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Comment by dporter | Hacker News Reader

I find it hard to get on board with Chia being a better alternative to Bitcoin because it uses less energy when the tradeoff it makes is the manufacturing and waste of millions of terabytes of hard drives. Does not seem very environmentally friendly to me.

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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.

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.

> the mining centers could be refactored someway into other use for computing power alone

The chips that are mining bitcoin are not general purpose computers.

But the hard disks are general purpose storage devices, right? Any chance they will become custom ASIC storage that can't be repurposed too?

You don't want any components that have been used in coin mining. Generally, GPUs, desktop CPUs, RAM, consumer disks (both solid stats and spinning rust) and even power supplies are not designed for years of 24x7 100% load.

This is a part of why NVidia cracked down on gpu mining recently - when ASIC mining became more profitable than GPUs, the secondhand market got flooded with cheap high quality cards (thus ruining the primary sale market for new GPUs) and people flooded NVidia support with support queries for slow or unreliable GPUs.

Chia doesn't require running disks at 24x7 100% load. You fill up your storage and then wait until you win the lottery. Most of the time, you won't win and your disk can remain idle.

Well, mostly idle. You can't win if you're not online, can you?

Drives used for Chia farming both SSD and HDD would have very little use over time. All the discussion around Chia destroying SSD's is when they are used in the initial plotting process which does a huge amount of reads and writes in the process of generating a plot. Once you move those plots to a large capacity spinning disk for farming, there is very little reads on the disk thereafter.

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

No, Bram Cohen has said that will never happen.

You are probably confusing Chia with Sia

Nah I just thought they were going to use the space for user files instead of just farming bit space to report its existence to the network

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