What is going on with Chia? Over the last week I've been getting news stories about Chia miners buying up hard drives and driving up prices. But I haven't really seen prices going up. And I looked into Chia and it seems like it is just running a testnet right now. And my coworker has not been getting the same news stories about hard drive prices.
> But I haven't really seen prices going up. [...] And my coworker has not been getting the same news stories about hard drive prices.
because 1EB is a minuscule amount of the hard drive capacity, compared to the total amount produced per year. According to seagate's blogpost[1], they ship at least 500 EB per year. If you add in capacity from WD/toshiba, it's probably closer to 1000EB if not more. That would make chia's consumption 0.1% of produced hard drive capacity.
>Because 1EB is a minuscule amount of the hard drive capacity
Very much agree here. I purchased about 144TB of raw storage a few weeks ago for future video and data projects, and it's possible to purchase 1PB of raw capacity (with no redundancy, nor anything to connect to) for as cheap as around $13000 USD at retail pricing.
1EB could be acquired for somewhere between $12-$15M. Not chump change, but considering the number of players pre-mining, absolutely nothing in the scheme of things.
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What will be interesting is how this increase in mainnet capacity grows over time, and relative to manufactured capacity. 1.1EB of footprint today is nothing ... but we might start to care if it were to grow at a rate of 1.1EB/day or faster, as manufacturers like Seagate, WD, Toshiba, etc. can't instantly respond to such a sustained demand spike. Channel supply could be exhausted relatively quickly.
It's just a spike, the price will come back down quickly as total stored space increases and makes further "farming" even less competitive. Just consider how quickly the projected rewards are dropping, e.g. at https://chiacalculator.com/ or the XCH/TiB chart at https://www.chiaexplorer.com/charts/xchTib (same site as OP).
To be fair, enterprise SSDs (particularly U.2, U.3 and E.1L) have had their own availability issues for a fair bit now, particularly the latest NVMe PCIe Gen 4 devices. However, the problem there isn't cryptocurrency, but hyperscalers having had exclusive periods to buy directly from the manufacturers. Which they have. At immense scale. Some drives announced nearly a year ago are only now hitting the retail and VAR channels.
High-speed DDR4 ECC memory (DDR-3200 in particular) can also be tough to come by. A fair number of VARs actually limit quantity (usually to 20 modules per SKU), since it's so tough to get. Again, not due to crypto mining, but because of hyperscalers.
Chia is on mainnet but transactions will not go live until May 3rd. Currently farmers are earning XCH without a means of sending it to one another or other wallets, and there is no price or market for XCH at this time.
As you can see in the graph, the mainnet network space for the Chia blockchain is growing exponentially fast. Lots of people starting to mine ("farm") Chia using low-electricity proofs of space. The full node count over the trailing 5 days is north of 120,000 which is more than Bitcoin I believe.
Part of the reason for this is because Chia is really easy to farm — anyone with extra space on their hard drives can do it. There are people farming a petabyte with a Raspberry Pi. This was by design to keep the network decentralized and hard to attack — close to the original intention of "one cpu one vote" from bitcoin.
Right now there's no price for Chia since it's not on exchanges and transactions won't start until May 3. But in the short term it's advantageous to buy enterprise-level SSDs because they're the fastest to "plot" with so it seems that in a few markets, especially in China where interest in farming Chia is surging, a few SSD sellers have seen a spike in demand.
For long-term effects on the storage industry it's hard to say what will happen — there's tons of existing storage out in the world already, the storage industry already sells 1+ zettabytes of storage a year, and unlike single-use bitcoin mining hardware hard drives are useful outside of Chia. The Chia company speculates on the impact on the storage industry on page 23 of their business whitepaper: https://www.chia.net/assets/Chia-Business-Whitepaper-2021-02...
Google, Facebook, and all the other datahoarders are going to be pissed that there is now a new and distributed player eating away their share from the global HDD and SSD market.
Or if Chia becomes popular then they're the most likely to hop onboard and use their overprovisioned space to farm Chia until they need it for something else.
AFAIK unlike storage coins (eg. sia or storj), it's not being used for anything, it's just "burned". Proof of work burns compute cycles. Proof of storage burns storage space.
I don't understand why one would need multiple drives then. Seems like you could earn the coin, sell it for USD, erase the drive, and earn another coin with the same disk.
Why doesn't that mean that coins can only be transferred through the sneakernet? If you get coins from someone else do you have to trust them to have the plot still around?
That wouldn't make for a very useful global ledger :)
Once a farmer wins a block it's theirs, the same way it works with bitcoin. The reward is tied to a public key, not the original storage. Just like in bitcoin once a miner wins a block they don't need to continuously prove that they have x amount of hashing power in the future.
There's two parts to Chia: plotting and farming. Plotting is a one-time cost of ~5-10 hours for a SSD, and after that you can start farming and you continuously earn Chia by proving your drive still contains the random data that got initialised during plotting. Erasing the drive would mean you have to start over and you lose ~10hrs of income.
chia claims that its proof of work alternative is "eco-friendly"[1]. This is also reflected in their advertising material, eg. instead of having a whitepaper they have a "greenpaper", and rather than mining they have "farming. While it's true that proof space is less energy intensive to "farm", wouldn't economics dictate that the resource consumption is equal to proof of work's resource consumption? All you're doing is shifting opex (electricity consumption) to capex (hardware costs). We can see this in bitcoin mining hardware. They've gotten exponentially more efficient over the years, but electricity consumption hasn't gone down. Having lower opex only incentivizes miners to pour more money into hardware, which results in resources poured into manufacturing rather than providing electricity.
The key difference is that there is a lot of overprovisioned storage out there currently sitting idle which could be used to farm Chia with only a marginal increase in energy usage. The theory is that as this overprovisioned storage comes online it will make stockpiling storage explicitly for farming unprofitable.
>The key difference is that there is a lot of overprovisioned storage out there currently sitting idle
From where? Individuals or enterprises? With the direction we're headed (SSDs and cloud storage), it's hard to imagine many people with a few terabytes of hard drive space. On the other hand you can get around cheap hard drives at around $15/TB if you buy external, then shuck them so you can put it in a backpane or something. At that price, it's hard to beat the price of a new drive, especially if you factor in the time it takes for the individual to set it up. Enterprises might have better economies of scale, but I'm skeptical that executives would sign off on running arbitrary code on production servers just to earn some cryptocoins.
Both enterprises and consumer drives have over-provisioned storage, yes. Enterprises obviously have a lot more and it will take a while for them to trust that Chia is a good way of using their unused storage until a more valuable use of their storage space comes along (like an Amazon customer requesting S3 space or something).
It also seems likely that flash storage will become cheaper than HDDs in the next ten years, which will start increasing SSD space on drives due to increased competition. Analysis here: https://wikibon.com/qlc-flash-hamrs-hdd/
The idea that enterprises have tons of "over-provisioned" storage is hilariously cute. Do the Chia guys really think engineers at FAANGs haven't found ways of using that storage for something useful? :-)
Storage workloads aren't uniform. Some need to have localized, reliable, consistently performing persistent storage with room to absorb sudden demand spikes (like customer data on cloud clusters). Others can be stored anywhere and moved with ease, with few requirements on latency, redundancy on a global scale, and read-mostly workloads, which means immediate loss of a single local copy is harmless (like YouTube videos). FAANGs have long since figured this out and how to optimize their storage utilization.
There is zero chance one of them is going to up and decide that Chia is a better use of their "spare" (not really) storage capacity if they have anything resembling competent engineering teams. I know Google does.
Not all enterprises are FAANGs and the immense majority operates at a tiny fraction of that scale.
While I don’t think too many businesses will buy this idea of using spare storage for “cryptofarming”, unused resources are pretty common.
The price of a cryptocurrency will tend to roughly follow the cost of generating it. In storage, it’s safe to assume the cost will only go down for the same amount of space. And disk space has been growing faster than transistor density for some time now.
Unused resources are common, but this kind of thing is only valuable at the scale at which you already have engineering teams doing useful stuff with the storage. Smaller enterprises are not going to be deploying "cryptofarming", there is no way it would be approved in the vast majority of orgs.
So in the end this is going to be just like every other cryptocurrency: people largely deploying exclusive mining (sorry, "farming") capacity and consuming resources doing so.
It's becoming more and more popular for hobbyists to have at least double-digits of TB of storage sitting around for various purposes. I'd gladly make some profit out of the part of my array that's not filled up yet.
The usual "Linux ISOs" storage, self-hosted cloud services, data hoarding of all kinds (https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/), probably original content creation for those who don't want to pay for/use cloud storage (photo/video/audio editing and creation). I'm sure that there must be more, but this is just the ones I know off the top of my head.
To speculate, it seems like the lowest-cost supplier will win and that’s likely to be used drives from data centers. Chia farming uses storage, but not necessarily reliable storage so maybe any drives that start looking flaky could be rented out to Chia farmers, to get a bit more use out of them?
At least some data centers destroy their old drives for privacy reasons, so they would need to figure out a way around that if they’re going to reuse them offsite.
>To speculate, it seems like the lowest-cost supplier will win and that’s likely to be used drives from data centers. Chia farming uses storage, but not necessarily reliable storage so maybe any drives that start looking flaky could be rented out to Chia farmers, to get a bit more use out of them?
AFAIK people already buy up used datacenter drives to use elsewhere, so you're just shifting demand around.
True. You can hold the drive for a couple decades and then decrypt it with your shiny new MacBook based on the newly released Q1 quantum processors. ;-)
I think another difference that I've heard the Chia folks talk about is the fact that even with a shift to manufacturing (which is real and a potential ecological problem, but one that already exists to some extent in the 1+ zettabyte storage industry), it's a one-time deal — hard drives can keep farming forever after they're manufactured with minimal electricity consumption. And they can be used for other purposes besides just farming Chia. With bitcoin the cost is terrible because ASIC hardware only works for mining bitcoin and by definition has to waste huge amounts of electricity forever to keep mining.
To be precise, the process of "plotting" (using disk space for Chia) causes a lot of writes to disks, but those writes are a one-time process. Once a plot is written it can be moved anywhere and farmed forever. The actual proof of space algorithm for farming only takes an initial 5 seeks and then 64 seeks for the full proof so farming is not a big stress on disks long-term.
I stumbled upon an interview with the actual Chia <s>miner</s> farmer, he claims best SSDs will stay healthy for about a year, and having SSD is a must. Plotting should be done on an SSD (preferably as an NVMe), since this process involves creating 300Gb temp file on the same device that will be used to form a plot.
Actual interview [0] is in Russian, but I guess you could get a decent Google Translate-processed English translation .
[0] https://habr.com/ru/company/ruvds/blog/554046/
This was really precious, spasibo! Especially for warnings on [not] using regular disks.
But from what I learned there, Chia is not a consumer’s tech, cause mainnet already requires huge TBW per dollar ratio, which ubiquitous Samsung EVO/Pro and alikes cannot do. It goes miners-are-special-hardware route again, sadly.
I wonder if it's feasible to use a ramdrive for the temp file. Or maybe the miners already run the number and decided it's cheaper to burn a stack of SSD every once in a while instead of investing in nodes with huge ram.
That would only be with enterprise class SSDs. I’ve been plotting on both consumer and enterprise and the former’s lifespan won’t be more than 3-4 months.
Thinking about it, for someone who is looking to be seriously into chia, that might make sense. The cost of the RAM is only about $1,500. Might be a smart idea.
Has anyone tried this? Would be interesting to see the benefits.
Somewhere over that couple days I read that you can farm on an HD, but plotting is faster on an SSD, so I'm making a huge presumption that plotting on a ramdisk would be even faster, without the wear on an SSD.
I'm still not clear on Chia. Sometimes I think I understand it, and other times I'm not so sure...
Plotting is the initial process of building the files that you farm with. Plotting is very CPU/Memory/Disk IO intensive and the total writes to a disk to build a ~100gb plot is over 1tb with ~260gb of temporary space used at any one time during the process. This means that the process of building plots (plotting) is best done with an ssd. The fact that the process writes over 1tb to the disk to generate a ~100gb plot means that you will be really consuming the life of a consumer grade SSD with a low TBW rating. It is possible to use RAMDisk and yes it is potentially faster for a single plot. But you would need ~260gb of ram to plot 1 plot at a time. Nvme SSD's are only marginally slower than ramdisk but they are much cheaper per GB and you can connect multiples of them meaning you can build many plots at once. ie. 1-2 plots per CPU core concurrently provided you have sufficient ram ~3400mb per plot and sufficient fast temporary storage SSD. Once plotted the plot file can be moved to a spinning disk HDD and farmed from there as very little reads are ever made in the farming process. Can you use Ramdisk? yes. Is it better? No. It's far cheaper and faster to use SSDs and use your ram for building multiple concurrent plots.
Actually plotting in parallel across multiple SSDs is likely to have the highest TiB/day of plots created. And then you’d be better off using the ram to enable more parallelism.
It’s a matrix of processor cores, threads per core, temp drive bandwidth, memory, and temp drive speed. Oh and cost per TiB of plots per day.
Also plotting happens in several stages, and each has a different set of requirements. So timing the running of plots in parallel and staggering starts also comes into it.
>it's a one-time deal — hard drives can keep farming forever after they're manufactured with minimal electricity consumption
Let's say your mining operation brings in $1000/day in revenue. If it's mining bitcoin you might be paying $500/day in electricity bills, leaving you with $500 as profit to reinvest in the business (ie. buy more hardware). If it's mining chia you might be paying $50/day in electricity. That's $450 in less resources wasted, sounds good right? Well no, because any savvy businesman is going to reinvest that $450 into buying more mining hardware, so you can make even more money. In the end any resource you save from lower electricity consumption just gets poured into manufacturing more hardware.
>And they can be used for other purposes besides just farming Chia
This is a mixed bag, because while it's true that the mining hardware can be repurposed, it also means that during boom times, regular consumers have to pay more for their hardware. See for instance, the GPU shortage.
What do you mean? Chia miners will be forced to continually expand capacity, otherwise they will be left behind by difficulty adjustment as other miners expand capacity instead.
Chia does only one thing: replace $1000 spent on electricity with $1000 spent on SSD manufacturing. It’s unclear which one is worse for the environment, but I think it’s likely that SSD manufacturing is worse, given the (real) mining and toxic chemicals involved.
> With bitcoin the cost is terrible because ASIC hardware only works for mining bitcoin and by definition has to waste huge amounts of electricity forever to keep mining.
Multipurpose mining hardware would compromise security of the network. An alternative use for the hardware would effectively be a subsidy on mining Bitcoin.
This would imply that the costs of securing Bitcoin
are not being paid by Bitcoin hodlers, and are not fully internalised by Bitcoin.
This is similar to the reason that Proof of Work must not have economic uses external to the network.
If such a subsidy were more valuable than rewards intrinsic to the network, any variance in that subsidy would cause variance in the security of the network, with the likely case being reduced security, the network now being dependent on that external use case.
E.g. if the alternative use is valuable, it might incentivise me to acquire enough miners such that I control majority hashrate of the network subsidised by the alternative more profitable use of the hardware. Any attack on the network is then subsidised by the external use case for the hardware.
To me, this is why Proof of Stake is the only long-term sensible decentralized cryptocurrency system. ISTM PoW and PoST ultimately equate to the same thing, for the reason you've suggested. If it's profitable to invest more in mining, people will invest more in mining; it doesn't matter whether that investment takes the form of ASICs, GPUs, HDDs, or simply the opportunity cost of holding the currency itself. The only difference is, that last one doesn't burn a bunch of real world resources in the process.
it's been 80% hell on gpu markets but asics did eventually offload pressure on most propf-of-work markets. and the blowback was overall pretty good & nice, albeit also saturated the secondary markets with cards used heavily, often over locked to shit, ready to fail, whereas typically such cards on ebay would have been great buys. but it pushes prices down nicely none the less, when asics took out the gpu market.
there's not really any way to tailor this new shitcoin to specialry hardware: if these fuck gains the all too much religious following, it will shred the storage market. there's no hacks, no special optimizations. there will never ever be relief. it will be reality versus their imaginary but profit making fantasy, pratical use versus endless speculative/zero-sum profiteering forever and ever & fuck them fuck that fuck this so so so much. what a horrible curse.
almost none of these cryptocoin nft whatever activities have any premise or use other than trying to get rich. what a disgraceful use. i'd label it all as esoteric but esoterics often have very powerful underlying use & powers: this is almost all a huge fucking sham where the value is nearly entirely an imaginary number, one too many fucks imagine.
Chia pre-mined 6 years worth of block rewards. Proof-of-space may be the closest thing we have to a viable proof-of-work replacement but this instantiation of it feels like a get rich quick scheme for its founders.
Edit: My calculation was based on the initial reward schedule of 64 units per block, but when you take into account the fact that it ramps down to 4 units per block shortly thereafter, it's actually a premine of 21 years: https://www.coindesk.com/5-takeaways-from-chia-networks-new-...
Satoshi (or one of his friends) owns 5% of all bitcoins that will ever exist.
I wouldn't call it a get rich quick scheme for its founder(s) because I doubt they could have known it would take off the way it did.
But, at this point, I don't know that intent matters. Imagine if Bitcoin really did become a dominant currency... one guy would own 5% of it, a deflationary currency! The "fiat billionaires" don't come anywhere close to that kind of concentration of wealth.
Doesn't he deserve it? If you were to launch a world-changing project at the cost of disappearing completely, wouldn't you want to reap some benefit from that project if it ever succeeds?
My hunch is that Bitcoin is actually a project to promulgate Austro-libertarian economics and "Satoshi" is actually a bunch of people hired by stratospherically wealthy libertarians (like the guy that founded Renaissance who is tight with the Mercers). Call me crazy, but after hearing the correlation between people becoming interested in Bitcoin and Austro-libertarianism simultaneously I can't help but think it's a deliberate project.
The thing with ideologies (and other kinds of socioeconomical hypotheses) is that they're hyperstitional in nature - you can't prove they're realizable without at the same time deliberately trying to realize them, using people as fodder. (See, communism.) And at least one of the ideologies promulgated in meme-space must have some basis in potential reality (otherwise people wouldn't be at all prone to believing in world-changing ideas). Might be this one, might be not.
Literally every issued asset in history has a "premine", but somehow last decade's crypto aficionados find this controversial. It's so strange to even care and the market obviously does not care because there is like half a millenium of it never caring.
It's nice to see the crypto market maturing and ignoring these people so segregated from every other financial market because they never traded anything else. Low float, "pre-mined" assets are in vogue and represent a more compatible funding model for continued development and personal riches than whatever was happening just a few years ago, let alone through the last decade in crypto.
You should ignore the "egalitarian ideology", or completely take advantage of it by launching a Chia-clone without a premine while you simply provide all the storage space first and get the exact same "insta-mine" result while advertising it to people like you that actually care about no premines. A dozen ways to get the same result, its all marketing.
> simply provide all the storage space first and get the exact same "insta-mine" result while advertising it to people like you that actually care about no premines. A dozen ways to get the same result, its all marketing.
You only get the same result if you completely monopolize mining for the first twenty-one years. If you control 50% of mining, it would take 119 years to achieve the equivalent. My issue is not that there is a premine. It's the scale of it.
Fair point, founder rewards are pretty common too.
Square Inc creates new shares for Jack Dorsey to sell like every week or so. Continual dilution that the market tolerated. Although fairly unique for the equities space, these are the case studies we are growing up with now.
Right, it just had Satoshi and friends as basically the only members on the network and mined millions of coins when difficulty was basically non existent.
In law - not. In spirit - yes. Same like Apple and Google aren't monopolists on mobile because the definition requires a single corp to be a monopoly. But essentially they are monopoly.
Definition sometimes are lagging behind ever changing reality, same with "premine".
Ore mine these days just means "we want to get rich off this first, and we don't really want to put any effort or resources into ensuring this. So we are going to allocate ourselves X% of total supply.
Satoshi had the decency to mine his coins alongside everyone else.
I'm not trying to be obtuse, but why is authority tied to amount of coin owned any more plutocratic than authority tied to amount of computing resources used? Both cost money, and both scale power with amount of money sunk into it.
What other options are possible for blockchain networks? All I've seen so far are plutocracy (PoW/PoS blockchains) and oligarchy (centralized blockchains).
PoW is not a plutocracy because miners cannot dictate the protocol rules. Not even a 51% miner could do that, a common misconception. They at most can refuse to process transactions.
Users have prevailed agaist miners and large business in Bitcon forkwors, which failed to force their agenda on the users. This is at least some empirical proof in support that Bitcoin is not a plutocracy.
Miners have large farms that can be bankrupted by users simply deciding to change the hashing algo. No such option in PoS.
In PoS, largest wallets dictate changes. Liquidity begets more liquidity, aka the rich get richer, and such effect has a centralizing effect on PoS. All PoS project to date have failed.
I don't have a great grasp yet of how PoS and other non-PoW consensus protocols work.
But if I ever grok the building blocks fully enough, I'd like to see if I can devise a system based on "proof of receipt" in which the act of receiving X coins grants you the ability to "settle" a set of blocks totaling a*X worth of transactions (for some constant a).
Like in other blockchains, the node selected to settle a block of transactions gets to keep some or all of the transaction fees for that block. But instead of continually getting selected by virtue of continuing to hold a large amount of coin, you could only continue to be selected by continuing to receive coin (presumably in return for goods and services).
The transaction fees and the constant $a$ would have to bee chosen such that you couldn't turn a profit by sending lots of money to yourself. But I think that would allow for a fair system with a good incentive structure.
>The transaction fees and the constant $a$ would have to bee chosen such that you couldn't turn a profit by sending lots of money to yourself. But I think that would allow for a fair system with a good incentive structure.
What if the goal isn't to profit from block rewards but to attack the network, though? What if you pass stuff around over and over between tons of addresses you own? (Any person can create an unlimited number of addresses, pretty much instantly.)
Even if by the end the total transaction fees result in a heavy loss being incurred, the attacker would only do it if they think they can gain more from the network attack than they'd lose in fees.
I think a secure blockchain system can never make any kind of assumption that 1 address = 1 person/entity or 1 transaction >= 2 people/entities. I think depending on addresses or transactions in any way is probably a non-starter.
One of the key anti-Sybil features of Proof of Work, Proof of Space, and Proof of Stake is that it solely relies on a single scarce, unfakeable, totally fungible resource. The network cares about only one fungible variable: the total amount of computational power, or hard drive space, or funds in the network. That way, it makes no difference if the attacker has 1 address or 1 million addresses.
I agree that any blockchain has to be resistant to Sybil attacks. And that may be an insurmountable obstacle for my idea but, so far, I haven't let that stop me from thinking about it.
There do seem to be some properties of PoW/PoS related to the level of iniquity in control of the blockchain and to their incentive structures, and I think it is worth casting a wide net in search of something better (even if it may not exist).
I agree. I don't know nearly enough about it all to be able to think of any, as well. I just know open, decentralized, trustless, permissionless, anonymous consensus in global peer-to-peer networks is a very difficult problem that people have been wracking their brains thinking about for decades. BitTorrent, Bitcoin, and Ethereum made some of the biggest breakthroughs, there.
It seems like everything might be a variation of one of two possible categories: economic game theory (Proof of Stake), or proof of committal of scarce, fungible physical resources. Everything else I can think of just seems like it'd be some form of centralization/oligarchy. But who knows?
(Proof of Stake is sometimes accused of being oligarchical, too, but I think it's still kind of the lesser of all evils, probably.)
Because PoW miners have very little authority tied to their computing resources.
Users have prevailed in Bitcoin forkwars over miners and many large exchanges and businesses.
Miners are really more similar to employees of the network, that order transaction in exchange for fees. They are not masters of the protocol, and cannot dictate its rules.
Proof of Work has a nuclear option (change of hashing algo) that would bankrupt the miners and render their farms useless. No such option exists in PoS, just political battles, as we've seen in practice.
In PoS users lost in political battles of EOS (collapsed and rewrote the network rules) and Steem (taken over by bad faith staker). Literally all PoS projects failed in some way until today, due to some centralization pressures it produces.
This is nonsensical. PoS users can change any parameters of the chain just as easily as PoW users can change the hashing algorithm. If all the PoS users switch to a version of the full node and or light client software that has the biggest holder’s balance reduced to zero, there is nothing anyone can do to stop them. It is the exact same thing as if PoW users switch to a full node software with a different hashing algo.
The upside is that the wealthy have an incentive to keep the currency functional, otherwise their wealth is lost.
The downside is that "functional" isn't exactly a high bar. For example reducing block rewards to encourage deflation would disproportionately help the wealthy so they may push it even if it isn't ideal for the average person.
The same argument has been made about monarchies; no rational king would ruin the kingdom for his son. A quick perusal of the history books makes a mockery of that theory.
Turns out humans aren’t perfectly rational, and handing a huge amount of control to a tiny number of rich people is a fantastic way to discover that while any given rich person might be smart and what not, there’s a non trivial chance that their heir is an idiot and will ruin whatever they’re given. This is entertaining for personal fortunes, but not so funny when they control a currency.
I hate this crypto thing too. more spiking people's belief to milk frivolous unfounded overconsumption. hard drive prices have doubled & that's if you can find stock. all for some new unproven technoreligion that promises riches. that is frankly equally as inscrutable & impersonal as all the other concensensus driven scarcizitation ponzi schemes. computing is far too good to be wasted on concensensus, on the limited. and such harping upon fomo, such impervious immovable centralized concensus at the heart of each of these, depraved & mad preying upon people, praying to get rich by helping stupid clocks to keep ticking; this poor sad era.
The idea of a decentralized ledger coupled with smart contracts is too powerful to be called a ponzi.
Ponzis can be built on top of it, just as the internet can be used to sell penis pills and get rich quick scams. But just as those don’t make the internet a sham, crappy coins and get rich quick schemes don’t make decentralized ledgers a scam.
A decentralised ledger with smart contract is just tech.
It's not that impressive and it's not a ponzi scheme.
Any currency which is not backed by real resources is a scam. Including fiat in the last decade - albeit fiat is a scam backed by state actors with armies, making it a bit more trustworthy
The Bolivar was introduced in 1879. To its credit, it lasted until Black Friday in 1983 as the most stable and internationally accepted currency in all of South America. It's been mostly downhill since then, but 104 years is a decent run. None of us will be alive in 2112 to see what becomes of Bitcoin, if it even still exists then.
One interesting thing about chia is that before you can “farm” you have to “plot”. Plotting (generating the files that fill up the hard drive to provide the proof of stake) takes fast SSDs and lots of CPU, if you want to build your farm in any reasonable timeframe.
The challenge is that it requires you to buy different sets of hardware to earn chia, and the high performance plotting hardware is only needed temporarily (while you’re filling up hard drives). It seems a cottage industry of plotting services is already developing so that those that want to farm don’t have to invest in the hardware to plot.
Farming requires very little CPU and slow disks are not a problem.
If you enjoy building PCs, it's an interesting challenge; plotting and farming have very different performance profiles, and there are multiple strategies for viable builds depending on your expertise (big JBOD vs. raspberry pi with USB drives, etc). Feels a lot like the early BTC/ETH mining days where we were building crates full of GPUs zip-tied together, before ASICs institutionalized the mining process.
> the high performance plotting hardware is only needed temporarily
I'm not sure if you're ever done plotting; if the network space keeps increasing, then you need to increase the number of plots you maintain to keep up -- else you'll gradually farm fewer over time.
I think you probably need more plotting hardware in the initial buildout phase though.
Some are already talking about "plotting as a service", selling disks full of plots once they have finished their own plotting. In the spirit of "selling jeans to gold miners", that might be a viable business model.
Is there a crash course on chia’s various requirements and models for a new participant? I moderately hate bitcoin for it’s effects on everything, but this one (yet) feels like an adequate thing to support, if their landing page is honest.
From looking at the Chia wiki, the farming process seems to be very slow. Slow enough that a tape- or optical-media robot library would easily keep up with it.
My reading of the wiki suggests that the time for your disk to read the data really does matter.
Chia blocks are every ~20 seconds. Within those 20 seconds, you need to read 7 + 64 different areas of the disk. Some read addresses depend on the last, so in reality you need to do 7 sequential reads, all within the block time to get any reward.
So basically, if your storage medium takes over ~1 second to read data, you're going to be throwing away some rewards, and if it takes over ~10 seconds per read, you will barely get any rewards at all.
Tape drives are out then, and so is optical media unless it's already in a drive.
Do the 7 initial reads access separate data from the remaining 64, or is the whole "plot" fair game for even those initial reads?
ETA: from looking at the docs, it seems that the 7 initial reads do access separate "tables". It should be possible to optimize by storing these on lower-latency storage, and even optimize further via parallel farming of many "plots", of which only a few at any given time will ever need to retrieve the 64 blocks denoting a successful proof. ISTM that tape media has real potential here.
The initial 7 reads simply save you from doing the last 64 incase there is no chance of winning.
Put those 7 on fast media and you'll very quickly know "I might have won". But without the results from the rest of the 64 reads in a couple of seconds, you won't actually win.
I've had trouble finding an answer to one question: I don't understand why one would need multiple drives. Seems like you could earn the coin, sell it for USD, erase the drive, and earn another coin with the same disk.
Filecoin has 4.6 EiB of space, of which only 11 PiB is actually used for file storage. It also has insane hardware and staking requirements. We are talking about $10k of hardware (including CPU and RAM) and staking $20k of the coin just to get started.
With Chia anybody can get started with their spare hardware.
Right now, it is a gold rush and this is leading to shortage of supply especially in China. This is a short term phenomenon as there eventually comes a point where you cannot compete against people who just have spare hardware and therefore $0 upfront investment.
I agree with your critique of FileCoin, but re Chia, I think it's the exact opposite of this:
> This is a short term phenomenon as there eventually comes a point where you cannot compete against people who just have spare hardware and therefore $0 upfront investment.
Very quickly people with just a regular amount of spare storage won't have any incentive to bother, compared to those with racks of PiB of drives and dedicated plotting hardware streaming to it. It's already at the point where 1TB of plots would take a year or so to win a reward, and the difficulty is increasing exponentially, so it would actually be far longer.
Perhaps farming pools will eventually make it feasible to make something with spare space, but likely not enough for it to be worth most people's time.
It's pure waste. You fill your disks with random data in a very computationally heavy process, and then wait for your "number" to be called on the network, for which you get a reward(which admittedly can be/should be done on a thin client like a raspberry pi, as their docs recommend).
The more storage you invest, the more numbers you have, it's analogous to bingo in a way.
That’s only the storage required for ongoing use (“farming”). You’re not taking into account “plotting” which requires NVMe SSDs, decently fast CPU, and a few GB RAM per plot (~101GB storage).
Assume it takes 7 hours to create a plot on high end consumer hardware.
As far as I can see, only the phase 1 of plotting is cryptographic in any meaningful way. The rest is just rearranging data requiring no CPU power, and can be done effectively instantly if you have 400GB of RAM.
A big 'plotting house' would have dedicated crypto units to do phase 1, then stream the results over the network to a machine with 400 gigs of ram to do the rearrangement and write out a plot file. It should be possible to do that in seconds per 100GB file.
The plotting I don't see is any kind of bottleneck for a big operation. It's the storage of the resulting files.
I agree on a longer time scale. It seems like moderate success of the Chia network would be a prerequisite for someone to invest in building that.
My comment was responding to my interpretation of your claim to mean a single entity is likely responsible for the majority of the 1EB, and that could be accomplished for $20M. Based on my own observations over the past few months, I believe the network has been bootstrapped by a wide variety of hobbyists and a few larger scale operations, with far more than $20M invested overall.
Here I am thinking there's finally a working file storage coin for truly decentralized and anonymous file hosting and no... it's another proof-of-waste thing.
They have all this material saying how green it is, but it's a load of bullshit. Which isn't surprising when the early "farmers" have massive financial incentive to lie.
Yep, all it does is incentivise wasteful manufacturing of storage drives that are then used for nothing actually productive. The chia creators are lying snakes trying to get rich off another premined scamcoin with a bullshit hook to draw in the suckers.
The ultimate dream was being able to hook up a few spare hard drives and then earning enough tokens to host your backups for free. The problem is defending against malicious actors makes everything too complex.
That's... a low bar for an "ultimate dream"? Other than the backups now being offsite, one gains pretty much nothing this way.
And there is much to be gained.
Any type of centralized service provider is a SPOF. Some companies have vastly better customer service track records than others, but their internal operations are fundamentally non-transparent, and driven by a particular implementation of the profit motive.
Interacting with a centralized service provider requires you to expose yourself to poorly quantifiable risks - hacking, internal abuse, government interventions, datacenter fires - and in ways not strictly required by the task of data storage - such as a breach leaving your data untouched but stealing your CC number or other credentials.
A better candidate for "the ultimate dream" would be cryptoprotocol-based participatory networks becoming more flexible, more efficient, more resilient, and more accessible than traditional institutions. That's still far away, it seems - and Goliath won't give up without a fight anyway.
I think that would be unfortunate. That kind of special-purpose hardware would go against the "anyone can farm" spirit of Chia and likely worsen the environmental impact since those drives wouldn't be useful for other applications.
"Anyone can farm" is clearly only going to be a thing while the project stays small.
It will always be more cost efficient to assemble tens of thousands of the most optimal hard drives/CPU's/ASICS in a big room, bulk ordering them all cheaply, than it will be to DIY it yourself at home.
Any kind of mining will always end up costing exactly the same as the revenue. And that means you and I will make a loss at home.
You could claim "but I'm using unused hard drive space, so it's free", but really you should be thinking "I bought a hard drive bigger than I needed, but I can partially recover the cost with Chia". And besides, in a few months, the 200GB free on your hard drive won't even be worth the effort of installing the software.
Basically the authors saw how much Ethereum/Solidity contracts are hacked because of unintended stateful side effects and decided to make a purely functional LISP-based language where there are none.
I don’t get it - it’s promoted as environmentally friendly, but it doesn’t seem that 1EB is being used for any actual useful storage purpose. It’s locked up as part of the running of the Chia system isn’t it?
I don't understand all the "green" claims either. It takes a lot of energy, resources, shipping miles and manhours to manufacture an HDD/SSD. Then you waste several hours of energy to "plot" the disk. Then you've got to keep the disk filled with random junk data and the hosting rig powered and connected to the internet to "farm" it. Plainly less resource-intensive than PoW (Proof of Work), but also very plainly far from a "green" solution.
It just seems so monumentally wasteful. At least with the liked of Filecoin the disks can be used for actual storage.
Does this Proof of Space approach have any real benefits over PoS (Proof of Stake)?
Bram has a talk where he goes into the issues with Proof of Stake, centralization and categories of issues that don't exist in proof of time and space: https://youtu.be/2Zlcgt8FVz4?t=510
Chia team anticipates an S curve where adoption will level off and at that point it'll mostly be companies or people that have extra storage laying around and figure 'why not' store some plots on these disks to try to earn a bit of money. Or orgs plotting to new servers while they're waiting to be used, deleting plots as the storage is needed.
They also argue it's more green because if you don't want to store the plots, you delete them and the storage is still available as normal storage for other purposes. With PoW, you have specialized hardware that isn't useful for other purposes and you burn a lot of electricity all the time securing the network.
So how many resources are needed now to mine just one proper bitcoin? First it could be done with a regular pc. Now you need advanced videocards, hardware, more power and loads of diskspace. So how much do you have to spend before mining one coin?
I'm admittedly rather disappointed with Chia after reading up on it, as I thought it was closer to Sia [0] or Storj [1] where you got rewarded in coin to provide storage space, but instead it's more akin to Burstcoin [2] and indeed, proof-of-capacity cryptocurrencies are nothing new and the only supposedly added value would be on Chialisp for (safer?) smart contracts. It IS factually correct to say proof-of-capacity is far less resource intensive than proof-of-work crypto as even the least efficient hard drive will consume orders of magnitude less energy than a mining rig, but it's still based on tying up a resource, this time it's just a majority of hardware and a minority of electricity instead of the other way around.
One issue that most people advocating for proof-of-stake gleefully ignore is to work through the initial distribution of the coin- can't stake what you don't have. So you either have a sizable premine, you bootstrap your coin using someone else's ledger or you start out with proof-of-work (or like Chia, proof-of-capacity) and then move on to proof-of-stake once there's a stable ecosystem for it. It does seem like Chia comes with a sizable premine, which is also disappointing but not entirely surprising as practically every new cryptocurrency that has come out as of late has had it to "financially bootstrap" its development and what not. I'd also have some choice words about Bram Cohen, but they'd be rather out of scope here.
The network has grown so rapidly recently that there is no hope of getting reward unless you have a purpose built farming rig, and that’s really devastating to the block chains longevity. The most compelling part about this crypto to me is that it could be farmed by anyone with their extra HDD/SSD space, but if there is no reward for the performance hit then the coin is much less interesting to the general public, who you need most for long-term acceptance of Chia.
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[ 0.51 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadbecause 1EB is a minuscule amount of the hard drive capacity, compared to the total amount produced per year. According to seagate's blogpost[1], they ship at least 500 EB per year. If you add in capacity from WD/toshiba, it's probably closer to 1000EB if not more. That would make chia's consumption 0.1% of produced hard drive capacity.
[1] https://blog.seagate.com/enterprises/seagate-has-shipped-thr...
2. Started with around 120 PByte. Seven weeks later and it'll be already a decimal order of magnitude bigger.
0.1 percent isn't minuscule.
Very much agree here. I purchased about 144TB of raw storage a few weeks ago for future video and data projects, and it's possible to purchase 1PB of raw capacity (with no redundancy, nor anything to connect to) for as cheap as around $13000 USD at retail pricing.
1EB could be acquired for somewhere between $12-$15M. Not chump change, but considering the number of players pre-mining, absolutely nothing in the scheme of things.
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What will be interesting is how this increase in mainnet capacity grows over time, and relative to manufactured capacity. 1.1EB of footprint today is nothing ... but we might start to care if it were to grow at a rate of 1.1EB/day or faster, as manufacturers like Seagate, WD, Toshiba, etc. can't instantly respond to such a sustained demand spike. Channel supply could be exhausted relatively quickly.
HDDs have been hit much harder than SSDs, but I’m guessing you didn’t buy 144 TB of SSDs.
High-speed DDR4 ECC memory (DDR-3200 in particular) can also be tough to come by. A fair number of VARs actually limit quantity (usually to 20 modules per SKU), since it's so tough to get. Again, not due to crypto mining, but because of hyperscalers.
Part of the reason for this is because Chia is really easy to farm — anyone with extra space on their hard drives can do it. There are people farming a petabyte with a Raspberry Pi. This was by design to keep the network decentralized and hard to attack — close to the original intention of "one cpu one vote" from bitcoin.
Right now there's no price for Chia since it's not on exchanges and transactions won't start until May 3. But in the short term it's advantageous to buy enterprise-level SSDs because they're the fastest to "plot" with so it seems that in a few markets, especially in China where interest in farming Chia is surging, a few SSD sellers have seen a spike in demand.
For long-term effects on the storage industry it's hard to say what will happen — there's tons of existing storage out in the world already, the storage industry already sells 1+ zettabytes of storage a year, and unlike single-use bitcoin mining hardware hard drives are useful outside of Chia. The Chia company speculates on the impact on the storage industry on page 23 of their business whitepaper: https://www.chia.net/assets/Chia-Business-Whitepaper-2021-02...
What prevents this?
Once a farmer wins a block it's theirs, the same way it works with bitcoin. The reward is tied to a public key, not the original storage. Just like in bitcoin once a miner wins a block they don't need to continuously prove that they have x amount of hashing power in the future.
You can learn more about the details of the blockchain and algorithm here: https://www.chia.net/greenpaper/
[1] https://www.chia.net/faq/
From where? Individuals or enterprises? With the direction we're headed (SSDs and cloud storage), it's hard to imagine many people with a few terabytes of hard drive space. On the other hand you can get around cheap hard drives at around $15/TB if you buy external, then shuck them so you can put it in a backpane or something. At that price, it's hard to beat the price of a new drive, especially if you factor in the time it takes for the individual to set it up. Enterprises might have better economies of scale, but I'm skeptical that executives would sign off on running arbitrary code on production servers just to earn some cryptocoins.
It also seems likely that flash storage will become cheaper than HDDs in the next ten years, which will start increasing SSD space on drives due to increased competition. Analysis here: https://wikibon.com/qlc-flash-hamrs-hdd/
Storage workloads aren't uniform. Some need to have localized, reliable, consistently performing persistent storage with room to absorb sudden demand spikes (like customer data on cloud clusters). Others can be stored anywhere and moved with ease, with few requirements on latency, redundancy on a global scale, and read-mostly workloads, which means immediate loss of a single local copy is harmless (like YouTube videos). FAANGs have long since figured this out and how to optimize their storage utilization.
There is zero chance one of them is going to up and decide that Chia is a better use of their "spare" (not really) storage capacity if they have anything resembling competent engineering teams. I know Google does.
Source: Xoogler.
While I don’t think too many businesses will buy this idea of using spare storage for “cryptofarming”, unused resources are pretty common.
The price of a cryptocurrency will tend to roughly follow the cost of generating it. In storage, it’s safe to assume the cost will only go down for the same amount of space. And disk space has been growing faster than transistor density for some time now.
So in the end this is going to be just like every other cryptocurrency: people largely deploying exclusive mining (sorry, "farming") capacity and consuming resources doing so.
At least some data centers destroy their old drives for privacy reasons, so they would need to figure out a way around that if they’re going to reuse them offsite.
AFAIK people already buy up used datacenter drives to use elsewhere, so you're just shifting demand around.
SSDs have limited program/erase lifespan, and the proof-of-space algorithms used by Chia eat into that lifespan pretty fast.
But from what I learned there, Chia is not a consumer’s tech, cause mainnet already requires huge TBW per dollar ratio, which ubiquitous Samsung EVO/Pro and alikes cannot do. It goes miners-are-special-hardware route again, sadly.
Has anyone tried this? Would be interesting to see the benefits.
Somewhere over that couple days I read that you can farm on an HD, but plotting is faster on an SSD, so I'm making a huge presumption that plotting on a ramdisk would be even faster, without the wear on an SSD.
I'm still not clear on Chia. Sometimes I think I understand it, and other times I'm not so sure...
It’s a matrix of processor cores, threads per core, temp drive bandwidth, memory, and temp drive speed. Oh and cost per TiB of plots per day.
Also plotting happens in several stages, and each has a different set of requirements. So timing the running of plots in parallel and staggering starts also comes into it.
Let's say your mining operation brings in $1000/day in revenue. If it's mining bitcoin you might be paying $500/day in electricity bills, leaving you with $500 as profit to reinvest in the business (ie. buy more hardware). If it's mining chia you might be paying $50/day in electricity. That's $450 in less resources wasted, sounds good right? Well no, because any savvy businesman is going to reinvest that $450 into buying more mining hardware, so you can make even more money. In the end any resource you save from lower electricity consumption just gets poured into manufacturing more hardware.
>And they can be used for other purposes besides just farming Chia
This is a mixed bag, because while it's true that the mining hardware can be repurposed, it also means that during boom times, regular consumers have to pay more for their hardware. See for instance, the GPU shortage.
You can also read more about the power consumption of Chia here: https://chiapower.org/
You can also use any old extra disk space you have on your current computers.
https://www.chia.net/2021/02/22/plotting-basics.html
Chia does only one thing: replace $1000 spent on electricity with $1000 spent on SSD manufacturing. It’s unclear which one is worse for the environment, but I think it’s likely that SSD manufacturing is worse, given the (real) mining and toxic chemicals involved.
Multipurpose mining hardware would compromise security of the network. An alternative use for the hardware would effectively be a subsidy on mining Bitcoin.
This would imply that the costs of securing Bitcoin are not being paid by Bitcoin hodlers, and are not fully internalised by Bitcoin.
This is similar to the reason that Proof of Work must not have economic uses external to the network.
If such a subsidy were more valuable than rewards intrinsic to the network, any variance in that subsidy would cause variance in the security of the network, with the likely case being reduced security, the network now being dependent on that external use case.
E.g. if the alternative use is valuable, it might incentivise me to acquire enough miners such that I control majority hashrate of the network subsidised by the alternative more profitable use of the hardware. Any attack on the network is then subsidised by the external use case for the hardware.
Bitcoin is a shitty public ledger, the resource consumption is due to the significant collective interest in it, not what it accomplishes.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
there's not really any way to tailor this new shitcoin to specialry hardware: if these fuck gains the all too much religious following, it will shred the storage market. there's no hacks, no special optimizations. there will never ever be relief. it will be reality versus their imaginary but profit making fantasy, pratical use versus endless speculative/zero-sum profiteering forever and ever & fuck them fuck that fuck this so so so much. what a horrible curse.
almost none of these cryptocoin nft whatever activities have any premise or use other than trying to get rich. what a disgraceful use. i'd label it all as esoteric but esoterics often have very powerful underlying use & powers: this is almost all a huge fucking sham where the value is nearly entirely an imaginary number, one too many fucks imagine.
Edit: My calculation was based on the initial reward schedule of 64 units per block, but when you take into account the fact that it ramps down to 4 units per block shortly thereafter, it's actually a premine of 21 years: https://www.coindesk.com/5-takeaways-from-chia-networks-new-...
Well, Bitcoin itself is a get rich quick scheme for its founders. So are most of its spinoffs.
Regardless of what you think about Bitcoin, this claim is completely ahistorical.
I wouldn't call it a get rich quick scheme for its founder(s) because I doubt they could have known it would take off the way it did.
But, at this point, I don't know that intent matters. Imagine if Bitcoin really did become a dominant currency... one guy would own 5% of it, a deflationary currency! The "fiat billionaires" don't come anywhere close to that kind of concentration of wealth.
It's nice to see the crypto market maturing and ignoring these people so segregated from every other financial market because they never traded anything else. Low float, "pre-mined" assets are in vogue and represent a more compatible funding model for continued development and personal riches than whatever was happening just a few years ago, let alone through the last decade in crypto.
You should ignore the "egalitarian ideology", or completely take advantage of it by launching a Chia-clone without a premine while you simply provide all the storage space first and get the exact same "insta-mine" result while advertising it to people like you that actually care about no premines. A dozen ways to get the same result, its all marketing.
You only get the same result if you completely monopolize mining for the first twenty-one years. If you control 50% of mining, it would take 119 years to achieve the equivalent. My issue is not that there is a premine. It's the scale of it.
Square Inc creates new shares for Jack Dorsey to sell like every week or so. Continual dilution that the market tolerated. Although fairly unique for the equities space, these are the case studies we are growing up with now.
Definition sometimes are lagging behind ever changing reality, same with "premine".
https://www.chia.net/2021/02/10/chia-businesss-whitepaper.ht...
You are free to agree or disagree with the plan, but need to read it before coming to any conclusions.
Satoshi had the decency to mine his coins alongside everyone else.
Other than that - absolutely nothing
Users have prevailed agaist miners and large business in Bitcon forkwors, which failed to force their agenda on the users. This is at least some empirical proof in support that Bitcoin is not a plutocracy.
Miners have large farms that can be bankrupted by users simply deciding to change the hashing algo. No such option in PoS.
In PoS, largest wallets dictate changes. Liquidity begets more liquidity, aka the rich get richer, and such effect has a centralizing effect on PoS. All PoS project to date have failed.
But if I ever grok the building blocks fully enough, I'd like to see if I can devise a system based on "proof of receipt" in which the act of receiving X coins grants you the ability to "settle" a set of blocks totaling a*X worth of transactions (for some constant a).
Like in other blockchains, the node selected to settle a block of transactions gets to keep some or all of the transaction fees for that block. But instead of continually getting selected by virtue of continuing to hold a large amount of coin, you could only continue to be selected by continuing to receive coin (presumably in return for goods and services).
The transaction fees and the constant $a$ would have to bee chosen such that you couldn't turn a profit by sending lots of money to yourself. But I think that would allow for a fair system with a good incentive structure.
What if the goal isn't to profit from block rewards but to attack the network, though? What if you pass stuff around over and over between tons of addresses you own? (Any person can create an unlimited number of addresses, pretty much instantly.)
Even if by the end the total transaction fees result in a heavy loss being incurred, the attacker would only do it if they think they can gain more from the network attack than they'd lose in fees.
I think a secure blockchain system can never make any kind of assumption that 1 address = 1 person/entity or 1 transaction >= 2 people/entities. I think depending on addresses or transactions in any way is probably a non-starter.
One of the key anti-Sybil features of Proof of Work, Proof of Space, and Proof of Stake is that it solely relies on a single scarce, unfakeable, totally fungible resource. The network cares about only one fungible variable: the total amount of computational power, or hard drive space, or funds in the network. That way, it makes no difference if the attacker has 1 address or 1 million addresses.
I agree that any blockchain has to be resistant to Sybil attacks. And that may be an insurmountable obstacle for my idea but, so far, I haven't let that stop me from thinking about it.
There do seem to be some properties of PoW/PoS related to the level of iniquity in control of the blockchain and to their incentive structures, and I think it is worth casting a wide net in search of something better (even if it may not exist).
It seems like everything might be a variation of one of two possible categories: economic game theory (Proof of Stake), or proof of committal of scarce, fungible physical resources. Everything else I can think of just seems like it'd be some form of centralization/oligarchy. But who knows?
(Proof of Stake is sometimes accused of being oligarchical, too, but I think it's still kind of the lesser of all evils, probably.)
Users have prevailed in Bitcoin forkwars over miners and many large exchanges and businesses.
Miners are really more similar to employees of the network, that order transaction in exchange for fees. They are not masters of the protocol, and cannot dictate its rules.
Proof of Work has a nuclear option (change of hashing algo) that would bankrupt the miners and render their farms useless. No such option exists in PoS, just political battles, as we've seen in practice.
In PoS users lost in political battles of EOS (collapsed and rewrote the network rules) and Steem (taken over by bad faith staker). Literally all PoS projects failed in some way until today, due to some centralization pressures it produces.
Some Orwellian newspeak right there. "Reduced to zero". Just call it what it is: blacklists.
Blacklists = permissioned access.
Behave or we blacklist your coins. Welcome to Fiat 2.0
It'll be just wildly more political than PoW chains where you can verify the heaviest chain objectively.
The downside is that "functional" isn't exactly a high bar. For example reducing block rewards to encourage deflation would disproportionately help the wealthy so they may push it even if it isn't ideal for the average person.
Turns out humans aren’t perfectly rational, and handing a huge amount of control to a tiny number of rich people is a fantastic way to discover that while any given rich person might be smart and what not, there’s a non trivial chance that their heir is an idiot and will ruin whatever they’re given. This is entertaining for personal fortunes, but not so funny when they control a currency.
We've seen this throughout history.
That's what PoS will do to small holders. They will be nothing but tiny shareholders with no anti-dilutive protections and zero legal recourse.
I'd much rather deal with a centralized entity where at least I have a some body of law I can rely on.
A system like that is definitely not decentralized.
The code is licensed under a FOSS license, I believe.
Ponzis can be built on top of it, just as the internet can be used to sell penis pills and get rich quick scams. But just as those don’t make the internet a sham, crappy coins and get rich quick schemes don’t make decentralized ledgers a scam.
It's not that impressive and it's not a ponzi scheme.
Any currency which is not backed by real resources is a scam. Including fiat in the last decade - albeit fiat is a scam backed by state actors with armies, making it a bit more trustworthy
The challenge is that it requires you to buy different sets of hardware to earn chia, and the high performance plotting hardware is only needed temporarily (while you’re filling up hard drives). It seems a cottage industry of plotting services is already developing so that those that want to farm don’t have to invest in the hardware to plot.
Farming requires very little CPU and slow disks are not a problem.
> the high performance plotting hardware is only needed temporarily
I'm not sure if you're ever done plotting; if the network space keeps increasing, then you need to increase the number of plots you maintain to keep up -- else you'll gradually farm fewer over time.
I think you probably need more plotting hardware in the initial buildout phase though.
Some are already talking about "plotting as a service", selling disks full of plots once they have finished their own plotting. In the spirit of "selling jeans to gold miners", that might be a viable business model.
Reddit also has some good plotting/farming recommendations among the usual chaff.
Chia blocks are every ~20 seconds. Within those 20 seconds, you need to read 7 + 64 different areas of the disk. Some read addresses depend on the last, so in reality you need to do 7 sequential reads, all within the block time to get any reward.
So basically, if your storage medium takes over ~1 second to read data, you're going to be throwing away some rewards, and if it takes over ~10 seconds per read, you will barely get any rewards at all.
Tape drives are out then, and so is optical media unless it's already in a drive.
ETA: from looking at the docs, it seems that the 7 initial reads do access separate "tables". It should be possible to optimize by storing these on lower-latency storage, and even optimize further via parallel farming of many "plots", of which only a few at any given time will ever need to retrieve the 64 blocks denoting a successful proof. ISTM that tape media has real potential here.
Put those 7 on fast media and you'll very quickly know "I might have won". But without the results from the rest of the 64 reads in a couple of seconds, you won't actually win.
What prevents this?
If multiple people have good enough plots there can be multiple winners for the same challenge!
You can also win with the same plot file multiple times.
With Chia anybody can get started with their spare hardware.
Right now, it is a gold rush and this is leading to shortage of supply especially in China. This is a short term phenomenon as there eventually comes a point where you cannot compete against people who just have spare hardware and therefore $0 upfront investment.
> This is a short term phenomenon as there eventually comes a point where you cannot compete against people who just have spare hardware and therefore $0 upfront investment.
Very quickly people with just a regular amount of spare storage won't have any incentive to bother, compared to those with racks of PiB of drives and dedicated plotting hardware streaming to it. It's already at the point where 1TB of plots would take a year or so to win a reward, and the difficulty is increasing exponentially, so it would actually be far longer.
Perhaps farming pools will eventually make it feasible to make something with spare space, but likely not enough for it to be worth most people's time.
The more storage you invest, the more numbers you have, it's analogous to bingo in a way.
So 1 exabyte is $20M. Well within the scope of VC funding for someone who wants to make Chia appear to be a success.
Assume it takes 7 hours to create a plot on high end consumer hardware.
A big 'plotting house' would have dedicated crypto units to do phase 1, then stream the results over the network to a machine with 400 gigs of ram to do the rearrangement and write out a plot file. It should be possible to do that in seconds per 100GB file.
The plotting I don't see is any kind of bottleneck for a big operation. It's the storage of the resulting files.
My comment was responding to my interpretation of your claim to mean a single entity is likely responsible for the majority of the 1EB, and that could be accomplished for $20M. Based on my own observations over the past few months, I believe the network has been bootstrapped by a wide variety of hobbyists and a few larger scale operations, with far more than $20M invested overall.
There's a bajilion serious hosting providers that have proven their mettle.
And when chips come down to it, crypto never is anonymous.
And there is much to be gained.
Any type of centralized service provider is a SPOF. Some companies have vastly better customer service track records than others, but their internal operations are fundamentally non-transparent, and driven by a particular implementation of the profit motive.
Interacting with a centralized service provider requires you to expose yourself to poorly quantifiable risks - hacking, internal abuse, government interventions, datacenter fires - and in ways not strictly required by the task of data storage - such as a breach leaving your data untouched but stealing your CC number or other credentials.
A better candidate for "the ultimate dream" would be cryptoprotocol-based participatory networks becoming more flexible, more efficient, more resilient, and more accessible than traditional institutions. That's still far away, it seems - and Goliath won't give up without a fight anyway.
In Chia, fairly high error rates are still very profitable.
Current hard disks might see one uncorrectable error every 1,000 TB read from them. Chia would be fine with one error every 1 megabyte.
That difference might allow custom drive firmwares to put far more bits far closer together, leading to cheaper less reliable storage for farming.
It will always be more cost efficient to assemble tens of thousands of the most optimal hard drives/CPU's/ASICS in a big room, bulk ordering them all cheaply, than it will be to DIY it yourself at home.
Any kind of mining will always end up costing exactly the same as the revenue. And that means you and I will make a loss at home.
You could claim "but I'm using unused hard drive space, so it's free", but really you should be thinking "I bought a hard drive bigger than I needed, but I can partially recover the cost with Chia". And besides, in a few months, the 200GB free on your hard drive won't even be worth the effort of installing the software.
https://chialisp.com
Basically the authors saw how much Ethereum/Solidity contracts are hacked because of unintended stateful side effects and decided to make a purely functional LISP-based language where there are none.
It just seems so monumentally wasteful. At least with the liked of Filecoin the disks can be used for actual storage.
Does this Proof of Space approach have any real benefits over PoS (Proof of Stake)?
They also argue it's more green because if you don't want to store the plots, you delete them and the storage is still available as normal storage for other purposes. With PoW, you have specialized hardware that isn't useful for other purposes and you burn a lot of electricity all the time securing the network.
One issue that most people advocating for proof-of-stake gleefully ignore is to work through the initial distribution of the coin- can't stake what you don't have. So you either have a sizable premine, you bootstrap your coin using someone else's ledger or you start out with proof-of-work (or like Chia, proof-of-capacity) and then move on to proof-of-stake once there's a stable ecosystem for it. It does seem like Chia comes with a sizable premine, which is also disappointing but not entirely surprising as practically every new cryptocurrency that has come out as of late has had it to "financially bootstrap" its development and what not. I'd also have some choice words about Bram Cohen, but they'd be rather out of scope here.
[0] https://sia.tech/
[1] https://www.storj.io/
[2] https://www.burst-coin.org/
https://mypennmedicine.me/