17 ms·

Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

94 points by atarian 5y ago

linsomniac 5y ago
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.
- gruez 5y ago
  > 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. [1] https://blog.seagate.com/enterprises/seagate-has-shipped-three-zettabytes-of-data-storage/ https://blog.seagate.com/enterprises/seagate-has-shipped-thr...
  - Eduard 5y ago
    1. Exponential growth. 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.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - MrFoof 5y ago
    >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. ----- 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.
    - thinkmassive 5y ago
      The difference in consumer storage prices today compared to a few weeks ago is pretty substantial, and that’s when you can find it in stock at all. HDDs have been hit much harder than SSDs, but I’m guessing you didn’t buy 144 TB of SSDs.
      - zozbot234 5y ago
        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/ https://chiacalculator.com/ or the XCH/TiB chart at https://www.chiaexplorer.com/charts/xchTib https://www.chiaexplorer.com/charts/xchTib (same site as OP).
      - MrFoof 5y ago
        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.
- EvanWinget 5y ago
  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.
- DeepYogurt 5y ago
  Feels like a marketing campaign
- Glench 5y ago
  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-2021-02-09-v1.0.pdf https://www.chia.net/assets/Chia-Business-Whitepaper-2021-02...
  - pabs3 5y ago
    How do you connect a petabyte of storage to a Rasberry Pi?
    - phire 5y ago
      Bunch of USB hubs?
      - gruez 5y ago
        Yeah, 1PB is only 56x 18TB external hard drives.
i_work_at_GOOG 5y ago
People are always asking me, "How much will 1 XCH be worth?". $13.51 on May 3rd is my answer.
Eduard 5y ago
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.
- Glench 5y ago
  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.
brink 5y ago
How much of it is currently utilized?
- gruez 5y ago
  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.
  - rckoepke 5y ago
    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. What prevents this?
    - snovv_crash 5y ago
      You earn the coin continuously for proving that you still have the disk full of random data. It isn't a once-off thing.
      - Talinx 5y ago
        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?
        Glench 5y ago
        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. You can learn more about the details of the blockchain and algorithm here: https://www.chia.net/greenpaper/ https://www.chia.net/greenpaper/
    - 5y ago
gruez 5y ago
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. [1] https://www.chia.net/faq/ https://www.chia.net/faq/
- magila 5y ago
  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.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >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.
    - Glench 5y ago
      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/ https://wikibon.com/qlc-flash-hamrs-hdd/
nynx 5y ago
Looking forward to not being able to afford storage anymore.
- rektide 5y ago
  check prices it's already fucked
  - RulerOf 5y ago
    First the miners came for our graphics cards. Now they're taking our hard drives.
    - rektide 5y ago
      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.
greyface- 5y ago
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-white-paper https://www.coindesk.com/5-takeaways-from-chia-networks-new-...
- reasons 5y ago
  > ... it feels like a get rich quick scheme for its founders Well, Bitcoin itself is a get rich quick scheme for its founders. So are most of its spinoffs.
  - eindiran 5y ago
    > Bitcoin itself is a get rich quick scheme for its founders Regardless of what you think about Bitcoin, this claim is completely ahistorical.
    - creato 5y ago
      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.
      - Orochikaku 5y ago
        'Satoshi' as far as we know is a fiction, it could very well be a psuedonym for an entire team of unknown size
rektide 5y ago
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.
- puranjay 5y ago
  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.
  - jokethrowaway 5y ago
    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
    - puranjay 5y ago
      State actors with armies haven’t exactly helped a lot of fiat survive. Ask a Venezuelan if he would rather have BTC vs his native fiat.
      - nonameiguess 5y ago
        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.
davidgh 5y ago
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.
- theptip 5y ago
  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.
  - wruza 5y ago
    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.
    - theptip 5y ago
      A good place to start is the official blog/wiki: https://chia.net/2021/02/22/plotting-basics.html https://chia.net/2021/02/22/plotting-basics.html Reddit also has some good plotting/farming recommendations among the usual chaff.
rckoepke 5y ago
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. What prevents this?
- freddiecoleman 5y ago
  The more space you have, the more likely you are to win coins. Therefore you want to plot as much space as possible. 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.
GrumpyNl 5y ago
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?
pjc50 5y ago
So .. is this like FileCoin, where people provide storage services and are rewarded, or is it a proof-of-waste scheme?
- freddiecoleman 5y ago
  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.
  - atat7024 5y ago
    Has Filecoin not grown because of this?
    - atat7024 5y ago
      because -> despite
  - tempestn 5y ago
    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.
- 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
londons_explore 5y ago
Disks are about $20/TB right now. So 1 exabyte is $20M. Well within the scope of VC funding for someone who wants to make Chia appear to be a success.
- exdsq 5y ago
  They've had 10x growth in < 50 days, so this is perfectly likely - especially as crypto as a whole has had a pretty choppy couple weeks recently.
- thinkmassive 5y ago
  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.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    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.
    - thinkmassive 5y ago
      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.
tnzm 5y ago
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.
- ddtaylor 5y ago
  Sia kinda works. I have a few GBs of data on the network and it only costs me about $1/yr
  - abricot 5y ago
    That just means that it works for _you_ right _now_.
    - tnzm 5y ago
      What technology emerged fully formed, working for everyone all the time?
- ziml77 5y ago
  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.
  - Salgat 5y ago
    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.
- VHRanger 5y ago
  What's even the point of "decentralized and anonymous file hosting"? There's a bajilion serious hosting providers that have proven their mettle. And when chips come down to it, crypto never is anonymous.
londons_explore 5y ago
In regular file storage, data error rates must be very low. 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.
- Glench 5y ago
  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.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    "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.
    - fomine3 5y ago
      Also, unused space is not just wasted, but utilized to efficient (less fragmented) data placing and wear leveling.
ddtaylor 5y ago
I always enjoy reading why HN hates cryptocurrency.
Glench 5y ago
Right now the focus is on network growth and farming, but I think long-term the smart contracts capability of Chia will be most interesting: https://chialisp.com 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.
jl6 5y ago
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?
- GordonS 5y ago
  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)?
  - devm0de 5y ago
    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 https://youtu.be/2Zlcgt8FVz4?t=510
- devm0de 5y ago
  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.
Proven 5y ago
1EB = 500 people with 2-3 disk drives each
ashtonkem 5y ago
And now storage devices have shot up in cost. Once again proving that crypto currencies seem to ruin everything they touch.
kemonocode 5y ago
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. [0] https://sia.tech/ https://sia.tech/ [1] https://www.storj.io/ https://www.storj.io/ [2] https://www.burst-coin.org/ https://www.burst-coin.org/
mrbbb 5y ago
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.
canada_dry 5y ago
Bad enough that I can't find a bloody 3080... this could make SSDs scarce too (if chia became wildly popular)!?!
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Yizahi 5y ago
HDD prices in my country tripled now.
mrlonglong 5y ago
I'm not very happy with this. In the space of a week the price on that 10tb hard disk I've had my eye on for a while has increased by £70. No choice but to swallow it though as prices will rise even more.
grendel25 5y ago
Monero supposedly had no premine. There are over 10,000 different crypto currencies and I know first hand several did not have a premine. 6 YEARS PRE-MINE AND CALLING IT "PRE-FARM" IS AN INSULT I generally don't have a problem with pre-mines and actively participate in coins with premines. BUT 6 YEARS!?!?! GET REAL DUDES

94 points by atarian 5y ago

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.

gruez 5y ago
> 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. [1] https://blog.seagate.com/enterprises/seagate-has-shipped-three-zettabytes-of-data-storage/ https://blog.seagate.com/enterprises/seagate-has-shipped-thr...
- Eduard 5y ago
  1. Exponential growth. 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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- MrFoof 5y ago
  >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. ----- 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.
  - thinkmassive 5y ago
    The difference in consumer storage prices today compared to a few weeks ago is pretty substantial, and that’s when you can find it in stock at all. HDDs have been hit much harder than SSDs, but I’m guessing you didn’t buy 144 TB of SSDs.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      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/ https://chiacalculator.com/ or the XCH/TiB chart at https://www.chiaexplorer.com/charts/xchTib https://www.chiaexplorer.com/charts/xchTib (same site as OP).
    - MrFoof 5y ago
      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.
EvanWinget 5y ago
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.
DeepYogurt 5y ago
Feels like a marketing campaign
Glench 5y ago
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-2021-02-09-v1.0.pdf https://www.chia.net/assets/Chia-Business-Whitepaper-2021-02...
- pabs3 5y ago
  How do you connect a petabyte of storage to a Rasberry Pi?
  - phire 5y ago
    Bunch of USB hubs?
    - gruez 5y ago
      Yeah, 1PB is only 56x 18TB external hard drives.

i_work_at_GOOG 5y ago

People are always asking me, "How much will 1 XCH be worth?". $13.51 on May 3rd is my answer.

Eduard 5y ago

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.

Glench 5y ago
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.

brink 5y ago

How much of it is currently utilized?

gruez 5y ago
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.
- rckoepke 5y ago
  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. What prevents this?
  - snovv_crash 5y ago
    You earn the coin continuously for proving that you still have the disk full of random data. It isn't a once-off thing.
    - Talinx 5y ago
      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?
      - Glench 5y ago
        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. You can learn more about the details of the blockchain and algorithm here: https://www.chia.net/greenpaper/ https://www.chia.net/greenpaper/
  - 5y ago

gruez 5y ago

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. [1] https://www.chia.net/faq/ https://www.chia.net/faq/

magila 5y ago
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.
- gruez 5y ago
  >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.
  - Glench 5y ago
    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/ https://wikibon.com/qlc-flash-hamrs-hdd/

nynx 5y ago

Looking forward to not being able to afford storage anymore.

rektide 5y ago
check prices it's already fucked
- RulerOf 5y ago
  First the miners came for our graphics cards. Now they're taking our hard drives.
  - rektide 5y ago
    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.

greyface- 5y ago

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-white-paper https://www.coindesk.com/5-takeaways-from-chia-networks-new-...

reasons 5y ago
> ... it feels like a get rich quick scheme for its founders Well, Bitcoin itself is a get rich quick scheme for its founders. So are most of its spinoffs.
- eindiran 5y ago
  > Bitcoin itself is a get rich quick scheme for its founders Regardless of what you think about Bitcoin, this claim is completely ahistorical.
  - creato 5y ago
    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.
    - Orochikaku 5y ago
      'Satoshi' as far as we know is a fiction, it could very well be a psuedonym for an entire team of unknown size

rektide 5y ago

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.

puranjay 5y ago
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.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  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
  - puranjay 5y ago
    State actors with armies haven’t exactly helped a lot of fiat survive. Ask a Venezuelan if he would rather have BTC vs his native fiat.
    - nonameiguess 5y ago
      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.

davidgh 5y ago

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.

theptip 5y ago
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.
- wruza 5y ago
  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.
  - theptip 5y ago
    A good place to start is the official blog/wiki: https://chia.net/2021/02/22/plotting-basics.html https://chia.net/2021/02/22/plotting-basics.html Reddit also has some good plotting/farming recommendations among the usual chaff.

rckoepke 5y ago

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. What prevents this?

freddiecoleman 5y ago
The more space you have, the more likely you are to win coins. Therefore you want to plot as much space as possible. 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.

GrumpyNl 5y ago

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?

pjc50 5y ago

So .. is this like FileCoin, where people provide storage services and are rewarded, or is it a proof-of-waste scheme?

freddiecoleman 5y ago
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.
- atat7024 5y ago
  Has Filecoin not grown because of this?
  - atat7024 5y ago
    because -> despite
- tempestn 5y ago
  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.
5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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londons_explore 5y ago

Disks are about $20/TB right now. So 1 exabyte is $20M. Well within the scope of VC funding for someone who wants to make Chia appear to be a success.

exdsq 5y ago
They've had 10x growth in < 50 days, so this is perfectly likely - especially as crypto as a whole has had a pretty choppy couple weeks recently.
thinkmassive 5y ago
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.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  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.
  - thinkmassive 5y ago
    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.

tnzm 5y ago

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.

ddtaylor 5y ago
Sia kinda works. I have a few GBs of data on the network and it only costs me about $1/yr
- abricot 5y ago
  That just means that it works for _you_ right _now_.
  - tnzm 5y ago
    What technology emerged fully formed, working for everyone all the time?
ziml77 5y ago
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.
- Salgat 5y ago
  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.
VHRanger 5y ago
What's even the point of "decentralized and anonymous file hosting"? There's a bajilion serious hosting providers that have proven their mettle. And when chips come down to it, crypto never is anonymous.

londons_explore 5y ago

In regular file storage, data error rates must be very low. 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.

Glench 5y ago
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.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  "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.
  - fomine3 5y ago
    Also, unused space is not just wasted, but utilized to efficient (less fragmented) data placing and wear leveling.

ddtaylor 5y ago

I always enjoy reading why HN hates cryptocurrency.

Glench 5y ago

Right now the focus is on network growth and farming, but I think long-term the smart contracts capability of Chia will be most interesting: https://chialisp.com 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.

jl6 5y ago

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?

GordonS 5y ago
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)?
- devm0de 5y ago
  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 https://youtu.be/2Zlcgt8FVz4?t=510
devm0de 5y ago
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.

Proven 5y ago

1EB = 500 people with 2-3 disk drives each

ashtonkem 5y ago

And now storage devices have shot up in cost. Once again proving that crypto currencies seem to ruin everything they touch.

kemonocode 5y ago

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. [0] https://sia.tech/ https://sia.tech/ [1] https://www.storj.io/ https://www.storj.io/ [2] https://www.burst-coin.org/ https://www.burst-coin.org/

mrbbb 5y ago

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.

canada_dry 5y ago

Bad enough that I can't find a bloody 3080... this could make SSDs scarce too (if chia became wildly popular)!?!

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Yizahi 5y ago

HDD prices in my country tripled now.

mrlonglong 5y ago

I'm not very happy with this. In the space of a week the price on that 10tb hard disk I've had my eye on for a while has increased by £70. No choice but to swallow it though as prices will rise even more.

grendel25 5y ago

Monero supposedly had no premine. There are over 10,000 different crypto currencies and I know first hand several did not have a premine. 6 YEARS PRE-MINE AND CALLING IT "PRE-FARM" IS AN INSULT I generally don't have a problem with pre-mines and actively participate in coins with premines. BUT 6 YEARS!?!?! GET REAL DUDES