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Comment by Glench | Hacker News Reader

Haven't seen Chia mentioned in this thread and it was only briefly mentioned in the article — Proof of Space/Time seems to have the same security guarantees as Bitcoin without any of the electricity usage. It uses extra hard drive space but a recent report confirmed that a lot of that is using underutilized existing space, not space from new drives: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US47836321

Chia's on-chain language is also a functional LISP called Chialisp that is more secure and auditable than Solidity: https://chialisp.com/ They're having a $500k prize hackathon for building cool things in Chialisp at the end of July: https://cointelegraph.com/press-releases/sirius-labs-launche...

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> using underutilized existing space, not space from new drives

Chia is basically turning wasting electricity into wasting silicium (or whatever tapes/harddrives are made from). Because this "space" needs to be created as well. I don't really see how that is less wasteful in the long run.

Well I mean the market for hard drives is already over 1 zettabyte a year so it seems a little ridiculous to make that comparison without taking into context the whole picture. Although yes, you're right, some resource needs to be consumed for any blockchain or database to work — in this case it's storage space (not necessarily hard drives).

To my mind, Chia puts existing underutilized space to work so it's not really wasting anything. The data seems to support that conclusion in the report I linked.

Some resource needs to be consumed, but we have payment systems that are currently multiple orders of magnitude more efficient than Bitcoin or Chia, so that is kind of a baseline. (Think Visa or Mastercard)

Secondly, Chia is a small coin, it did not make a dent in the global market yet. I can believe that so far nobody really bothered to invest in storage.

However, imagine Chia would be as large as say Bitcoin, then Chinese Chia miners would be filling warehouses with tape drives to the effect of millions per year. The costs they are now making burning electricity would be replaced by the same cost at installing computer memory of some kind. Compared to the current financial system that is really wasteful. But even as compared to most existing proof-of-work crypto, it is arguably more damaging to the environment as there are more toxic chemicals involved in tape than in burning electricity.

Overall, you traded wasting time for wasting space. I do not see how that is helpful.

> Some resource needs to be consumed, but we have payment systems that are currently multiple orders of magnitude more efficient than Bitcoin or Chia, so that is kind of a baseline. (Think Visa or Mastercard)

Well yeah, but blockchains obviously offer different benefits/drawbacks than those platforms which is why they exist.

> Secondly, Chia is a small coin, it did not make a dent in the global market yet. I can believe that so far nobody really bothered to invest in storage.

There are currently 30 EiB of storage securing the network which is about 3% of the total storage market sold every year and a much higher percentage of the retail HDD market. Chia also has significantly more full nodes than Bitcoin. And it's only been out for a few months.

> it is arguably more damaging to the environment as there are more toxic chemicals involved in tape than in burning electricity.

Tape drives don't work with Chia. But you're speculating about an environmental impact that is already happening today with hard drives. Maybe you should send a letter to Google or your local politician about the environmental impact of their hard drives if you're actually concerned about that :)

> we have payment systems that are currently multiple orders of magnitude more efficient than Bitcoin or Chia, so that is kind of a baseline. (Think Visa or Mastercard)

Credit cards offer none of the desirable properties found in many cyptocurrencies such as decentralization, privacy, security, full custody of funds... It makes little sense to compare the two, especially in terms of "efficiency".

It does. I am trading off decentralization, privacy, security, ... with (for Bitcoin) more than how much energy I would use in a year and CO2 I would use in a life, per transaction.

They do offer a comparable product, and you need to compare their upsides and downsides.

Not really. It is a tradeoff but you can't really compare their efficiency because they don't provide the same features. Credit cards provide none of the properties provided by cryptocurrencies.

You're looking at the cost of transactions. You're not looking at the cost of private anonymous trustless decentralized uncensorable unsanctionable irreversible transactions.

I think bitcoin is a waste of resources because it failed as a cryptocurrency. I wouldn't mind even larger amounts of resources being poured into better coins like XMR though. I don't care how much energy it requires, those properties are just too valuable.

> Chia is basically turning wasting electricity into wasting silicium (or whatever tapes/harddrives are made from).

Does this apply to filecoin?

> Chia is basically turning wasting electricity into wasting silicium (or whatever tapes/harddrives are made from).

That depends on the price of chia. The economics as intended by the chia team are that buying hdd just to farm chia isn’t profitable - only using spare capacity is. We’re already pretty close to that point, with the breakeven on new hdd purchases being about 1 year assuming no further network growth, which of course is a bad assumption.

> seems to have the same security guarantees as Bitcoin

It doesn't though. While the PoW in a block commits to all its transactions, POST cannot and does not. Instead the winning farmer separately commits to the transactions with a signature. Which means that a collusion of all recent winning farmers can rewrite tx history at zero cost. Which is not possible in PoW.

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