3 ms·

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.

by domano 5y ago

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 :)

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.

by 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 :)