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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 rea

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 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
    [deleted]
- MrFoof 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
Feels like a marketing campaign
Glench 6y 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 6y ago
  How do you connect a petabyte of storage to a Rasberry Pi?
  - phire 6y ago
    Bunch of USB hubs?
    - gruez 6y ago
      Yeah, 1PB is only 56x 18TB external hard drives.

gruez 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
  [deleted]
MrFoof 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago

Feels like a marketing campaign

Glench 6y 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 6y ago
How do you connect a petabyte of storage to a Rasberry Pi?
- phire 6y ago
  Bunch of USB hubs?
  - gruez 6y ago
    Yeah, 1PB is only 56x 18TB external hard drives.