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SSD makers start warning that mining products like ChiaCoin will void warranty

358 points by RachelF 5y ago

exporectomy 5y ago
I'm surprised they would honor any warranty claims where the drive has been written to beyond its specified terabytes written endurance. Is it that this farming causes more damage for the same amount of data written than normal use?
- agogdog 5y ago
  That sounds like what they're saying. I imagine when they determine warranties they're looking at what they estimate to be "normal" use? Reading/writing to capacity 24/7 certainly creates a lot of heat for a long time.
  - VectorLock 5y ago
    Its not the heat. SSDs wear out after repeated writing. Some more quickly than others.
    - agogdog 5y ago
      That was already known, it's an included spec when you're buying an SSD and already written into the warranties... this is an additional warning for this use case: >“If users use our SSDs for mining/farming and other abnormal operations, the data writing volume is much higher than the standard for daily use, and the SSD will slow down or get damaged due to excessive data writing volume. Due to the tests carried out, the damages are qualitative according to the test results, and that is why according to the quality assurance standards of our SSDs, we have the right to refuse to provide warranty services. The right of final interpretation belongs to the company." They're specifically calling out "standard for daily use"... One alternative explanation is that maybe farmers were just wearing them out quickly and playing naive to claim the warranty?
      - VectorLock 5y ago
        Most SSDs aren't designed for the repeated writing Chia requires. "Data center" or "high-endurance" SSDs have that capacity but are consequently more expensive. >One alternative explanation is that maybe farmers were just wearing them out quickly and playing naive to claim the warranty? That's exactly what they were doing. If you use a low cost "consumer" SSD you can wear it out very quickly then claim it was "defective."
        vii 5y ago
        Is that a false claim? The expectation that an SSD or even SD-card is infinitely rewriteable (practically speaking) is implicit in the marketing. The idea that a drive can't be rewritten too many times should be explicit (like SMR HDDs)
        wmf 5y ago
        Every SSD spec sheet has a Total Bytes Written (TBW) spec and Drive Writes Per Day (DWPD) and many warranties say that they don't cover wearout beyond those specs. It's akin to a tire rated for 50,000 miles; if it fails beyond that it's not defective.
        Dylan16807 5y ago
        > Most SSDs aren't designed for the repeated writing Chia requires. It doesn't require all that many writes. Problems come from a conscious decision to use a small number of SSDs as scratch space for a very large array.
        agogdog 5y ago
        what about the repeated writing is the issue though? in theory shouldn't the TBW be the TBW? that's why I was speculating about heat.
- marcan_42 5y ago
  From looking at numbers from the macOS SSD thrashing issue, we know lifetime usage as reported by SMART is not a strict function of terabytes written (at least on those SSDs). This makes sense, because small writes have a much higher endurance cost than large writes on SSDs. SSD lifetime isn't based on total bytes written, it's based on total blocks erased in the underlying Flash, and blocks are much larger than sectors so small writes necessarily cause write amplification to some extent (depending on the wear leveling). If manufacturers are guaranteeing a certain number of TBW on SSDs but can't actually sustain that at pathological write sizes, they need to start qualifying those guarantees with e.g. an average write size statistic. Then they can claim Chia breaks that assumption and reject warranty claims in those cases. This isn't unique to Chia. For example, a database workload will cause higher stress per byte written on an SSD than a raw video recording workload. It's also possible they're talking about time-based warranties with daily usage numbers. Many SSDs will be "guaranteed for 5 years" at some DWPD (drive writes per day). In that case they're probably just saying Chia plotting greatly exceeds the DWPD stat and thus your number of years warranty no longer applies. That ignores the above problem and is just about how the drive endurance is specified. (Also, just to clarify: apparently SSDs are used in Chia as a staging ground to build data to put on HDDs, which is then read only; I don't think there is any endurance cost to disks for actually "farming" Chia, only for "plotting" the contents of those disks initially; I think Chia is silly but just want to get the tech right)
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    Does Chia do lots of small writes? A lot of these plot generation steps sound like the writes are pretty linear. Plus sorting, which can easily be designed to use big writes too.
  - compressedgas 5y ago
    Is there any way to extend the lifetime of a SSD by allowing its capacity to decrease by replenishing its reserve of replacement blocks so that the SSD could continue to operate until it runs out of writable blocks?
    - verall 5y ago
christiansakai 5y ago
I am actually really curious why does Chia take off like this? Any other Proof of Space coin like Spacemesh and Burst coin didn't have this kind of explosive growth. Why? Why China? Why now?
- cam0 5y ago
  Bram Cohen + record high cryptocurrency prices in general
  - prvc 5y ago
    + it's "Green" (but not really) + an understanding of advanced stochastic memetics, a.k.a. multidimensional hype
  - christiansakai 5y ago
    Bram Cohen has that brand name power? TIL.
    - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
      Maybe, maybe not. I'd assume that bittorrent is what has the brand name power and caused the much higher level of interest than was seen for similar currency schemes.
    - ALittleLight 5y ago
      Seems like Andreessen Horowitz, among others, are investors. I bet they know how to market things. Even stuff like this post could be PR. "Hey, SSD makers, would doing this void my warranty? It would, can you clearly state that in writing somewhere? Thanks!" Then you call your friend at guru3d with an interesting article tip and a link to their updated warranty, and suddenly everyone's wondering why they can't mine chia coin. Who are you to tell me I can't mine chia coin! I must mine it!
    - worker767424 5y ago
      He turned the BitTorrent company into such a success /s
porknubbins 5y ago
I have been thinking about trying Chia mining to learn about it but haven’t read the details. One video said that his HDD was only like 2x the time to farm a plot compared to a SATA SSD and the real bottleneck is long term storage so I can’t see why anyone would be in such a rush that they would burn out their SSD. Haven’t looked too deeply into it yet though.
- VectorLock 5y ago
  Chia 'mining' is done in two phases. You create a 'plot' once which is very CPU, memory, and above all disk write/seek intensive. Then you can 'farm' that plot with low resources. Its the 'plotting' that chews up SSDs.
  - calvinmorrison 5y ago
    Why not just use a large ramdisk as fake drive space? Plenty of commodity servers can handle over 256gb of ram
    - latch 5y ago
      Plotting is both CPU and IO bound. Plotting can't fully take advantage of multiple cores. The workaround is to start N plots, each taking ~400GB of space and ~2 cores. On an 8 core server with 2x800 GB SSD, you can do 4 plots in parallel. Assuming you only had 512GB of RAM, you'd only be able to do 1 plot at a time (since you need 400GB per plot). Plotting to RAM would need to be 4x faster, but it isn't since you'll be CPU bound. So it would be both slower and more expensive.
    - VectorLock 5y ago
      You need ~300Gb of 'temp' space per plotting process. So you could only do 1 plot on a system that with a fast SSD you could do 6 or more plots in parallel.
- outsomnia 5y ago
  Chia's problem is your chance of "winning" is directly proportional to the global number of participating plots. Adding plots costs 100GB a time, so an 8GB drive can get you about 80. If you want to double that, you must buy another drive. Double it again, two, four, eight drives etc, and they're like $200 each. The number of participating plots you are competing with though, is going up exponentially. That will double by itself in a couple of weeks. So people in at the ground floor, who premined, will do great, the whale-sized farming operations with a significant fraction of the lottery tickets will do great, for everybody else every hour dilutes their chance of "winning" anything.
prvc 5y ago
Uselessly filling storage devices incurs a needless and wasteful environmental cost, just the same as computing hashes does. At least Filecoin provides distributed storage, which allows the storage devices to be put to something resembling their intended use.
- creamytaco 5y ago
  Filecoin enforces tremendous waste, only a small portion of total network space is used for storage. The equipment needed to mine costs tens of thousands of dollars. With Chia, anyone can farm with minimal electricity cost (after plotting).
  - christiansakai 5y ago
    Why is this the case? And is this the case as well with Storj?
    - PurpleFoxy 5y ago
      Storj recommends you have a server with at least 128GB of ram and a powerful GPU before joining the network. The problem is the whole system is zero trust so you must constantly be calculating proofs to show you have all of the data and that it is always available. It’s much more efficient to just have one large data enter with a reputation and trust. They have to store all of the data to keep their reputation.
      - IThoughtYouGNU 5y ago
        Not sure where you're getting that first part with regard to satellites. That is not correct.
      - tecleandor 5y ago
        I think you mean FileCoin. You can really use some spare capacity for StorJ (I have a Jail with 2TB of disk space on my FreeNAS) but not at all for Filecoin. StorJ: https://docs.storj.io/node/before-you-begin/prerequisites#hardware-requirements-recommended https://docs.storj.io/node/before-you-begin/prerequisites#ha... Filecoin: https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/hardware-requirements/#general-hardware-requirements https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/hardware-requirements/#general...
supernova87a 5y ago
Can they modify a warranty after someone has bought it? Is that what they're doing, or do the original terms allow such modification/interpretation?
- gleenn 5y ago
  TFA mentions the current warranty has qualitative wording around what the company gets to decide is "normal" usage. That may be objectionable but I don't think they're technically changing it, but perhaps clarifying in newer warranties. I'm definitely not defending any positions to be clear.
VectorLock 5y ago
If you're ruining a SSD with Chia Plotting and then try to return it for warranty you're a criminal. And I'm sure its already happened numerous times already and you can't even trade Chia yet.
1cvmask 5y ago
Companies always change warranty terms when it endangers their profits and sometimes even their existence.
- hellotomyrars 5y ago
  This is a pretty scorching take in context. I’ve noticed the warranty on most of the power tools I’ve purchased are 3-5 years but only 3-12 months for commercial use. Of course there is a reason for this. I’m going to use this impact driver a few times a month. A construction company might use it several hours per day. The purpose of the warranty is to guard against a defective product, not abuse. Everything has a service life and if my drill craps out on me a year in and I’ve barely used it that’s probably no fault of my own. I don’t trust companies to not abuse most tools and certainly warranties ebb-and-flow in their consumer friendliness, but this is a pretty absurd take on this specific case.
dchuk 5y ago
We have a pretty healthy forum growing over at https://chiaforum.com https://chiaforum.com if anyone is interested in getting into chia plotting and farming. The coin will start allowing transactions on Monday, should be interesting to see it play out price-wise!
- cookguyruffles 5y ago
  Would you mind giving passers-by a 101 on Chia? Had never heard of it before. Recognise Bram's name obviously, but why is this interesting and valuable rather than another shitcoin? Bram's name alone has no weight in this area from what I can tell
  - leppr 5y ago
    The #1 argument against Bitcoin and Proof-of-work consensus in general is that it's harmful for the environment. Chia and other Proof-of-Space consensus coins promise environmentally-friendly consensus (because running the algorithm requires very little energy, and in theory it should be be unprofitable to produce or acquire hardware specifically for mining it), that is also decentralized. Despite the buzz around cryptocurrency prices, there have been very little new working decentralized consensus algos since 2009. Most alternatives (the shitcoins you're talking about) compromised on decentralization and/or security. Chia has the potential to be a strictly better Bitcoin on almost all points. (I'm neither an investor, nor a miner, nor do I own any of the coins, I've simply been enthusiastically waiting for its release since it was first announced)
    - petmon 5y ago
      Is this competing with Bitcoin in the sense that maybe I could buy a coffee with it? Or is it competing with S3?
      - dazaidesu 5y ago
        they're targeting 20 tps which is roughly 5x bitcoin and pretty similar to ethereum's tps. they're planning to rely on layer 2 scaling because bram thinks sharding is a bad idea when it comes to security. it's definitely not competing with s3, just trying to be better than bitcoin in terms of decentralization, power usage & programmable money with chialisp & colored coins.
selimnairb 5y ago
Have the ChiaCoin miners heard of Optane?
- nickysielicki 5y ago
  Optane (and caching in general) won't help much if you're doing a bunch of random/pseudorandom seeks.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    What are you talking about? That's the single thing Optane is very good at. Oh, wait, are you only aware of those 32GB Optane cards? They make much bigger ones and you could do the plotting process directly on them.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
graeme 5y ago
Reminds me of the Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment. An AI which destroys the universe by turning it into paperclips, as its goal is to make more paperclips. First crypto took marginal GPU and energy capacity. Now it is taking SSDs. It has so far produced nothing except higher values measured in fiat. And the higher the values go the more resources needed for the computer networks. Of course crypto is not an AI so it can only get fed more resources if it converts believers to feed it more. More GPUs, more SSDs, more coal, to run calculations. So this should be self limiting at some point. Or maybe I’m wrong and some practical use will come of it but it’s been 12 years without any so far.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Someone a while ago imagined a future humanity where we had constructed a Dyson shell entirely devoted to cryptocurrency generation and were now a species of conmen and zealots desperately trying to convince alien civilizations that it is valuable.
  - greesil 5y ago
    There is some overlap here with the plot of a science fiction book Accelerando. I guess the singularity is here but it's not what we expected.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      Ah yes-- I remember reading that around the time it was released and couldn't really wrap my head around was "economics 2.0" was actually supposed to be. 16 years later I'm starting to understand.
    - cesarb 5y ago
      > science fiction book Accelerando For those who haven't read it yet, it's available for free on the author's website: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
    - 5y ago
paulmd 5y ago
as long as you're within the endurance limits the warranty should apply. writes are writes as far as the drive is concerned, it could be movies, it could be porn, it could be crypto, it doesn't matter, the warranty was advertised with a specific wear life and if you're within that the workload is irrelevant. (writes when very full / etc will cause write amplification, but that still shows up on the endurance counter. if you want to do a bunch of writes with 10x amplification cause your drive is full then that's on you, it still counts 10x towards the endurance... but the endurance counter is what they specify in the warranty.) if the drive fails when it's past its advertised endurance... they can tell you to pound sand and that's fine.
ChuckMcM 5y ago
It seems like an interesting denial of service attack against storage. Part of the challenge of the surveillance state is that it is "easy" to keep everything since storage is so cheap, but if you wanted to make storage expensive, and could not dictate the market prices, you could create a system that consumed massive amounts of storage and removed it from being available for other uses. That said, people burning up SSDs by writing stuff to them seems, kind of par for the course. I wonder if these same SSD vendors exclude video surveillance from their warranties? After all storing HD video 24/7/365 is a lot of writing and typically way more than the "normal" use.
- tomerv 5y ago
  Do you really need SSDs to store video? If you build a surveillance system, it would probably be cheaper with HDDs.
  - ddorian43 5y ago
    In chia you need 1 SSD for every ~100+ HDD. You need HDDs more.
  - ChuckMcM 5y ago
    Yes and no. Typical multi-camera video systems can generate data at a prodigious rate. You can "either" put together a RAID system to handle the write bandwidth your you can use a couple of SSDs. The latter is "simpler" the former is more "economical". That said, when NetApp was trying to sell SATA based filers into this market (which, not surprisingly is VERY cost sensitive) two things became apparent. First, up front system cost had to be minimized, and the vendors of these systems saw disk failure as a revenue opportunity to "roll a truck" to the customer and replace a failed drive.
stadium 5y ago
This gives me a mental image of trying to fill a sheet of paper with a #2 pencil as fast as possible. By the way, I am selling fully penciled sheets of paper for $USD one million each. They are unique because I am only human and can't fill the page perfectly evenl every time. They can be eaily minted as nft's for $USD two million. dm for details.
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  This makes me think of LazyCoin. https://lav.io/2014/05/lazycoin-officially-patented/ https://lav.io/2014/05/lazycoin-officially-patented/
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
  I will admit that I do not get this coin. At all. Now, if someone came up with a way to store valuable data on everybody elses hdds and have them distributed this way; basically storing secrets via coin.. I could kinda get the reason for all this insanity.
  - stadium 5y ago
    That's a good idea, like a torrent but renting out unused capacity that's agnostic of the content. Maybe like a hyper-distributed S3.
rkagerer 5y ago
Inferior endurance is the "dirty secret" of the consumer-level SSD industry. You and I know better, but the average consumer doesn't pay attention to write endurance or under-provisioning. While I'm no proponent of storage mining, I do feel a little empathy. First they sell products that don't stand up as well to wear, then they wash their hands of it when you actually want to use the thing. Feels a bit like when stainless steel appliances gave way to plastic ones. That's why I stopped buying entry-level, and prefer enterprise SSD's or at least good brands that publish endurance figures and have held up to third-party testing proving them out. Here are some fun experiments writing to SSD's for days/months/years on end to see how long they'd last: [1] https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead/ https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experi... [2] https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/thread/9rl1lp19?p=9#r179 https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/thread/9rl1lp19?p=9#r179 [3] http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm&p=5236109&viewfull=1#post5236109 http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SS... I have no problem with a manufacturer publishing a lifetime write rating and denying the warranty once you've exceeded it. But unless they were up-front about it, amending the terms afterward by saying "well, we never intended you to use it like that" seems a cop-out.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  Consumer 100Mbps internet will also not match datacenter 100Mbps internet. Consumer coffee maker wont match industrial coffee maker when you try to make coffee continuously, it will overheat the sensor area and start making bad coffee and eventually fail much sooner than the industrial one. It all comes to the use case scenarios. It's not really a dirty secret but cost issue where you can pay up more for robustness and buy the industrial use one if the consumer grade stuff doesn't fit your needs. On 99.99% of its users it's fine, almost everyone is happy with a consumer SSD.
  - roflc0ptic 5y ago
    I’m down with a consumer coffee maker not working as well as an industrial coffee maker, but 100Mbps is a well defined thing, and I don’t understand how it isn’t criminal that my internet speeds never even approach the advertised rates. This isn’t an issue of my “use case” not requiring honesty, this is an issue of me paying for something and simply not getting it.
o_p 5y ago
"If you use the product, that voids wararnty"
throwaway4good 5y ago
What happened to the proof-of-useful-space algorithms? Eg. the promise of Filecoin: A proof of space based distributed cryptocoin, where the space is offered as usable storage for end-users who pays the said crypto. Has the industry given up on that?
- barbegal 5y ago
  It doesn't really work in practise. For example you could have two clients sharing a hard drive with both claiming to independently store the same files. There is no way of actually proving the data is being usefully stored.
  - operator-name 5y ago
    No you can't? To my understanding although you can't guarantee thst the two clients aren't sharing a hard drive (or datacenter) you can guarentee there are two copies.
- dannyw 5y ago
  It is impossible to force someone to actually transmit the stored file. They can prove they have it, but you can't force them to not ransom you to get it back.
Kiro 5y ago
If you're thinking about getting into Chia farming with your consumer hardware, don't bother. The total network space has increased exponentially the last couple of weeks to a point where 1 TB of plots gives you a chance to win a block in 10 years of active farming.
- digitalnalogika 5y ago
  Classic FUD around the internet, 1 TB of plots gives you 10 months expected time to win currently. https://chiacalculator.com/ https://chiacalculator.com/
  - Kiro 5y ago
    Not FUD. I'm farming Chia myself but it looks pretty hopeless so just giving my honest review that no-one should expect to win any reward anytime soon without betting big on hardware. Regarding the calculation and estimation: "Actual results may take 3 to 4 times longer than this estimate." So 10 months to 3 years to win one single block which will give you 2 XCH. Considering the total network space rising at the rate we're seeing I think we should review this calculation again in a week.
flyinghamster 5y ago
Note that there are other non-mining activities that can also put the hurt on an SSD. Distributed computing projects such as BOINC can also get their licks in. World Community Grid has just put up a GPU application for their COVID-19 BOINC project (at this point, let's call it the equivalent of a 1.0 release), and some users have reported an average of 20 MB/second of continuous writes during the project-wide stress test that's going on. It makes me exceedingly glad that I put my project directory on spinning rust. Others have been using ramdisks to spare their SSDs.
h0nd 5y ago
What is an 'abnormal operation' for a SSD? In my understanding an SSD is a storage device that allows to write and read data. Does 'mining Chia Coin' involve anything else/different than writing and reading data - what the SSD is made for?
- dorkwood 5y ago
  Chia devs themselves recommend not using consumer-grade drives, since they're not built for running at 100% all day. > The one thing in common will be that you need high endurance, due to the fact that it take almost ~1.8TB of writes using the -e flag or 1.6TB without that option to create a single K=32 plot. > Endurance is how much data can be written to the SSD before it wears out. In Chia this is important because a plotting SSD will generally be at 100% duty cycle and writing all day. > A mixed use or high endurance data center or enterprise SSD is the best choice for plotting. Used SSDs with plenty of endurance can be found for a good value on eBay, Craigslist, or similar. > Consumer NVMe SSDs are generally not recommended due to the lower endurance, and they often employ caching algorithms to faster media (SLC, or single level cell) for great bursty performance. They do not perform well under heavy workload sustained IO. There are very high performance consumer NVMe SSDs that will offer great plotting performance, but the lower rated endurance in TBW will result in a faster wearout. https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/wiki/SSD-Endurance https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/wiki/SSD-End...
Copenjin 5y ago
Good luck with that idea in EU.
- dannyw 5y ago
  Or Australia.
pojzon 5y ago
Gr8, not only I wont be able to buy a decent card for new PC but also NVME.. Cryptocurrency really ruins the market for regular consumer.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Why blame the supply when you can blame the demand instead? Just like if there is food shortage, it's probably the fault of humans for consuming too much food, not the fault of the producers for making too little. Right?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - nullifidian 5y ago
    >Just like if there is food shortage That analogy doesn't work. We don't usually build literal useless pyramids out of food on an industrial scale.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      I think you missed my point a bit. I'm saying that it's a bit strange and out-of-place to blame the demand side of things here, instead of blaming the supply. What the thing is used for is irrelevant in the end. Most food goes to "waste" as well, but you don't see people making much uproar over that.
      - nullifidian 5y ago
        >What the thing is used for is irrelevant in the end. That's some weird axioms you have in your reasoning. It's not irrelevant. Crypto waste literally makes technological progress more expensive -- it probably already affects drug development, and decades later someone will probably publish a study on how the crypto craze delayed crucial cancer drug development programs by years. And blaming supply is much harder, considering supply is relatively inelastic, chip fabs take years and billions of dollars of planning and construction, and they can't wholeheartedly rely on the fickle crypto demand, on the decisions of crypto stakeholders to go or not to go "proof of stake" and the like. And that's when crypto demand shouldn't even exist in an ideal world to begin with. The whole crypto ideology of "deflationary money free from institutions and government regulations" is just wrong, not something we should want, and would end up regulated anyway. (We should want better regulated better institutions) Not to mention that this ideology is mostly mentioned to justify the unbridled speculation and ponzi-like nature of the current crypto -- nobody really cares about it, it's a "get rich quick, fuck everything and everyone" scheme for most of the crypto users. >Most food goes to "waste" as well, As a side effect of purposeful consumption. It's below 50% by most estimates, and considered a problem. We all need to eat to survive, need to eat well to feel good. While the computer hardware demand and waste from "get rich quick" technologies is entirely inessential, and arguably harmful.
ultrastable 5y ago
what's the likelihood that Chia, if taken up, will have a similar effect on storage (supply issues etc) as BTC has had on processing hardware? I don't have enough technical knowledge to know how credible the claims in their whitepaper are
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
Can someone explain Chia coin to me? I can wrap my head around BTC and ETH, but this is more esoteric ( and frankly reads even more like MLM thing than regular crypto ).
lucasnortj 5y ago
cryptos are for tools
idlewords 5y ago
Chia was supposed to be a less wasteful version of Bitcoin that would remain inherently decentralized, but already three days before release it's chewing through the high-end SSD supply chain, and the number one request farmers have is to be able to centralize into big farming pools. And these pools won't be along some co-operative model where everyone can pool their existing plots—pooling will require re-plotting, so the centralizing dynamic will be in full swing. This was not just predictable but repeatedly and boringly predicted, and yet here we are. Good luck getting high-performance drives next year because Bram Cohen went and reinvented bingo. The immense technical sophistication of this project, coupled with the failure to anticipate even the most basic first-order effects, make me wonder what's going on in the minds of the founders.
- adenozine 5y ago
  Maciej, come on now. You know what was going on. I think you may be making a false assumption that sophisticated and interesting technology reflects some sort of moral intention. I find it at least a tad disingenuous to ponder this "What could this soon-to-be-very-wealthy technologist possibly have been thinking?" line of thought. It's cliche at this point. Glad to see your comment nonetheless.
  - idlewords 5y ago
    I've met Bram Cohen and have no difficulty believing he's sincere about his aims, and also so smart in some dimensions that it's overflowed into foolishness.
    - adenozine 5y ago
      I suppose it's much more wise to attribute this whole circus to that rather than to malice, given his character and his history. I'm sure you're probably right in that regard.
mschuster91 5y ago
Am I the only one annoyed beyond belief by cryptocoins of all kinds? * Bitcoin wastes an enormous amount of electricity, to the point mining ops have been buying up derelict power plants and powering them up again, and on top of that Iran and North Korea use Bitcoin to finance their dictatorships * Shitcoins have led to GPUs being unaffordably expensive for years now * Not to mention loads of people getting scammed with pump & dump schemes, shitcoins, the plague that is NFT or hackers using Bitcoin to transfer cryptolocker ransom money * And now, this new shitcoin makes people raid cheap SSDs. Just how much are we willing to endure? At some point this shit has to stop.
- dannyw 5y ago
  Bitcoin is more or less the first international currency that cannot be blocked by governments or financial institutions. You may not find this property valuable, but for someone who's banned from multiple banks, bitcoin is incredible.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    Generally people who are banned from multiple banks tend to be hardened criminals and terrorists or enemy nations such as Iran or North Korea. For legit people with stuff like shot credit scores, there's always credit unions or debit-only accounts.
    - dannyw 5y ago
      I don't fall under any of those categories. I'm a registered and compliant digital currency business and regulated under our national law. Banks don't want to work with me, not just for my business, but also personally.
rbanffy 5y ago
If I understand it correctly, plotting is what needs fast storage, but not particularly reliable storage. Farming requires durable storage and the volumes would be better served for now with hard disks. I wonder if RAM wouldn’t be a good option for plotting. Sure it would demand a beefy machine, but it’d be well under a large mining rig.
ShriekBob 5y ago
We are the AI. Capitalism is the maximizing function. Crypto is the paper clip. We’re fucked.

358 points by RachelF 5y ago

I'm surprised they would honor any warranty claims where the drive has been written to beyond its specified terabytes written endurance. Is it that this farming causes more damage for the same amount of data written than normal use?

agogdog 5y ago
That sounds like what they're saying. I imagine when they determine warranties they're looking at what they estimate to be "normal" use? Reading/writing to capacity 24/7 certainly creates a lot of heat for a long time.
- VectorLock 5y ago
  Its not the heat. SSDs wear out after repeated writing. Some more quickly than others.
  - agogdog 5y ago
    That was already known, it's an included spec when you're buying an SSD and already written into the warranties... this is an additional warning for this use case: >“If users use our SSDs for mining/farming and other abnormal operations, the data writing volume is much higher than the standard for daily use, and the SSD will slow down or get damaged due to excessive data writing volume. Due to the tests carried out, the damages are qualitative according to the test results, and that is why according to the quality assurance standards of our SSDs, we have the right to refuse to provide warranty services. The right of final interpretation belongs to the company." They're specifically calling out "standard for daily use"... One alternative explanation is that maybe farmers were just wearing them out quickly and playing naive to claim the warranty?
    - VectorLock 5y ago
      Most SSDs aren't designed for the repeated writing Chia requires. "Data center" or "high-endurance" SSDs have that capacity but are consequently more expensive. >One alternative explanation is that maybe farmers were just wearing them out quickly and playing naive to claim the warranty? That's exactly what they were doing. If you use a low cost "consumer" SSD you can wear it out very quickly then claim it was "defective."
      - vii 5y ago
        Is that a false claim? The expectation that an SSD or even SD-card is infinitely rewriteable (practically speaking) is implicit in the marketing. The idea that a drive can't be rewritten too many times should be explicit (like SMR HDDs)
        wmf 5y ago
        Every SSD spec sheet has a Total Bytes Written (TBW) spec and Drive Writes Per Day (DWPD) and many warranties say that they don't cover wearout beyond those specs. It's akin to a tire rated for 50,000 miles; if it fails beyond that it's not defective.
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        > Most SSDs aren't designed for the repeated writing Chia requires. It doesn't require all that many writes. Problems come from a conscious decision to use a small number of SSDs as scratch space for a very large array.
      - agogdog 5y ago
        what about the repeated writing is the issue though? in theory shouldn't the TBW be the TBW? that's why I was speculating about heat.
marcan_42 5y ago
From looking at numbers from the macOS SSD thrashing issue, we know lifetime usage as reported by SMART is not a strict function of terabytes written (at least on those SSDs). This makes sense, because small writes have a much higher endurance cost than large writes on SSDs. SSD lifetime isn't based on total bytes written, it's based on total blocks erased in the underlying Flash, and blocks are much larger than sectors so small writes necessarily cause write amplification to some extent (depending on the wear leveling). If manufacturers are guaranteeing a certain number of TBW on SSDs but can't actually sustain that at pathological write sizes, they need to start qualifying those guarantees with e.g. an average write size statistic. Then they can claim Chia breaks that assumption and reject warranty claims in those cases. This isn't unique to Chia. For example, a database workload will cause higher stress per byte written on an SSD than a raw video recording workload. It's also possible they're talking about time-based warranties with daily usage numbers. Many SSDs will be "guaranteed for 5 years" at some DWPD (drive writes per day). In that case they're probably just saying Chia plotting greatly exceeds the DWPD stat and thus your number of years warranty no longer applies. That ignores the above problem and is just about how the drive endurance is specified. (Also, just to clarify: apparently SSDs are used in Chia as a staging ground to build data to put on HDDs, which is then read only; I don't think there is any endurance cost to disks for actually "farming" Chia, only for "plotting" the contents of those disks initially; I think Chia is silly but just want to get the tech right)
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  Does Chia do lots of small writes? A lot of these plot generation steps sound like the writes are pretty linear. Plus sorting, which can easily be designed to use big writes too.
- compressedgas 5y ago
  Is there any way to extend the lifetime of a SSD by allowing its capacity to decrease by replenishing its reserve of replacement blocks so that the SSD could continue to operate until it runs out of writable blocks?
  - verall 5y ago

christiansakai 5y ago

I am actually really curious why does Chia take off like this? Any other Proof of Space coin like Spacemesh and Burst coin didn't have this kind of explosive growth. Why? Why China? Why now?

cam0 5y ago
Bram Cohen + record high cryptocurrency prices in general
- prvc 5y ago
  + it's "Green" (but not really) + an understanding of advanced stochastic memetics, a.k.a. multidimensional hype
- christiansakai 5y ago
  Bram Cohen has that brand name power? TIL.
  - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    Maybe, maybe not. I'd assume that bittorrent is what has the brand name power and caused the much higher level of interest than was seen for similar currency schemes.
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    Seems like Andreessen Horowitz, among others, are investors. I bet they know how to market things. Even stuff like this post could be PR. "Hey, SSD makers, would doing this void my warranty? It would, can you clearly state that in writing somewhere? Thanks!" Then you call your friend at guru3d with an interesting article tip and a link to their updated warranty, and suddenly everyone's wondering why they can't mine chia coin. Who are you to tell me I can't mine chia coin! I must mine it!
  - worker767424 5y ago
    He turned the BitTorrent company into such a success /s

porknubbins 5y ago

I have been thinking about trying Chia mining to learn about it but haven’t read the details. One video said that his HDD was only like 2x the time to farm a plot compared to a SATA SSD and the real bottleneck is long term storage so I can’t see why anyone would be in such a rush that they would burn out their SSD. Haven’t looked too deeply into it yet though.

VectorLock 5y ago
Chia 'mining' is done in two phases. You create a 'plot' once which is very CPU, memory, and above all disk write/seek intensive. Then you can 'farm' that plot with low resources. Its the 'plotting' that chews up SSDs.
- calvinmorrison 5y ago
  Why not just use a large ramdisk as fake drive space? Plenty of commodity servers can handle over 256gb of ram
  - latch 5y ago
    Plotting is both CPU and IO bound. Plotting can't fully take advantage of multiple cores. The workaround is to start N plots, each taking ~400GB of space and ~2 cores. On an 8 core server with 2x800 GB SSD, you can do 4 plots in parallel. Assuming you only had 512GB of RAM, you'd only be able to do 1 plot at a time (since you need 400GB per plot). Plotting to RAM would need to be 4x faster, but it isn't since you'll be CPU bound. So it would be both slower and more expensive.
  - VectorLock 5y ago
    You need ~300Gb of 'temp' space per plotting process. So you could only do 1 plot on a system that with a fast SSD you could do 6 or more plots in parallel.
outsomnia 5y ago
Chia's problem is your chance of "winning" is directly proportional to the global number of participating plots. Adding plots costs 100GB a time, so an 8GB drive can get you about 80. If you want to double that, you must buy another drive. Double it again, two, four, eight drives etc, and they're like $200 each. The number of participating plots you are competing with though, is going up exponentially. That will double by itself in a couple of weeks. So people in at the ground floor, who premined, will do great, the whale-sized farming operations with a significant fraction of the lottery tickets will do great, for everybody else every hour dilutes their chance of "winning" anything.

prvc 5y ago

Uselessly filling storage devices incurs a needless and wasteful environmental cost, just the same as computing hashes does. At least Filecoin provides distributed storage, which allows the storage devices to be put to something resembling their intended use.

creamytaco 5y ago
Filecoin enforces tremendous waste, only a small portion of total network space is used for storage. The equipment needed to mine costs tens of thousands of dollars. With Chia, anyone can farm with minimal electricity cost (after plotting).
- christiansakai 5y ago
  Why is this the case? And is this the case as well with Storj?
  - PurpleFoxy 5y ago
    Storj recommends you have a server with at least 128GB of ram and a powerful GPU before joining the network. The problem is the whole system is zero trust so you must constantly be calculating proofs to show you have all of the data and that it is always available. It’s much more efficient to just have one large data enter with a reputation and trust. They have to store all of the data to keep their reputation.
    - IThoughtYouGNU 5y ago
      Not sure where you're getting that first part with regard to satellites. That is not correct.
    - tecleandor 5y ago
      I think you mean FileCoin. You can really use some spare capacity for StorJ (I have a Jail with 2TB of disk space on my FreeNAS) but not at all for Filecoin. StorJ: https://docs.storj.io/node/before-you-begin/prerequisites#hardware-requirements-recommended https://docs.storj.io/node/before-you-begin/prerequisites#ha... Filecoin: https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/hardware-requirements/#general-hardware-requirements https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/hardware-requirements/#general...

supernova87a 5y ago

Can they modify a warranty after someone has bought it? Is that what they're doing, or do the original terms allow such modification/interpretation?

gleenn 5y ago
TFA mentions the current warranty has qualitative wording around what the company gets to decide is "normal" usage. That may be objectionable but I don't think they're technically changing it, but perhaps clarifying in newer warranties. I'm definitely not defending any positions to be clear.

VectorLock 5y ago

If you're ruining a SSD with Chia Plotting and then try to return it for warranty you're a criminal. And I'm sure its already happened numerous times already and you can't even trade Chia yet.

1cvmask 5y ago

Companies always change warranty terms when it endangers their profits and sometimes even their existence.

hellotomyrars 5y ago
This is a pretty scorching take in context. I’ve noticed the warranty on most of the power tools I’ve purchased are 3-5 years but only 3-12 months for commercial use. Of course there is a reason for this. I’m going to use this impact driver a few times a month. A construction company might use it several hours per day. The purpose of the warranty is to guard against a defective product, not abuse. Everything has a service life and if my drill craps out on me a year in and I’ve barely used it that’s probably no fault of my own. I don’t trust companies to not abuse most tools and certainly warranties ebb-and-flow in their consumer friendliness, but this is a pretty absurd take on this specific case.

dchuk 5y ago

We have a pretty healthy forum growing over at https://chiaforum.com https://chiaforum.com if anyone is interested in getting into chia plotting and farming. The coin will start allowing transactions on Monday, should be interesting to see it play out price-wise!

cookguyruffles 5y ago
Would you mind giving passers-by a 101 on Chia? Had never heard of it before. Recognise Bram's name obviously, but why is this interesting and valuable rather than another shitcoin? Bram's name alone has no weight in this area from what I can tell
- leppr 5y ago
  The #1 argument against Bitcoin and Proof-of-work consensus in general is that it's harmful for the environment. Chia and other Proof-of-Space consensus coins promise environmentally-friendly consensus (because running the algorithm requires very little energy, and in theory it should be be unprofitable to produce or acquire hardware specifically for mining it), that is also decentralized. Despite the buzz around cryptocurrency prices, there have been very little new working decentralized consensus algos since 2009. Most alternatives (the shitcoins you're talking about) compromised on decentralization and/or security. Chia has the potential to be a strictly better Bitcoin on almost all points. (I'm neither an investor, nor a miner, nor do I own any of the coins, I've simply been enthusiastically waiting for its release since it was first announced)
  - petmon 5y ago
    Is this competing with Bitcoin in the sense that maybe I could buy a coffee with it? Or is it competing with S3?
    - dazaidesu 5y ago
      they're targeting 20 tps which is roughly 5x bitcoin and pretty similar to ethereum's tps. they're planning to rely on layer 2 scaling because bram thinks sharding is a bad idea when it comes to security. it's definitely not competing with s3, just trying to be better than bitcoin in terms of decentralization, power usage & programmable money with chialisp & colored coins.

selimnairb 5y ago

Have the ChiaCoin miners heard of Optane?

nickysielicki 5y ago
Optane (and caching in general) won't help much if you're doing a bunch of random/pseudorandom seeks.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  What are you talking about? That's the single thing Optane is very good at. Oh, wait, are you only aware of those 32GB Optane cards? They make much bigger ones and you could do the plotting process directly on them.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

graeme 5y ago

Reminds me of the Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment. An AI which destroys the universe by turning it into paperclips, as its goal is to make more paperclips. First crypto took marginal GPU and energy capacity. Now it is taking SSDs. It has so far produced nothing except higher values measured in fiat. And the higher the values go the more resources needed for the computer networks. Of course crypto is not an AI so it can only get fed more resources if it converts believers to feed it more. More GPUs, more SSDs, more coal, to run calculations. So this should be self limiting at some point. Or maybe I’m wrong and some practical use will come of it but it’s been 12 years without any so far.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Someone a while ago imagined a future humanity where we had constructed a Dyson shell entirely devoted to cryptocurrency generation and were now a species of conmen and zealots desperately trying to convince alien civilizations that it is valuable.
- greesil 5y ago
  There is some overlap here with the plot of a science fiction book Accelerando. I guess the singularity is here but it's not what we expected.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Ah yes-- I remember reading that around the time it was released and couldn't really wrap my head around was "economics 2.0" was actually supposed to be. 16 years later I'm starting to understand.
  - cesarb 5y ago
    > science fiction book Accelerando For those who haven't read it yet, it's available for free on the author's website: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
  - 5y ago

paulmd 5y ago

as long as you're within the endurance limits the warranty should apply. writes are writes as far as the drive is concerned, it could be movies, it could be porn, it could be crypto, it doesn't matter, the warranty was advertised with a specific wear life and if you're within that the workload is irrelevant. (writes when very full / etc will cause write amplification, but that still shows up on the endurance counter. if you want to do a bunch of writes with 10x amplification cause your drive is full then that's on you, it still counts 10x towards the endurance... but the endurance counter is what they specify in the warranty.) if the drive fails when it's past its advertised endurance... they can tell you to pound sand and that's fine.

ChuckMcM 5y ago

It seems like an interesting denial of service attack against storage. Part of the challenge of the surveillance state is that it is "easy" to keep everything since storage is so cheap, but if you wanted to make storage expensive, and could not dictate the market prices, you could create a system that consumed massive amounts of storage and removed it from being available for other uses. That said, people burning up SSDs by writing stuff to them seems, kind of par for the course. I wonder if these same SSD vendors exclude video surveillance from their warranties? After all storing HD video 24/7/365 is a lot of writing and typically way more than the "normal" use.

tomerv 5y ago
Do you really need SSDs to store video? If you build a surveillance system, it would probably be cheaper with HDDs.
- ddorian43 5y ago
  In chia you need 1 SSD for every ~100+ HDD. You need HDDs more.
- ChuckMcM 5y ago
  Yes and no. Typical multi-camera video systems can generate data at a prodigious rate. You can "either" put together a RAID system to handle the write bandwidth your you can use a couple of SSDs. The latter is "simpler" the former is more "economical". That said, when NetApp was trying to sell SATA based filers into this market (which, not surprisingly is VERY cost sensitive) two things became apparent. First, up front system cost had to be minimized, and the vendors of these systems saw disk failure as a revenue opportunity to "roll a truck" to the customer and replace a failed drive.

stadium 5y ago

This gives me a mental image of trying to fill a sheet of paper with a #2 pencil as fast as possible. By the way, I am selling fully penciled sheets of paper for $USD one million each. They are unique because I am only human and can't fill the page perfectly evenl every time. They can be eaily minted as nft's for $USD two million. dm for details.

CameronNemo 5y ago
This makes me think of LazyCoin. https://lav.io/2014/05/lazycoin-officially-patented/ https://lav.io/2014/05/lazycoin-officially-patented/
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
I will admit that I do not get this coin. At all. Now, if someone came up with a way to store valuable data on everybody elses hdds and have them distributed this way; basically storing secrets via coin.. I could kinda get the reason for all this insanity.
- stadium 5y ago
  That's a good idea, like a torrent but renting out unused capacity that's agnostic of the content. Maybe like a hyper-distributed S3.

rkagerer 5y ago

Inferior endurance is the "dirty secret" of the consumer-level SSD industry. You and I know better, but the average consumer doesn't pay attention to write endurance or under-provisioning. While I'm no proponent of storage mining, I do feel a little empathy. First they sell products that don't stand up as well to wear, then they wash their hands of it when you actually want to use the thing. Feels a bit like when stainless steel appliances gave way to plastic ones. That's why I stopped buying entry-level, and prefer enterprise SSD's or at least good brands that publish endurance figures and have held up to third-party testing proving them out. Here are some fun experiments writing to SSD's for days/months/years on end to see how long they'd last: [1] https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead/ https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experi... [2] https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/thread/9rl1lp19?p=9#r179 https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/thread/9rl1lp19?p=9#r179 [3] http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm&p=5236109&viewfull=1#post5236109 http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SS... I have no problem with a manufacturer publishing a lifetime write rating and denying the warranty once you've exceeded it. But unless they were up-front about it, amending the terms afterward by saying "well, we never intended you to use it like that" seems a cop-out.

mrtksn 5y ago
Consumer 100Mbps internet will also not match datacenter 100Mbps internet. Consumer coffee maker wont match industrial coffee maker when you try to make coffee continuously, it will overheat the sensor area and start making bad coffee and eventually fail much sooner than the industrial one. It all comes to the use case scenarios. It's not really a dirty secret but cost issue where you can pay up more for robustness and buy the industrial use one if the consumer grade stuff doesn't fit your needs. On 99.99% of its users it's fine, almost everyone is happy with a consumer SSD.
- roflc0ptic 5y ago
  I’m down with a consumer coffee maker not working as well as an industrial coffee maker, but 100Mbps is a well defined thing, and I don’t understand how it isn’t criminal that my internet speeds never even approach the advertised rates. This isn’t an issue of my “use case” not requiring honesty, this is an issue of me paying for something and simply not getting it.

o_p 5y ago

"If you use the product, that voids wararnty"

throwaway4good 5y ago

What happened to the proof-of-useful-space algorithms? Eg. the promise of Filecoin: A proof of space based distributed cryptocoin, where the space is offered as usable storage for end-users who pays the said crypto. Has the industry given up on that?

barbegal 5y ago
It doesn't really work in practise. For example you could have two clients sharing a hard drive with both claiming to independently store the same files. There is no way of actually proving the data is being usefully stored.
- operator-name 5y ago
  No you can't? To my understanding although you can't guarantee thst the two clients aren't sharing a hard drive (or datacenter) you can guarentee there are two copies.
dannyw 5y ago
It is impossible to force someone to actually transmit the stored file. They can prove they have it, but you can't force them to not ransom you to get it back.

Kiro 5y ago

If you're thinking about getting into Chia farming with your consumer hardware, don't bother. The total network space has increased exponentially the last couple of weeks to a point where 1 TB of plots gives you a chance to win a block in 10 years of active farming.

digitalnalogika 5y ago
Classic FUD around the internet, 1 TB of plots gives you 10 months expected time to win currently. https://chiacalculator.com/ https://chiacalculator.com/
- Kiro 5y ago
  Not FUD. I'm farming Chia myself but it looks pretty hopeless so just giving my honest review that no-one should expect to win any reward anytime soon without betting big on hardware. Regarding the calculation and estimation: "Actual results may take 3 to 4 times longer than this estimate." So 10 months to 3 years to win one single block which will give you 2 XCH. Considering the total network space rising at the rate we're seeing I think we should review this calculation again in a week.

flyinghamster 5y ago

Note that there are other non-mining activities that can also put the hurt on an SSD. Distributed computing projects such as BOINC can also get their licks in. World Community Grid has just put up a GPU application for their COVID-19 BOINC project (at this point, let's call it the equivalent of a 1.0 release), and some users have reported an average of 20 MB/second of continuous writes during the project-wide stress test that's going on. It makes me exceedingly glad that I put my project directory on spinning rust. Others have been using ramdisks to spare their SSDs.

h0nd 5y ago

What is an 'abnormal operation' for a SSD? In my understanding an SSD is a storage device that allows to write and read data. Does 'mining Chia Coin' involve anything else/different than writing and reading data - what the SSD is made for?

dorkwood 5y ago
Chia devs themselves recommend not using consumer-grade drives, since they're not built for running at 100% all day. > The one thing in common will be that you need high endurance, due to the fact that it take almost ~1.8TB of writes using the -e flag or 1.6TB without that option to create a single K=32 plot. > Endurance is how much data can be written to the SSD before it wears out. In Chia this is important because a plotting SSD will generally be at 100% duty cycle and writing all day. > A mixed use or high endurance data center or enterprise SSD is the best choice for plotting. Used SSDs with plenty of endurance can be found for a good value on eBay, Craigslist, or similar. > Consumer NVMe SSDs are generally not recommended due to the lower endurance, and they often employ caching algorithms to faster media (SLC, or single level cell) for great bursty performance. They do not perform well under heavy workload sustained IO. There are very high performance consumer NVMe SSDs that will offer great plotting performance, but the lower rated endurance in TBW will result in a faster wearout. https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/wiki/SSD-Endurance https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/wiki/SSD-End...

Copenjin 5y ago

Good luck with that idea in EU.

dannyw 5y ago
Or Australia.

pojzon 5y ago

Gr8, not only I wont be able to buy a decent card for new PC but also NVME.. Cryptocurrency really ruins the market for regular consumer.

capableweb 5y ago
Why blame the supply when you can blame the demand instead? Just like if there is food shortage, it's probably the fault of humans for consuming too much food, not the fault of the producers for making too little. Right?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- nullifidian 5y ago
  >Just like if there is food shortage That analogy doesn't work. We don't usually build literal useless pyramids out of food on an industrial scale.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    I think you missed my point a bit. I'm saying that it's a bit strange and out-of-place to blame the demand side of things here, instead of blaming the supply. What the thing is used for is irrelevant in the end. Most food goes to "waste" as well, but you don't see people making much uproar over that.
    - nullifidian 5y ago
      >What the thing is used for is irrelevant in the end. That's some weird axioms you have in your reasoning. It's not irrelevant. Crypto waste literally makes technological progress more expensive -- it probably already affects drug development, and decades later someone will probably publish a study on how the crypto craze delayed crucial cancer drug development programs by years. And blaming supply is much harder, considering supply is relatively inelastic, chip fabs take years and billions of dollars of planning and construction, and they can't wholeheartedly rely on the fickle crypto demand, on the decisions of crypto stakeholders to go or not to go "proof of stake" and the like. And that's when crypto demand shouldn't even exist in an ideal world to begin with. The whole crypto ideology of "deflationary money free from institutions and government regulations" is just wrong, not something we should want, and would end up regulated anyway. (We should want better regulated better institutions) Not to mention that this ideology is mostly mentioned to justify the unbridled speculation and ponzi-like nature of the current crypto -- nobody really cares about it, it's a "get rich quick, fuck everything and everyone" scheme for most of the crypto users. >Most food goes to "waste" as well, As a side effect of purposeful consumption. It's below 50% by most estimates, and considered a problem. We all need to eat to survive, need to eat well to feel good. While the computer hardware demand and waste from "get rich quick" technologies is entirely inessential, and arguably harmful.

ultrastable 5y ago

what's the likelihood that Chia, if taken up, will have a similar effect on storage (supply issues etc) as BTC has had on processing hardware? I don't have enough technical knowledge to know how credible the claims in their whitepaper are

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago

Can someone explain Chia coin to me? I can wrap my head around BTC and ETH, but this is more esoteric ( and frankly reads even more like MLM thing than regular crypto ).

lucasnortj 5y ago

cryptos are for tools

idlewords 5y ago

Chia was supposed to be a less wasteful version of Bitcoin that would remain inherently decentralized, but already three days before release it's chewing through the high-end SSD supply chain, and the number one request farmers have is to be able to centralize into big farming pools. And these pools won't be along some co-operative model where everyone can pool their existing plots—pooling will require re-plotting, so the centralizing dynamic will be in full swing. This was not just predictable but repeatedly and boringly predicted, and yet here we are. Good luck getting high-performance drives next year because Bram Cohen went and reinvented bingo. The immense technical sophistication of this project, coupled with the failure to anticipate even the most basic first-order effects, make me wonder what's going on in the minds of the founders.

adenozine 5y ago
Maciej, come on now. You know what was going on. I think you may be making a false assumption that sophisticated and interesting technology reflects some sort of moral intention. I find it at least a tad disingenuous to ponder this "What could this soon-to-be-very-wealthy technologist possibly have been thinking?" line of thought. It's cliche at this point. Glad to see your comment nonetheless.
- idlewords 5y ago
  I've met Bram Cohen and have no difficulty believing he's sincere about his aims, and also so smart in some dimensions that it's overflowed into foolishness.
  - adenozine 5y ago
    I suppose it's much more wise to attribute this whole circus to that rather than to malice, given his character and his history. I'm sure you're probably right in that regard.

mschuster91 5y ago

Am I the only one annoyed beyond belief by cryptocoins of all kinds? * Bitcoin wastes an enormous amount of electricity, to the point mining ops have been buying up derelict power plants and powering them up again, and on top of that Iran and North Korea use Bitcoin to finance their dictatorships * Shitcoins have led to GPUs being unaffordably expensive for years now * Not to mention loads of people getting scammed with pump & dump schemes, shitcoins, the plague that is NFT or hackers using Bitcoin to transfer cryptolocker ransom money * And now, this new shitcoin makes people raid cheap SSDs. Just how much are we willing to endure? At some point this shit has to stop.

dannyw 5y ago
Bitcoin is more or less the first international currency that cannot be blocked by governments or financial institutions. You may not find this property valuable, but for someone who's banned from multiple banks, bitcoin is incredible.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  Generally people who are banned from multiple banks tend to be hardened criminals and terrorists or enemy nations such as Iran or North Korea. For legit people with stuff like shot credit scores, there's always credit unions or debit-only accounts.
  - dannyw 5y ago
    I don't fall under any of those categories. I'm a registered and compliant digital currency business and regulated under our national law. Banks don't want to work with me, not just for my business, but also personally.

rbanffy 5y ago

If I understand it correctly, plotting is what needs fast storage, but not particularly reliable storage. Farming requires durable storage and the volumes would be better served for now with hard disks. I wonder if RAM wouldn’t be a good option for plotting. Sure it would demand a beefy machine, but it’d be well under a large mining rig.

ShriekBob 5y ago

We are the AI. Capitalism is the maximizing function. Crypto is the paper clip. We’re fucked.