10 ms·

This proposal, if implemented, puts Bitcoin on an equal footing with Chia(also capex bottlenecked). It's probably the "next best thing" for an efficient securin

This proposal, if implemented, puts Bitcoin on an equal footing with Chia(also capex bottlenecked). It's probably the "next best thing" for an efficient securing function without going towards staking.

Glench 5y ago
Chia has the nice property that it leverages the existing 1.2 zettabyte per year storage market, though. Meaning that no specialized hardware for mining is needed — existing storage in the world can be used to mine, lessening the environmental impact of buying new drives. And if miners no longer want to use their storage space for Chia they can sell it to anyone who might want the storage space for whatever purpose, not just Chia mining. It also means that any innovations in storage media that might happen to optimize Chia earnings would also very likely benefit the whole world since it would mean cheaper ways to store lots of data.
- domano 5y ago
  But immediately i have seen companies announce specialized PCIe 4 SSDs - in the beginning you could also just mine bitcoin with existing CPUs or GPUs.
  - Glench 5y ago
    SSDs are not required for farming Chia or even really advantageous at this point. Using them to write the plot data is faster than HDDs certainly, but that only happens once per plot and will happen a lot less as the network growth slows down. The main costs of Chia in the long-term are using the cheapest, most dense storage media to farm with minimal electricity. We'll certainly see empirically what the long-term outcome of Chia is given that the network is at 7 exabytes and showing no signs of slowing down.
    - Mdubrov 5y ago
      Chia is great (and the one real alternative to oPoW for low energy consumption that I am aware of), however the security assumptions are very different from PoW (it uses VDFs etc). Bitcoin is conservative by nature, so the likelihood of adoption for a PoW with the same fundamental game theory and security assumptions is much higher. Regarding targeting commodity hardware: This has a good ring to it but introduces some 51% attack vectors. A lot of the security in BTC comes from the fact that miners will make their hardware worthless if they collude to double spend in a 51% attack. That's not true if the hardware is a real commodity and has resale/reuse value outside the system. Probably there will be specialized hw for Chia though as people often point out.
      - Glench 5y ago
        I don't think that specialized hardware is a security feature of Bitcoin, and definitely not one that was addressed or foreseen in the Bitcoin whitepaper (one IP one vote or one CPU one vote). In fact, it's quite easy to argue the opposite, that commodity hardware makes the decentralization/security of the network higher because anyone with extra space can farm. This is true today since Chia already has more full nodes than Bitcoin — you can run a full node off a Raspberry Pi :)
- brokensegue 5y ago
  So instead of wasting energy we waste resources building HDDs. And the market will be flooded with worn out HDDs. And instead of GPU prices it's HDD prices. Little gained.
  - Glench 5y ago
    Maybe! One of the bets the Chia team is making is that there's a lot of over-provisioned storage already out in the market that organizations and individuals will start to turn toward farming. This is obviously a lot more profitable than buying new drives just to farm since they're existing assets. And if in the long-run it continues to be profitable to farm Chia by buying new drives then it will likely help lower storage prices for the entire market.

Glench 5y ago

Chia has the nice property that it leverages the existing 1.2 zettabyte per year storage market, though. Meaning that no specialized hardware for mining is needed — existing storage in the world can be used to mine, lessening the environmental impact of buying new drives. And if miners no longer want to use their storage space for Chia they can sell it to anyone who might want the storage space for whatever purpose, not just Chia mining. It also means that any innovations in storage media that might happen to optimize Chia earnings would also very likely benefit the whole world since it would mean cheaper ways to store lots of data.

domano 5y ago
But immediately i have seen companies announce specialized PCIe 4 SSDs - in the beginning you could also just mine bitcoin with existing CPUs or GPUs.
- Glench 5y ago
  SSDs are not required for farming Chia or even really advantageous at this point. Using them to write the plot data is faster than HDDs certainly, but that only happens once per plot and will happen a lot less as the network growth slows down. The main costs of Chia in the long-term are using the cheapest, most dense storage media to farm with minimal electricity. We'll certainly see empirically what the long-term outcome of Chia is given that the network is at 7 exabytes and showing no signs of slowing down.
  - Mdubrov 5y ago
    Chia is great (and the one real alternative to oPoW for low energy consumption that I am aware of), however the security assumptions are very different from PoW (it uses VDFs etc). Bitcoin is conservative by nature, so the likelihood of adoption for a PoW with the same fundamental game theory and security assumptions is much higher. Regarding targeting commodity hardware: This has a good ring to it but introduces some 51% attack vectors. A lot of the security in BTC comes from the fact that miners will make their hardware worthless if they collude to double spend in a 51% attack. That's not true if the hardware is a real commodity and has resale/reuse value outside the system. Probably there will be specialized hw for Chia though as people often point out.
    - Glench 5y ago
      I don't think that specialized hardware is a security feature of Bitcoin, and definitely not one that was addressed or foreseen in the Bitcoin whitepaper (one IP one vote or one CPU one vote). In fact, it's quite easy to argue the opposite, that commodity hardware makes the decentralization/security of the network higher because anyone with extra space can farm. This is true today since Chia already has more full nodes than Bitcoin — you can run a full node off a Raspberry Pi :)
brokensegue 5y ago
So instead of wasting energy we waste resources building HDDs. And the market will be flooded with worn out HDDs. And instead of GPU prices it's HDD prices. Little gained.
- Glench 5y ago
  Maybe! One of the bets the Chia team is making is that there's a lot of over-provisioned storage already out in the market that organizations and individuals will start to turn toward farming. This is obviously a lot more profitable than buying new drives just to farm since they're existing assets. And if in the long-run it continues to be profitable to farm Chia by buying new drives then it will likely help lower storage prices for the entire market.