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Comment by christiansakai | Hacker News Reader

I am actually really curious why does Chia take off like this? Any other Proof of Space coin like Spacemesh and Burst coin didn't have this kind of explosive growth.

Why? Why China? Why now?

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Bram Cohen + record high cryptocurrency prices in general

Bram Cohen has that brand name power? TIL.

Maybe, maybe not. I'd assume that bittorrent is what has the brand name power and caused the much higher level of interest than was seen for similar currency schemes.

Seems like Andreessen Horowitz, among others, are investors. I bet they know how to market things.

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!

He turned the BitTorrent company into such a success /s

+ it's "Green" (but not really) + an understanding of advanced stochastic memetics, a.k.a. multidimensional hype

Here is a good read on that

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4418567-bitcoin-china-launc...

There is nothing in that article about Chia's explosive growth. Am I missing something?

Also, the writer seemed to miss the whole point of decentralized currency.

Chia's design philosophy is the overall best in my opinion. Actually trying to make a useful cryptocurrency rather than just pure speculative vehicle of other shitcoins.

But why did China decided that Chia is the one to do, and why now. Why the sudden focus on this crypto?

China decided? What?

Presumably China thought it had potential for speculative growth?

They haven't decided Chia is the one; big miners have been rushing into every new coin that launches, including Filecoin and now Chia. It's a "deal flow" approach where you mine 50 shitcoins and hope one pops 1000x.

How is Chia useful? I just looked at their website and don't see what differentiates from other cryptocurrency. I see you mine with hard drive space rather than compute (like FileCoin) but I don't get why this would be useful.

a couple of hard drive lookups every few minutes uses orders of magnitude less power than asics & gpu hashing

...but consumes orders of magnitude more drive space.

I don't know if anybody has done the math on how much energy/CO2 it costs to construct a hard drive vs. used in PoW mining with GPUs or ASICs but I'd love to see it.

That means it doesn't have the same cost as bitcoin. That says nothing about why Chia coin is useful. Can I do anything with it, or is it one of those things where I buy it now in the hopes other people will buy it from me for more later?

Take a look at https://chialisp.com

It’s a functional language for smart contracts.

People have nothing better to do with their money and want to get returns from unproductive pseudo-ponzi schemes because they see other people doing it.

Doesn't answer my question.

90% of it is just hype be from intensive marketing riding on the tail of the de-fi fad. Though compared to other "storage" coins it's backed by people with good track record and they have consistently worked with institutional investors to get an IPO/ETF so any loss of value down the road would be socialized and you would not be holding the bags alone.

It's never about da tech or mah decentralisacion, just some maaaad gainz that may and may not happen.

Good track record of what?

A large number of Chia's executive team came from Overstock.com, a company that's been instrumental in pumping up the value of cryptocurrencies both in 2013 and 2017. Sure they could pull this off again, right?

The answer to “why now” is that they turned on their mainnet in March, so the farming for real coins began then. It got some press, at least in crypto land, and it’s very accessible to start small scale plotting by yourself. Everyone has spare disk space.

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.

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