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Comment by bitcurious | Hacker News Reader

Chia is famously decentralized when using “number of nodes” as the measure and yet is missing from this list.

Chia currently has 123398 full nodes https://dashboard.chia.net/d/em15uQ47k/peer-info?orgId=1

Massive premine on Chia, didn’t know that. I have a hard time believing that many nodes are reachable, there are probably about that many users in general, if that. Looking at the latest dozen blocks right now, they’re completely empty.

Chia Network explains the reason for the prefarm and how it’s going to be used in their whitepaper https://www.chia.net/assets/Chia-Business-Whitepaper-2022-02...

Also worth checking about Chia Network projects with WorldBank and InternationalFinanceCorporation for carbon credits market https://www.chia.net/2022/08/17/bringing-transparency-and-ef... about some real use that is launching very soon.

Their software runs a full node and a wallet, so most users are a node by default (if I’m not mistaken) and rewards are double for the first couple years. You can run their software and just about anything, low powered CPU’s, pi’s, NAS, etc. So I don’t doubt their numbers are too far from the truth, esp considering how much China supports them. Nodes have been slowly dropping over time as the crypto boom cycle has died down.

As far as real transactions, they’ve got a way to go. Just releasing NFT support a few months ago.

In the beginning everyone had to run a full node even if they weren’t farming (in Chia instead of mining it’s 2 stages, first plotting and then farming) but earlier this year Chia released a new light wallet which doesn’t run a full node. Now it should be mostly actual farmers that run full nodes. Chia currently has 22 EiB of netspace which would be more than 1.5 million of 14 TB hard drives.

They made a pooling protocol too to avoid the issue bitcoin had with centralization of the big pools.

So is this 120k nodes are validating/producing/verifying the blocks?

Chia sounds like the biggest lost opportunity ever. Why not use the drives for cloud storage?

Destroying a lot of HDDs and SSDs for nothing

Probably the same reason PoW is wasted on "useless calculations" instead of calculating protein folding or whatever.

Because these useless calculations have cryptographic properties (one way functions) that make the process secure. Useful calculations instead of just calculating a simple hash function would either be risky in term of future security (because of unknown properties), or outright insecure.

Completely off topic and not really relevant to your comment buuutttt Banana coin’s ‘POW’ is based off protein folding and contributing to medical research. It’s a joke and you aren’t enabling consensus but you are getting banana emissions for ‘noble causes’, which I found was fun and regularly run it when I go to sleep.

Chia probably represents about 0.01% of the data in the world (I'm extrapolating from old info -- https://rivery.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/a-day-in-data2....).

The process of plotting the data is strenuous on SSDs. You might kill an SSD if you are plotting a petabyte or so. But if you are that serious, you can plot in RAM (or just eat the cost, which is insignificant compared to the cost of a petabyte).

The process of farming/mining doesn't stress HDDs in the slightest.

To the OP, why isn't Chia in this list?

The point is to save energy during operation in exchange for spending more energy on manufacturing the equipment. Since equipment manufacturing is bounded by more than just raw energy the end result is a net decrease in energy consumption.

But is it really "more energy on manufacturing the equipment"? Bitcoin requires hardware, too. (Hardware that can never be used for other purposes.)

it doesn't destroy disks anymore than datacenter use destroys disks.

And in reality much much less than a Datacenter would. Once plot files are written they use a cache to look up their hashes. The utility of those files on the other hand are a whole different conversation.

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