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Chia is pitched as a more environmentally friendly alternative to proof of work, but it’s unclear how much better it is. The energy consumption of proof of work
by woah 6y ago
Chia is pitched as a more environmentally friendly alternative to proof of work, but it’s unclear how much better it is. The energy consumption of proof of work is related only to the relationship between the price of performing the work and the price of the proof of work coin. Efficiency is a concept which is meaningless for proof of work.
The same dynamic will hold with Chia. If the price goes up, this will result in more money being spent on storage devices to mine it. These storage devices will not use as much electricity as hashing miners, but this means that the operators will have more money to spend buying more storage devices, which they will have to do if they want to keep up with the pack.
In summary: Bitcoin work is manufacturing and putting electricity into hashing chips. Chia work is manufacturing storage chips. It’s unclear whether $100 spent manufacturing a storage chip is less bad for the environment than $100 running a hashing chip.
- codsane 6y agoI think the difference in energy consumption between storage devices and GPU miners is being significantly downplayed here. While a good bit of energy has to be consumed to generate the plots, the benefit is that once completed the storage devices may sit idle in a much more energy efficient farming machine (and for quite literally forever). As of right now the network is only a very small percentage of the global storage market, so it is hard to imagine any impact on chip supply chains, but of course there is no telling what stress could be brought in the future as the network grows, we will have to see. However in a time when energy usage and carbon footprint are being used as direct attacks to "cancel" cryptocurrency (which are legitimate concerns, not only just about "cancelling" crypto), I can't help but wonder if Chia is in the place to completely change the game with adoption of proof of space. https://chiapower.org/ https://chiapower.org/
- woah 6y agoThe tradeoff is very simple: spend $100 on electricity, or spend $100 manufacturing storage chips? Chia miners can't just decide not to spend the $100 buying more storage, because if they don't, someone else will, pushing up the storage requirement, and reducing their income.
- codsane 6y agoI'm familiar with the economics of mining, I don't know why it is thought that Chia was supposed to change that. Their initiative is a GPU mining alternative which utilizes less power. The point of my comment was to emphasize that they have achieved exactly that.