doesn't work. We don't usually build literal useless pyramids out of food on an industrial scale.
What the thing is used for is irrelevant in the end. Most food goes to "waste" as well, but you don't see people making much uproar over that.
That's some weird axioms you have in your reasoning. It's not irrelevant. Crypto waste literally makes technological progress more expensive -- it probably already affects drug development, and decades later someone will probably publish a study on how the crypto craze delayed crucial cancer drug development programs by years.
And blaming supply is much harder, considering supply is relatively inelastic, chip fabs take years and billions of dollars of planning and construction, and they can't wholeheartedly rely on the fickle crypto demand, on the decisions of crypto stakeholders to go or not to go "proof of stake" and the like.
And that's when crypto demand shouldn't even exist in an ideal world to begin with. The whole crypto ideology of "deflationary money free from institutions and government regulations" is just wrong, not something we should want, and would end up regulated anyway. (We should want better regulated better institutions) Not to mention that this ideology is mostly mentioned to justify the unbridled speculation and ponzi-like nature of the current crypto -- nobody really cares about it, it's a "get rich quick, fuck everything and everyone" scheme for most of the crypto users.
>Most food goes to "waste" as well,
As a side effect of purposeful consumption. It's below 50% by most estimates, and considered a problem. We all need to eat to survive, need to eat well to feel good. While the computer hardware demand and waste from "get rich quick" technologies is entirely inessential, and arguably harmful.
This was not just predictable but repeatedly and boringly predicted, and yet here we are. Good luck getting high-performance drives next year because Bram Cohen went and reinvented bingo.
The immense technical sophistication of this project, coupled with the failure to anticipate even the most basic first-order effects, make me wonder what's going on in the minds of the founders.
I think you may be making a false assumption that sophisticated and interesting technology reflects some sort of moral intention.
I find it at least a tad disingenuous to ponder this "What could this soon-to-be-very-wealthy technologist possibly have been thinking?" line of thought. It's cliche at this point.
Glad to see your comment nonetheless.
I'm sure you're probably right in that regard.
* Bitcoin wastes an enormous amount of electricity, to the point mining ops have been buying up derelict power plants and powering them up again, and on top of that Iran and North Korea use Bitcoin to finance their dictatorships
* Shitcoins have led to GPUs being unaffordably expensive for years now
* Not to mention loads of people getting scammed with pump & dump schemes, shitcoins, the plague that is NFT or hackers using Bitcoin to transfer cryptolocker ransom money
* And now, this new shitcoin makes people raid cheap SSDs.
Just how much are we willing to endure? At some point this shit has to stop.
You may not find this property valuable, but for someone who's banned from multiple banks, bitcoin is incredible.
For legit people with stuff like shot credit scores, there's always credit unions or debit-only accounts.
Regarding the calculation and estimation: "Actual results may take 3 to 4 times longer than this estimate."
So 10 months to 3 years to win one single block which will give you 2 XCH. Considering the total network space rising at the rate we're seeing I think we should review this calculation again in a week.
Has the industry given up on that?
In my understanding an SSD is a storage device that allows to write and read data.
Does 'mining Chia Coin' involve anything else/different than writing and reading data - what the SSD is made for?
> The one thing in common will be that you need high endurance, due to the fact that it take almost ~1.8TB of writes using the -e flag or 1.6TB without that option to create a single K=32 plot.
> Endurance is how much data can be written to the SSD before it wears out. In Chia this is important because a plotting SSD will generally be at 100% duty cycle and writing all day.
> A mixed use or high endurance data center or enterprise SSD is the best choice for plotting. Used SSDs with plenty of endurance can be found for a good value on eBay, Craigslist, or similar.
> Consumer NVMe SSDs are generally not recommended due to the lower endurance, and they often employ caching algorithms to faster media (SLC, or single level cell) for great bursty performance. They do not perform well under heavy workload sustained IO. There are very high performance consumer NVMe SSDs that will offer great plotting performance, but the lower rated endurance in TBW will result in a faster wearout.
https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/wiki/SSD-End...
World Community Grid has just put up a GPU application for their COVID-19 BOINC project (at this point, let's call it the equivalent of a 1.0 release), and some users have reported an average of 20 MB/second of continuous writes during the project-wide stress test that's going on. It makes me exceedingly glad that I put my project directory on spinning rust. Others have been using ramdisks to spare their SSDs.
I wonder if RAM wouldn’t be a good option for plotting. Sure it would demand a beefy machine, but it’d be well under a large mining rig.
And I'm sure its already happened numerous times already and you can't even trade Chia yet.
Oh, wait, are you only aware of those 32GB Optane cards? They make much bigger ones and you could do the plotting process directly on them.
Of course there is a reason for this. I’m going to use this impact driver a few times a month. A construction company might use it several hours per day.
The purpose of the warranty is to guard against a defective product, not abuse. Everything has a service life and if my drill craps out on me a year in and I’ve barely used it that’s probably no fault of my own.
I don’t trust companies to not abuse most tools and certainly warranties ebb-and-flow in their consumer friendliness, but this is a pretty absurd take on this specific case.
The coin will start allowing transactions on Monday, should be interesting to see it play out price-wise!
I really hope that BTC and all similar will finally find some real use or collapse (beyond gambling and scams), current situation is ridiculous.
The long term goal is getting Chia so decentralized that buying HDDs to plot chia will be unprofitable
hopefully it will not be caused by Chia being successful and causing increase in HDD prices
Despite the buzz around cryptocurrency prices, there have been very little new working decentralized consensus algos since 2009. Most alternatives (the shitcoins you're talking about) compromised on decentralization and/or security. Chia has the potential to be a strictly better Bitcoin on almost all points.
(I'm neither an investor, nor a miner, nor do I own any of the coins, I've simply been enthusiastically waiting for its release since it was first announced)
If the coin becomes important or profitable, would this still be true? It seems like some of these coins replace direct energy use (coal/nuclear) with indirect energy use (create chips in factories from mined materials, all using coal/nuclear).
It is becoming increasingly maddening to me that people still think this is a good idea.
See Andrew Poelstra ‘15: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/on-stake-and-conse...
I’m a huge fan of both Kevin and Bram so this was a big geek fest for me. The tech is very compelling.