Bitcoin rival Chia 'destroyed' hard disc supply chains, says its boss

So, question from a complete noob:

Can the thrashing of space be done on a RAMdisk, preventing SSD wear? Thereby only the 100GB would be moved onto long term storage, e.g. primary SSDs.

Is that worthwhile? Does RAM speed matter in this case?

What are some examples of "enterprise SSD"? I actually would like to buy one because I suppose they are way more durable than consumer SSDs, and less likely to die on me. But the closest to "enterprise" that I can find are the samsung pro.

I always thought that if bitcoin crashed, the mining centers could be refactored someway into other use for computing power alone.

Now with this new currency, you could maybe even run cloud storage. Maybe we are accidentally building the futur alternatives to Amazon cloud services.

Aren't they going to be using that space eventually for another distributed file system?

To be fair, there's the plotting phase, and the farming phase.

When farming, disk speed is not critical, just size. Thus the idea of recycling millions of HDDs in a low power scenario. A few seeks here or there on your old, unused terabytes, but you need to have enough space to offer, otherwise your chances are zero. Today's farming is dominated by pools, some using non-official, closed source binaries of unknown origin. Official pooling is, supposedly, coming soon.

Plotting, which is preparing the files that are farmed, is, as of today, extremely IO intensive, but still cheaper, energy-wise, than mining. A single 100GB plot (you need ~20TB to have any chances of farming success) can take hours to plot. So people are resorting to extremely fast SSDs, or NVMe in RAID0 in PCIe 8x/16x cards to slash that time. And, in the process, wearing them out. Can't find the link now, but some were saying normal SSDs are ruined after 6 weeks of 24/7. Plotting keeps improving, although I'm not sure if it's got a lower performance bound by design.

If people invest time/money mining coins, they're going to promote those coins in order to justify their mining operation.

From this initial organic buzz, speculative markets take over and the whole thing becomes a positive feedback loop.

Crypto is fundamentally a huge waste of advanced manufactured goods, electricity, and time, and enables tax avoidance and money laundering. The correct response from Governments is to simply ban the formal exchange of all of them in the same way that the USA bans online gambling and pyramid schemes.

I don't know because I don't understand Proof of Stake well enough to know its weak points and vulnerabilities. I hope it works out, but what do we really know about its security and power dynamics?

Proof of stake, as implemented in most of its current examples, faces a philosophical problem in that the initial distribution of the token is now a "trust me" premise - a founding organization announces a policy - versus a baked-in labor theory of property concept (I put "work" into this therefore I own it). Coins that transition from one mode to the other, as Etherium is doing, must reckon with friction from miners. Distribution, both in terms of early emission rates and then years later, represents a major quandary.

So, alternative proofs of work still have an interesting basis for speculative valuation and acceptance. In the last crypto bear market, of the top 100 at peak, proof of work coins were the ones that had the smallest drawdowns.

What part of 'we released new shitcoin and are billionaires dont you understand?

A better characterization would be that Bitcoin requires miners to perform vast amounts of hashing in the hopes of finding a hash that is arbitrarily difficult to find.

Then I could get behind it

I haven't read any papers about this, so this is just a first speculative guess that I will update if/when I learn more:

I suspect nodes ask one another to perform computations on random subsets of very large amounts of data. Since the subsets requested would be random, nodes can't predict the requests and thus have to store all the data. The data would then be augmented with the consensus results of these computations, so that future computations would be able to reference them.

It's built on large files that act as bingo cards. You have a limited time to respond when you get a bingo. The more cards you have, the more likely you are to win.

They are designed so that precomputing the bingo card is expensive but once you have them, checking to see if you have a bingo is cheap. It's thought that nobody will be able to compute a winning bingo cards on the fly ("grinding"), so it will be cheaper to store and reuse them once you have them.

(I don't know the details of the algorithms though.)

The way it was explained to me is that when you "farm" your "plots" the first time, you are just generating and writing a lot of numbers that are written in the 100GB plots.

Then the transaction validation is done by whoever finds value in their storage (instead of doing a lot of computations online, they are pre-generated).

I assume there's a bunch of tree-like structures in the middle to make the search faster.

This is well explained in chia’s documentation. A server issues “challenges” and the harvesters respond if they have the answer to that challenge. Think of it like bingo but with a gazillion squares.

The trick is that calculating the response to a challenge takes a very long time and the server only waits for a very short time to get any valid responses. So it follows that the harvesters must compute the responses in advance and store them on disk, which serves as proof that you had that disk space allocated to chia harvesting.

Its not obvious that its any different than the defunct BurstCoin, which called its method Proof-of-Capacity

The drives are reportedly destroyed from the process relatively rapidly. So no, I’d probably not plan to be able to resell drives on eBay later.

I don't know much about Chia, but I've read some stories about how Chia plotting just destroys SSDs.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/chia-crypto-farming-can-de...

But I'm no expert so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

[I see from other comments that this is bad for SSDs but not so much for HDDs]

This! As the numbers become larger, the distinction becomes more important.

Yeah but that doesn't sound as cool!

Chia network is currently 12.04 EiB

>Gene Hoffman, the president of Chia Network, the company behind the currency, admits that “we’ve kind of destroyed the short-term supply chain”, but he denies it will become an environmental drain.