Chia Coin Miners Are Reselling Used SSDs as New
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
As we dove into the chia coin rabbit hole to figure out just what was going on, it came to our attention that people are using firmware tools to reset SMART counters on drives … rolling back the odometer, so to speak.
Just terrible behavior all around.
And now this.
> Value-based pricing
> This led Sivaram to discuss pricing; “Disk capacities are scaling beautifully. We want to move towards value pricing.” Customers are getting substantial added value from the linear scaling in disk drive capacity to the current levels, according to Sivaram. They would get even more from future capacities.
> With larger capacity drives the manufacturing cost in $/TB terms comes down. He suggested that, perhaps, it is time to think about moving from manufacturing cost-based pricing centred on $/TB towards value-based pricing: “$/TB is no longer the right metric.”
> A customers gets more value from a larger capacity drive, he said. “They can monetise more data.” This extra value could be larger than the sheer savings of the lower $/TB cost that WD can pass on. In that case WD could pass on only a proportion of that cost-saving to the customer and so charge for some of the extra value
[1] https://blocksandfiles.com/2019/12/17/western-digital-disk-d...
Their store seemed to operate primarily on incompetence.
I finally got my invoice two weeks later, still with no working shipping information, and the drive turned up days later still.
On top of their scummy behaviour around SMR disks, and their NAS solution, I think I'll be steering as clear as possible.
The vendor added a markup to Amazon prices, and fulfilled with Amazon. I'm pretty sure I got a fake, ordering direct from the manufacturer.
I'll withhold names, so as not to embarrass anyone.
it was pretty obvious when you've bought 5 disks and one has completely different (crappy) packaging
But I have no real proof to send it back for a refund. Instead I'll just have to suffer with super slow writes.
Since I started telling buyers that I log serial numbers for every item I sell, though, a surprising number of them started closing their own cases.
The buyer filed a complaint that the printer wasn't new. I responded with "Of course it's not, look at the title & description." Ebay made us pay for them to ship it back and refund the money.
When we got it back there were 2,000 more pages printed on it.
I'll NEVER do any business through ebay. You are either braver then I or have a higher tolerance for bullshit then I do.
Fortunately, most people do the right thing and with the mitigation strategies we have in place we lose only around 0.5% of revenue to (suspected) fraud.
eBay's ~10% processing fee makes a much, much bigger dent in our bottom line.
When I worked retail, we used to get people buying cameras or lenses and using them for a weekend, then returning them under the 7-day "no quibble" refund policy.
It wasn't uncommon for a camera or lens to come back with 10,000 shots taken. Best we could do with them is clean them up and sell them on as refurbished. A few went back to the manufacturer and came back as "factory refurbished".
If it's not an emergency situation then I'm okay with them increasing MSRP. They're the ones who make it, they set the price.
I'm talking about the hoarder-resellers. I have zero sympathy for them.
But if its an emergency then giving the limited resource to people who already have too much of it is a waste.
How about we meet in the middle? Rather than go full free market or full government why not just let sellers declare the product an "emergency service" which allows the buyer to delay his payment. The invoice is sent to the government who then gets in contact with the seller. The seller presents his costs to provide the emergency service and then the government finally decides upon a fair price and gives the emergency seller a small commission for the trouble of providing an emergency service (this lowers the price the consumer has to pay in the end).
That way the price will still help as a discovery mechanism but have no gouging effect on the wallet of desperate people. Meanwhile people who do not need emergency service will not buy the product because they would be stuck with a large bill as the government would be less likely to negotiate in your favor.
And you need to revisit Economics 102 where they talk about inelastic demand and why some prices are usually controlled at least to an extent ( food, medication, electricity), and Economics 103 where they mention they real world and economy are slightly more complex and have slightly more variables than what Economics 101 started with.
Food definitely is not as in that case there will be no need to pour the milk into the river during the Great Depression. Basic medication such NSAID are cheap because there's no patent and can be mass produced and things like Novartis’ Zolgensma is apparently a different story. For electricity, don't get me started with Texas... I agree it probably a problem that is it is not controlled there.
The point is, yes there will be more variables in the real world, but the most basic rules still applies.
Economics isn't a science, so this class is essentially as valuable as any art or philosophy class at prediction reality or informing us of how we are supposed to act: Not at all, unless you put significant amounts of personal effort in.
It is not supposed to be a crystal ball that you can see thought the future. Actually, I am not sure if such thing actually exists, but probably a physicist can prove that.
Personal attacks not appreciated here.
> If you set a price ceiling, this will make the shortage worse
No. You may perceive the shortage as worse, but in reality, 100% of the supplies will be going to people who need them, as opposed to 30% sitting unused in hoarders' warehouses not helping anyone. Having 70% of the supplies in the field and 30% sitting in a warehouse, appearing for sale, but outside anyone's budget, is not an efficient use of supplies in an emergency.
If there is a mask shortage, I want every single mask strapped to a face, somewhere, somehow, and zero masks in a warehouse.
If you don't regulate it, it means the rich get essential items while the poor don't. Instead of the people who have the greatest legitimate need for the essential items getting access to them.
If the items are "outside anyone's budget", then the price gouger will not make money and they will lower the price until someone buys them. Thus, your goal of 100% usage of supplies is still eventually achieved.
> If you don't regulate it, it means the rich get essential items while the poor don't.
If the items are truly essential, and there are not enough to go around, what difference does it make if the rich get them and the poor don't? This seems like you just want to find an excuse to stick it to the rich.
> Instead of the people who have the greatest legitimate need for the essential items getting access to them.
How do you propose determining who has the "greatest legitimate need" more accurately than just seeing who is willing to pay the most?
> as opposed to 30% sitting unused in hoarders' warehouses
It's interesting that you started off talking about price gouging but have now switched to using the term "hoarding".
The thing is, "price gouging" discourages hoarding. If the price is not increased in response to a shortage, then everyone (rich and poor) is incentivized to buy as much as they can whenever an item is available for sale (even if it's well in excess of their actual need). This is basically the definition of "hoarding". Whereas, if the price were allowed to increase, people are discouraged from buying more than they need, and more supply is available for all.
This is almost exactly what happened with toilet paper last year. Toilet paper costs about $1 / roll. Most people can afford to buy extra toilet paper, and so very quickly the entire stock of toilet paper was bought up and there was none available for sale. If the price had increased to (say) $5 / roll, people would have been disincentivized from hoarding it. As it was, the people who had the "greatest legitimate need" - those that actually ran out of TP - were unable to purchase any.
Additionally, the fact that people like you demonize manufacturers and retailers who raise prices in emergencies as "price gouging" also provides a disincentive for manufacturers and retailers to invest in spare capacity for these very emergencies. If "price gouging" is illegal, there is no good way for manufacturers and retailers to recoup the cost of temporarily increasing production, or maintaining a buffer of inventory for temporary spikes in demand.
Since you talked about PPEs, you can check what happened in Wuhan during the first outbreak. The Chinese government demands no price increase for PPEs such as face masks... and what happened? The hospitals asked the public for donation of N95 facemasks because they cannot get those from the market. Every one in China are of course entitled for protecting themselves, but the truth is, at that time supply is simply not enough for the whole population and medical workers who needed those most cannot get them even the hospitals have enough dry powder to pay up. The market was awfully inefficient at that time.
Having every single mask strapped to a face and zero masks in a warehouse is far from enough. In a shortage, you need MORE facemasks. You need to make sure there will be enough are being supplied at the market. With a pricing cap, there will be no incentive for putting stock in the warehouse on sale and producing more, and it makes things worse.
Linus tech tips YouTube channel has done a few articles on vendors quietly switching components to lower performing parts recently, it’s worth googling around to see if others with the same make/model are reporting vastly different performance from official benchmarks
The only time it made sense to buy new equipment to try to plot really quickly, was right at the start before Netspace increased. Chia now has somewhere on the order of 300,000 - 400,000 full nodes operating on the network (already making it more decentralized than Bitcoin) and is approaching 36EiB of space. The "green" benefit of Chia is that you don't throw away the proofs that get generated like you do with Bitcoin mining and instead you can keep them for many years and potentially decades. This is where a lot of the power savings come from. Take a look at https://chiapower.org/ to understand the power usage compared to existing cryptocurrency networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
using my spare disks like this does not make sense when it apparently burns them out very quickly. i doubt i would recoup even the cost of a new drive
So if one simply plotted very slowly on an HDD with the spare space they had, it would not likely impact the expected lifespan, and they could earn a few pennies for their efforts. However the issue with all of these crypto efforts is that systems naturally trend towards centralization for reasons of efficiency. The best systems have some balance between the two. It's simply not worth it for most people to plot 100gb of free space on their laptop for Chia and earn a few cents per month. So it only makes sense for miners to do at scale.
It will be interesting to see how things centralize or decentralize going forward. When I think of the lottery I'm always amazed by the number of people that play it even with the extraordinarily low odds of winning that exist. I think there will be some equilibrium that's found for the global number of operating nodes that will be a function on the odds of finding a proof and Chia's price.
Companies have spare storage…but it sure as shit ain’t worth it to them. This is the hubris of most crypto projects: they have no real economic grasp of the problems they jump into. Amazon isn’t going to fuck around with Chia for what amounts to literal dust on their balance sheet. Businesses aren’t going to jeopardize their core competency for a couple of bucks. And the average Joe doesn’t actually have external storage space. Spotify, iCloud, Dropbox, etc. It’s all professional miners. Chia is not decentralized.
> When I think of the lottery I'm always amazed by the number of people that play it even with the extraordinarily low odds of winning that exist.
The payoff for the lottery is HUGE. So even though the EV is negative, people still do it. The payoff for Chia is comparatively small. People won’t (and don’t) care.
Which companies will adopt it and which ones won't is probably hard to determine from the outside. It should be a fairly objective evaluation though internally for a company in terms of what hardware the company currently has and what it will cost to farm Chia and what future expected value for Chia may be. Chia has somewhere between 300K - 400K full nodes operating on the network. That is objectively more decentralized than Bitcoin that has somewhere on the order of 40K - 80K full nodes the last time I checked. So I would say Chia is the most decentralized network I currently know of.
> The payoff for the lottery is HUGE. So even though the EV is negative, people still do it. The payoff for Chia is comparatively small. People won’t (and don’t) care.
That will be a function of the price of Chia. As Chia's price increases more and more people will want to get into that lottery. A lot more people will consider farming some plots of Chia if one XCH is worth $50K compared to $250.
And Amazon has millions of nodes. That doesn’t make them decentralized.
We have no idea who owns the nodes, or what the concentration of ownership is for the top X%
I'm not going to argue about how Chia Coin works, but I'm always skeptical of claims about excessive writes destroying SSDs.
From what I understand, this is mostly unfounded fear based on the fact that earlier MLC cells were specced for a minimum of 10,000 write cycles and people extrapolated 5-10 year life expectancies from that. In practice, though, testing showed that the typical cell could be rewritten around 1,000,000 times, and the controllers would just route around the weaker cells that died early.
Anecdotally, even though consumer SSDs have been mainstream for around a decade now, I have not heard, IRL or online, of a single person complain that their SSD has failed (manufacturing defects such as the Sandforce firmware bug aside). At the same time, I've personally witnessed dozens of HDD failures.
I don't fully understand why fear around consumer SSDs is still a thing, but I suspect it's exactly the same "Reddit expert" social dynamic that drives the advice around thermal paste application.
> 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...
I work with enterprise SSDs and that number is well above anything I've seen or heard, even from the manufacturers.
It seems I misremembered the quantitative data, but the overall qualitative point (SSD Endurance is much, much higher than most "prosumers" believe) is accurate.
[1] https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experi...
It’s like a farm burning some of their crops to generate a bit of hot air for wind power. Like, you can do it and it gives you that small amount of power but you’re literally destroying the resource and probably cause a lot of waste in the system as a whole.
Chia is like Bingo. Generating the Bingo cards can put a lot of wear on an SSD, but once you have the bingo cards to fill up whatever space you have, you can play for nearly free.
I haven't done the calculation myself, but I've read that it's no longer worthwhile to generate new cards. If so, that means most of the damage has already been done. It's a sunk cost.
But the people who are already in the game can keep playing indefinitely. If prices are too low to even do that, they could back up to tape and go offline for a while.
In the meantime, my operating cost is running the NAS (which was going to be powered up anyway), and some CPU power to handle the farming (not even noticeable on a Ryzen 3900X).
Chia is just "proof of prior work" and as such has the same arms race problem as bitcoin. People aren't just buying a few TB, farming it and being content. They're building farming rigs and piling on the storage constantly. It just consumes power AND storage.
I currently have 4TB of free space. I could plot them which would result in an estimated $7.57/month of income per month.
But.... that's not a constant $7.57 each month. Instead, it's a 1.5% chance of winning a single payout of 2 XCH each month. I could reasonably expect to go five years, never winning a single XCH.
Who knows what the value of XCH will be then. There has been a pretty solid downward trend in price since May, contrary to most coins, which started trending up again.
That changes the calculation significantly.
Are Bitcoin miners as ready to jump ship to the next thing, if it falls out of favor? I don't think so. Chia is not as popular (it is currently #230 on Coinmarketcap).
I also don't think that the power savings of Chia outweigh the space considerations.
I think that most people commenting here understand that this is the way that proof-of-* systems end up functioning at scale. Participants in these systems are incentivized to cut corners, externalize costs, and generally fuck things up for everyone else.
That won't happen unless your NAS is a bunch of consumer grade SSDs, which I hope it is not.
/s
Crypto is like Eternal September where everyone wields flame throwers.
In all seriousness it would be an interesting social experiment.
The whole thing started out as a utopian ideal for freeing people from centralized control of transactions and it's turning out to be yet another thing ruined by bad actors.
In that context, buying SSD's from (largely) thieves who (largely) will fleece you in several other ways will not turn out well for you.
sounds like it's specifically the chinese crypto community
It's kind of like how the electricity to create a bitcoin costs more than the market value of the mining reward, the only way to be profitable is to steal electricity. In chia's case, the best way to profit is to steal memory write-cycles.
All writes are fully streaming, there is no write amplification, and there are lots of random reads involved (which don't really cause much wear/stress).
Actually that's incorrect. Chia is always more efficient than PoW, b/c in PoW everyone is constantly racing to solve every block. (i.e. find the proof) Whoever finds the proof gets the block reward and everyone else just throws away all that work for nothing and then the next race starts for the next block reward.
Contrast that with Chia, where when you are plotting you are storing your proofs in a file for later challenges. You aren't discarding that work and you can hold onto it for a long time (years). It's not until you are "farming" the plot that you start answering challenges. The challenges just translate to simple reads from disk, which are quick constant time lookups. Now it may take you a long time (or never) to find a reward for a single proof, but at least you didn't have to throw all that work away and start over.
First, when the network space is growing exponentially, the value of preexisting work is decaying exponentially. I do grant you that completed work is nonzero in value, but during a growth phase its value might as well be zero. Whenever speculators believe the currency will actually have any long term value above its current exchange rate minus the resource costs, then it will be in a growth phase. The total resource consumption during this growth phase, including the supply chains to produce space, need to be studied. Measured in transactions per unit of CO2 emissions, I expect its efficiency to be better only during a phase of stable network space, i.e. when its value is not speculated to be higher than its current value.
Second, not all PoW is discarded. I want to be clear at the outset that this isn't a defense of PoW, but there's a system called AuxPoW which allows work to be applied to multiple chains, modestly improving its efficiency. This mining protocol is being used actively by scrypt hashed coins, e.g. dogecoin and litecoin. I'm certainly not saying PoW is superior to the proof system in Chia, but just that the distinction between them is not as strong as claimed. Nevertheless, both are incredibly destructive and yet interesting.
To be fair you'd also have to measure and compare Chia's growth phase to Bitcoin's (or other PoW chains) growth phase as well. This would mean taking into account the manufacturing of the equipment, distribution and deployment costs of ASIC miners, electrical power generation costs, etc. Also, Chia runs on general computing hardware whereas ASICs have to be specifically designed and manufactured and ASICs use a whole lot more electricity than servers with hard drives running Chia. I think a single Ant miner uses something like 32 kWh a day IIRC. Chia has done a lot of power consumption analysis already and you can dive deep on that information yourself over at https://chiapower.org/ if you're curious. There's a dramatic difference between Bitcoin's PoW network and Chia's PoST network.
Also, this technology is far from new. When usb thumb drives first became mass-produced a lot of thieves would buy small ones and change the flash memory to read whatever size, and sell them to unsuspecting customers. Man that was forever ago, like back when most were only a few MB in size.
In fact here[1] is an article from two years ago discussing it being done on SSDs as well, and lists several programs to try and find if you've been deceived.
[1] https://www.raymond.cc/blog/test-and-detect-fake-or-counterf...
Another cool thing is they don't require a custom tool for that, a standard ATA formst command is enough, and as a last bonus it'll also merge reallocated sector list into factory bad sector list.
They made damn good drives, I wish they were still an independent manufacturer.
They went out of business after they were blacklisted on Amazon... well sorta. They just came back as a different company a few times.
This confused me a bit; where is "domestically", actually?
The linked article fails to mention it but the original report is from the perspective of and looking at Vietnam.
Unfortunately I highly doubt the majority of these fraudsters will face any real repercussions. Maybe a few victims will be able to successfully issue a chargeback, after many months maybe PayPal and other payment processors will try to freeze some funds, but whatever happens the fraudsters will still come out ahead. They'll just start selling under a new name and continue for another 6 months.
Any idea how you get known good samples for new drives (without buying a bunch of new drives)?
Thought about getting one for swap, but don’t have a free slot.
> Chia farming is a write-intensive activity. Speed matters, so the most common strategy is to use an SSD for creating plots, because SSDs are much faster than HDDs, and then transfer them to an HDD once completed.
> Chia is a different animal, though. According to MyDrivers, mining Chia can trash a 512GB in 40 days, while a 1TB SSD lasts twice as long, and a 2TB SSD can give up the ghost in just 160 days, or barely over five months.
Also, does anyone want to buy my server with space for 1.5TB of ram? The 425W of idle power usage became too much and I am moving to Ryzen 5950k
For example, if you had 36EiB of space filled with plots then you would be equal to the entirety of the current Netspace of the Chia Network. (https://www.chiaexplorer.com/blockchain/blocks) So you would win the reward half the time and the rest of the network would win the reward the other half of the time. (i.e. 32 XCH every 10 minutes) Of course, this is an absurd example, as to obtain that amount of space it would probably cost you on the order of $20 billion just to procure the equipment, but at least it should give you an idea about how disk size works in regards to Chia.
The creation of these files requires so much writing that you are basically writing as fast as your CPU can, until the drive dies.
"Dishonesty? In my crypto? It's more likely than you think."
> "We look at, OK, what can we do to use this in a beneficial way … I don't want to say we're in the business of methane destruction, but we're in the business of beneficial use of that potential methane-generating source. You combust it properly. You don't flare it, and you control those emissions," Jenkins said.
But thankfully: 1. the network has mostly stopped expanding 2. I think there's a pretty good ramdisk plotter now for big miners